Jim Collins explains how synthetic biology business models dictate the type of venture capital investors a company attracts.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Collins: Leading molecular biologists insisted synthetic genetic toggle switches were impossible
“We had talked to about six or seven very serious molecular biologists who told us this couldn't happen, this couldn't work. They said for it to work, you're going to have to have a very tight off state, two very tight off states. That's going to be impossible.…”
Insight
Collins: Single-gene knockout attribution is absurd from a systems standpoint
“I maintain that in almost every biology experiment paper I've read, they've never had the controls that I'd like to see. Which is the idea that you can knock out a gene and that what's lacking and now can be attributed to the gene is absurd from a system stand…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Collins: Synthetic biology currently lacks established quantitative design principles
“A major challenge in engineering biology, and more broadly, specifically synthetic biology, is that we don't really know the design principles.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Collins: The 21st century will be the century of synthetic biology
“I think in many ways this century is going to be the century of biology, and really to put point on it, I think it's going to be the century of synthetic biology”
Insight
Jim Collins: Engineering models have predictive value without mechanism knowledge
“An engineer can do remarkably well in many instances with little, if any, understanding of mechanism. And that we'll get after a black box. You can represent a model that gives you some sense of relation between the input and output of, say, going back to our …”
Insight
Collins: Serial biological testing takes 20x longer than parallel engineering
“The young biologists in my lab will instead pick one design, one embodiment of that design, and they're going to drill down in great detail Over, instead of two weeks, over six weeks. Realize that it didn't work, and then they're going to go and create the nex…”