In 2019, I was a 30-year-old newly minted PhD living through a premature mid-life crisis. I was working as a postdoc and moonlighting as a grant writer. I should have felt fulfilled, but I felt disappointed in myself and disillusioned with my chosen career. I hated my job, and I could not see a way out of my PhD-sentence. I remember feeling desperate, stuck, and questioning every life decision that led me to this point. And then, a ray of light came into my life from a place I never imagined: Ginkgo, a famed biotech company with a publishing business side hustle.
One afternoon when I was surfing the web to escape my unwanted reality, I stumbled upon a curious invitation: Ginkgo was advertising the upcoming launch of its creative publication called GROW. I was intrigued: is it a science journal? Or a marketing magazine? What will they be writing about? I had to find out. You could pre-order a physical copy of it for free, and I did. A few months later, a beautifully radiant magazine arrived in the mail. It was exquisite: the perfect balance of science, creative writing, inquisitive insight, and philosophical perspective on the state of the world. It had beautiful artwork and well-crafted stories. It was nothing like the typical biotech publication. It was a work of art.
The first article I read blew my mind with the caliber of writing and the depth of the topic. The Nature of Nature asked: should we bring back the nearly extinct chestnut trees that once shaped the ecology of the entire northeast of the United States with a genetically engineered super-tree? Is it our place to decide the fate of evolution, to deliberately alter ecosystems in an attempt to restore them? Where is the line between good and bad when it comes to genetically-engineering plants? These were the same questions I had been asking myself for the past few years but was afraid to say out loud, thinking I will be ostracized from my field for voicing concern or doubt about how this rapidly developing science field could affect humanity and the world.
I held the precious paper-bound copy in my hands and felt validated, inspired, and relieved knowing that I’m not the only one asking these crazy questions – and that the world needs this kind of thought-provoking writing that straddles science and art. For the next few months, I savored the issue: only reading a couple of pages at a time over my morning coffee, and it would help me get excited about the day’s work. I carried the magazine with me like a totem. It gave me hope. It gave me something to look up to. It gave me a goal – a dream, I should say, because at the time that goal seemed unreachable.
GROW was the name of the magazine, and grow did I in the years since I first held its first print issue. In the four years since then, I’ve transformed from a miserable postdoc into a digital nomad, writing about the things I know and love from beautiful locations like Colombia and Mexico. I get inspired by the world around me and try to look at things from a scientific lens while not forgetting to marvel at the exquisite beauty of biology. I would say that my writing style has been influenced by the provocative philosophical questions the magazine tackled, like Who Will Control the Exowomb? or Who Owns Living Things? I have been dreaming of one day seeing my work appear in print in a similar type of outlet. It took me four years to muster the confidence but a couple of months ago, I finally reached out to GROW with a pitch for a story.
I picked the un-sexy topic of industrial fermentation scale-up for my pitch. If that word combination does not mean anything to you, don’t worry. It’s basically a very important issue in biotech that no one outside of the field knows about. The promise of biotech rests on the premise that we can produce the things we need – like medicines, foods, fragrances, and materials – in microbes much more efficiently than the way we currently source them from plants and animals. But what stands between that dream and reality is the immense difficulty of scaling up production from lab to commercial scale.
In this article, I tried to walk the fine line between being scientific and creative and bridge the gap between my reverence for nature’s ingenuity and my expertise in synthetic biology. I wanted to give microbes a “voice”. To make the reader try to imagine what a bacterial life would be like. To tell a story that evokes human emotions – something that is strictly prohibited in the scientific world. We are told to not emphasize with the subjects of our research, not anthropomorphize the living organisms we work with, and, god forbid, not to express our own opinion or feelings about our work. Well, I am not a professional scientist anymore, which gives me the liberty to tell those stories the way I want to tell them.
In the past, when I grew bacteria in the long-necked glass flasks in the lab, I would imagine these incredibly complex microbial cells floating in a vast ocean of warm, nutrient-rich amniotic fluid, magically making valuable products out of simple sugars. But this idyllic image is as far from reality as our society is from the Garden of Eden. Instead, the conditions inside a bioreactor are more like those in a dystopian city: it is crowded, dirty, and filled with toxic pollutants. There is scarcity, death, and decay. The older cells have to be constantly replaced with younger, healthier members of the community to maximize their productive output under limited resources.
As scientists, we treat fermentation like a chemical reaction, forgetting that inside the fermenter there is a living ecosystem. Within each cell, hundreds of different reactions are happening in parallel – a living factory. Just like us, microbes try to live happy lives, and not just work, work, work. They are pretty smart at escaping these forced labor conditions and can even evolve inside the bioreactor to form rebellious sub-populations that refuse to produce. But only the ones that can survive and be productive in the harsh conditions of the steel-tank reactor are considered valuable. And the craziest thing is that after all the investment that goes into growing trillions of cells, at the end of each fermentation, these amazing organisms simply get discarded to recover the precious product that generates profit. Sounds familiar?
Fermentation is a tale of rise and fall, feast and famine, procreation and death. In this article, I wanted to ask: What if we could re-write that story, by designing a reactor that takes the microbes’ wellbeing into consideration and works WITH biology, not against it? What if we re-think the boom-and-bust model and instead develop more sustainable cultivation, where cells live longer, produce more, and do not get thrown out at the end of each fermentation? What if we re-imagine the bioreactor?
I invite you to explore these “What Ifs?” with me in this new article: Reimagining the Bioreactor in GROW by Ginkgo.