This note is the twenty-first letter in the 104-days-of-summer-vacation series. You can also follow the full twitter thread here, and leave any thoughts and comments that might come up!

Dearest Reader,

Isn’t it incredible how resilient biology is? All you need is water, air and sunlight to grow some cells and they will grow almost anywhere on the surface of Earth. Biology is fault-tolerant engineering, I’ve been getting a new found appreciation for that at Dynacyte.

We were talking about artificial meats earlier, and the biological processes required to culture these meat cells. Much of artificial protein research has been done with specialized labs and expensive scientific equipment like clean rooms and industry-standard bioreactors.

The problem here is that when we try to scale this research to mass-produce artificial proteins, we also need access to lab environments similar to pharmaceutical labs. Meanwhile the competitor to artificial protein, the chicken, can be grown in any old crusty henhouse. The economics of producing artificial protein in labs is tough to overcome.

This is because artificial meats are designed in the same reference frame as regulated pharmaceuticals, the only way to circumvent it is to start from radically different assumptions. And the correct assumption to have is that the wet-ware should be as fault-tolerant, as any other chicken.

Interestingly, it seems like fault-tolerance is something biology should have had by default. But it turns out that the trade-off multicellular organisms made many millennia ago, was to exchange some of that cellular fault tolerance for a greater level of complexity and interdependence.

This is why bacteria are fault-tolerant and easy to grow, but chicken cells are not - they rely on a complex network of immune cells, scaffolding and other “public services” to survive. Kind of like us, and the trade-offs we made for complex human civilization. I reckon not many of us would survive in a forest alone either.

TLDR, a difficult problem between us and commodified synthetic biology is the ability to engineer fault-tolerant biological systems from scratch, which I don’t think we’ve cracked quite yet.

~ Shan