Thursday, December 10, 2009
It’s looking more and more like the first big proof-of-concept for commercial synthetic biology will be in biofuels or so-called white or green chemistry — the production of “clean” organic chemicals and materials with the aid of biotechnology, using the same sort of souped-up fermentation process being tried out for fuels.
The November 26th 2009 print [...]
Friday, November 13, 2009
In response to my last post about the Mother Jones story on DTC genomics company 23andMe, I got a (friendly) email from Linda Avey, who left the company in September to start an Alzheimer’s research foundation called Brainstorm. Avey wrote that although she no longer speaks for the company, she felt it was important to [...]
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Does Mother Jones know that Linda Avey has left the building? I suppose Shannon Brownlee’s article on 23andMe in the November/December issue of the magazine could have gone to press before cofounder Avey’s departure was announced September 4, 2009, and was widely discussed in the genomics community. But even on the MoJo blog yesterday, there’s [...]
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
This summer, I blogged about Joule Biotechnologies’ high-profile quest to make “solar ethanol” and wondered how it would affect other startups also using synthetic biology to make biofuel production more efficient. Particularly, I wondered whether VC firm Flagship Ventures would continue to support the fuel-focused work of LS9, which in May entered a major deal [...]
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Last week I wrote about Ginkgo Bioworks’ move into a new location on Boston’s waterfront. I have to say that for a tiny company, they’ve done a great job getting and keeping visible in the media. In addition to the recent flurry of attention generated by the move and this piece in MIT’s Technology Review, [...]
Now, this is interesting.
Writing in the New York Times, John Markoff reports that “one of the oldest names in computing is joining the race to sequence the genome for $1,000. On Tuesday, I.B.M. plans to give technical details of its effort to reach and surpass that goal, ultimately bringing the cost to as low as [...]
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Ginkgo Bioworks, a two-year-old parts-and-services provider for the burgeoning synthetic biology community founded by MIT alumni, has moved out of its “virtual” phase and into a new brick-and-mortar lab space occupying 3,400 square feet in the Marine Industrial Park on the South Boston waterfront, thanks to a $150,000 loan from Boston’s LifeTech initiative. As Xconomy [...]
From the website of British nonprofit biomedical funding organization the Wellcome Trust, a nice article that includes clearly animated explanations of the current methods used for DNA sequencing, as well as a brief overview of “third generation” sequencers, which we should see soon. Companies mentioned include 454 Life Sciences, Solexa, Illumina, SOLiD, Pacific Biosciences, Oxford [...]
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
The November issue of Inc. magazine contains a long piece I wrote on U.S. entrepreneurs who are using innovative technologies to change the way we get, treat, use, and reuse fresh water. When things start to settle down after the election and we start muddling our way through — and eventually out of — this [...]
For an article in the current issue of Inc. magazine, I had the pleasure of speaking at length with Charles Kittredge, the current CEO of paper-maker Crane & Co. and the sixth-generation Crane family member to head the business, founded in 1801.
Well known for its high-end stationery products, the company, based in Dalton, Massachusetts, has [...]