The Ledger, every show

“There's very little evidence that the pioneering innovators win. And what we found instead is that it's not being innovative that matters. It's the ability to scale the right innovations.”

“And then, look at all that data, and what you find, what we found, is that If anything, the comparisons were luckier, but it wasn't strong enough to make that case, so we'll call it a wash. Essentially, if you wanted to argue that the ones who beat their compa…”

“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.…”

“A major challenge in engineering biology, and more broadly, specifically synthetic biology, is that we don't really know the design principles.”

“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”

“He wanted Apple to be a great and lasting company that its ultimate proof would be that it didn't need him.”

“I've been in the SynBio world now for about two decades, and I have yet to get significant buy-in from the engineers in my lab for doing directed evolution.”

“I think the marriage of direct evolution with synthetic biology really is also the future, coupled to machine learning.”

“So many of these early companies got to be pretty good at producing one dollar worth of gasoline, but it cost them eight dollars to do it, which was a horrible business model.”

“I think climate is really just beginning to excite the community and broadly environmental issues on two counts. One is in what way could we use algae and other organisms to pull more carbon out of the atmosphere? Can we help reverse the trend on using biology…”

“And if I go look at that list, and I could go make the list longer than this too, but most of them did not have the crushing wilderness experience. Most of them did not.”

“If you calibrate with empirical validation by firing bullets first, and then you get calibration, then you convert to the cannonball, that's what correlates with the best performers over time.”

“Nonetheless, in nine months, he had a functioning bistable toggle switch.”

“You're increasingly seeing companies turn towards synthetic circuits to Alter traits in a programmable fashion of plants and to enable them to be more robust to pathogens.”

“And what's interesting is the biomedical engineers did not play a major role in the genome effort.”

“And when I got pulled in, there were only seven publicly available data sets. So the idea you could reverse engineer large scale network was ludicrous.”

“There still is a high percentage of the genes that are not functionally annotated in E. Coli, 30 to 40%.”

“It was clear to me that they had taken the ideas from good to great way back when they were just trying to become good.”