reshMa shetty /
Ginkgo Bio Works
reshMa shetty has always been a
builder at heart. At the office of her
Boston company, there’s a Lego
model that was once shaped like a
DNA helix; she and her colleagues
are forever playing with the design,
moving bricks from one section
and adding them to another. The
colorful structure is an apt metaphor for her life’s work: constructing biological systems—including
customized bacteria that smell like
banana, for instance, or can be
used as fuel—using a toolbox of
standard genetic parts.
Shetty first dug deep into the
nascent field of biological construction as a PhD candidate at
MIT. There she met her personal
Obi-Wan, computer scientist and
biologist Tom Knight, who’s popularly considered the father of synthetic biology. Under Knight’s
tutelage, Shetty learned that with
an array of basic genetic building
blocks, biological machines could
be constructed to do almost anything you wanted. “That kind of lit
my imagination,” she says. “Your
body is this amazing mechanical
system that can do things no engineer can do. How do we take advantage of that?”
Billcramer
At MIT, Shetty earned her
synthetic-biology chops by helping
engineer a strain of E. coli bacteria
that smelled minty fresh, eliciting
praise from experimental biolo-
gists who hated the outhouse
stench of unadulterated E. coli.
But she found herself wondering if
the work she’d already done could
be accomplished more easily. What
if you could assemble a library of
genetic components—much like
the standardized two- and four-
stud-across Lego bricks—that
could be used in a wide variety of
synthetic-biology projects, simpli-
fying the entire construction pro-
cess? “If you think about building
a house, you draw up plans, there
are materials, experts who build
your house for you. You know at
the end of the process, you’re going
to get a house,” Shetty says. “We
are nowhere near that in biology.
There are no architects. People
don’t have any idea how to make a
blueprint for a biological system.”
She and her MIT colleagues
founded Ginkgo Bio Works in hopes
of designing, constructing, and vet-
ting synthetic-biology systems
much more efficiently—and helping
outside researchers to do the same.
“you use trees to Build; why not just grow pieces of your Building? why not have self- repair roads?”
these amazing nanostructures,”
she says. “So we’re going to see a
transition from regular manufacturing to biological manufacturing. You can chop down a tree into
pieces and use it to build things,
but why not just grow pieces of
your building? Why not have roads
that can self-repair?” If Shetty’s
vision comes to fruition, the 21st
century will be all about the proliferation of new life in unexpected
places. —Elizabeth Svoboda
