Comment by warlog

Or: Biology is really hard, and returns to investors in the space have been pretty tame, and taken longer than promised (expected). See commentary by Peter Thiel in Zero to One for more on this topic. In response to this reality, one tactic is to create a narrative that sells the vision of biotech as a tech or engineering discipline to an investor audience that is naive about biology and uber bullish on tech eg, this article). "Biology? It's just engineering, we can engineer things, we'll just engineer biology (please invest in us as if we're tech]". Never mind that engineering is a tradition built on minimizing variation, while biology is a science founded on understanding a built-in mechanism for generating variation. "Life finds a way". Indeed. I've been on numerous synbio projects and one thing is certain, evolution is always driving against the engineered design. And by driving against, I mean undoing. Entropy might slowly undue engineering, but mutation and selection? It's an entropic accelerant for engineered outcomes. Also, engineering is about "parts" and synbio is constantly dreaming of building things by putting parts (promotors, genes, etc) together from a catalogue. In reality, biology is interactions, where the expression of almost everything is dependent on the context of all the other parts. So outcomes aren't simply "the sum of the parts". When they are it's for a minority of cases. Finally, as you scale a process (say from a test tube to a 1,000,000L industrial sized fermentation tank, biology almost never cooperates.

Biotech's dirty secret is that biology is Not engineering (it is still a discovery science)...but the music is still playing folks, dance on! (Sorry, it's early, I'm still pre caffeinated, and this topic always rankles me).