Can Biotech Be Beautiful?
Biology is beautiful and beauty is something that people want. So why is it rare for beauty to be the goal of biotech R&D?
Transcript
The best part of my job is how I get to see cool biotech all the time. I love it and I'm freaking out about it pretty much constantly. But a few weeks ago, I had an encounter with biology that hit me in a different kind of way.
I was at the Ginkgo Ferment, which is our annual event to celebrate biology and all the developers who build products on our platform. One partnership we have is with Light Bio, a company that makes and sells glowing plants. So in the back of the event space and up the stairs, there was a dark room filled with Firefly Petunias, bioluminescent flowers that glow like soft moonlight1.
It was magic. It was powerful. I don't really have the words to explain how it felt. As someone who has spent my career thinking about DNA, to be in the presence of this living thing with engineered DNA, and it was just itself. It wasn't there to solve a problem or as part of some bigger technology. It was just alive and beautiful.
And it occurred to me that beauty is one of those transcendent values that is worth our hard work and our time. But that it seems to be underrepresented as a motivation in biotech.
I think a lot of people who do biotech are motivated by a sense of purpose in the work. Sometimes it’s scientific curiosity. It might be helping patients. It might be the satisfaction of solving a problem with good engineering. Those are all great motivations.
And then you have the drive to create beauty, which you might expect to be common for people who work with biology. It's basically universal in human culture to see the living world as a source of beauty and something that gives life meaning. But then you walk into a biology lab and beauty is usually not on people's minds. Why would that be?
I've heard a few different arguments. The first is economic. Biotechnology is expensive. We might want to create beauty, but who is going to pay for it? Until biology gets easier to engineer, we need to focus on the most high value applications.
I think there’s some truth to this, but I'm not sure it tells the whole story. People do pay a premium for things that spark joy, look cool, or impress their friends. Many luxury designs already use bioproducts, biomaterials, or are otherwise bio-inspired in ways that might be enhanced with bioengineering. So I'm not sure the economic value of bioengineering for beauty has really been explored yet.
A second argument is technical. Basically beauty is complicated. Until biology gets easier to engineer, we need to focus on simple and practical designs. A bioengineer just doesn’t have the same level of control as an artist with a brush or a pastry chef with a cake.
I think there's some truth here too. Biology is hard tech. But that’s true for almost anything we do. Cell therapy is hard. Metabolic engineering is hard. We do these things anyway because we believe in their value. So when it comes to beauty, what's the excuse for not really trying?
And that brings me to the third argument, which is cultural. Beauty, as a motivation for engineering biology, might be just kind of undervalued. We scientists tend not to see it as a worthy goal. There’s a way of thinking, very deeply rooted, that divides the world into science and art and doesn't want to see those two things mixed. Scientific values like objectivity and reason are seen as the opposite of artistic values like subjectivity and emotional expression.
So if you are motivated by scientific curiosity, solving problems or fixing patients, you can live comfortably on the science side of the divide. But if your motivation is to create beauty, you're crossing over in a way that is a little bit threatening. It's as though you were suggesting to replace the data in your experiments with a poem about your feelings. Beauty is not just different, but opposing and inferior.
There's a gendered component here too. Somewhere back in history, the bad guys decided that science was for boys and beauty was for girls. Most scientists today don't believe that, but those old ways of thinking are hard to squash completely.
The upshot is that the average bioengineer just doesn't have beauty on their cultural radar. The economic and technical challenges are very real, but we work less hard on those challenges than we would if scientific culture embraced beauty as a value.
Is that fair? I hope I haven't stereotyped the many scientists out there who do love beauty. Maybe you agree with this analysis or maybe not. But even if I'm wrong, let's spend more time thinking about what we choose to build with biology and why.
For one thing, maybe I'm right. If beauty is undervalued in biotech for cultural reasons, that could be an opportunity. There might be a world of new products out there where the economics and the technology are ready to go, but that are being overlooked because most of us don't have the right kind of eyes.
And if beauty is something that we can make with biology - I just want it. I value it. I'm motivated by it. If other people are too, we can have more of it in our future. We can create beautiful things with biology and be with them, just for their own sake.