Nuts and bolts, I don’t see bioproduction being disfavored since it’s “hard to tame”. We’re getting a lot better at bending it to our will. I think it’s losing ground for reasons of metabolism and chemical environment. Biological systems grow up step by step and each step needs to take place in an environment that’s basically congenial to all the others, so you get complicated pathways that take place in mild conditions, and overall energetics that are the sum of many punishing overpotentials. And of course it can't handle compounds that can't form in water, at neutral pH, at STP, etc.
The energy story explains our long slow transition from biomaterials. The materials of the future have always been made out of energy. From copper to bronze to iron, from iron to Al and Mg, from mud to brick and stone to concrete, wood to engineered wood and plastic, cotton or rubber to nylon or synthetics, the materials future has been getting less about an investment of material and more about an investment of energy. And so biology’s advantages in distributed production and chemical complexity feel less relevant for making the materials the future is made from.
> Nuts and bolts, I don’t see bioproduction being disfavored since it’s “hard to tame”. We’re getting a lot better at bending it to our will.
Fair enough. People have suggested that bio is nice because the process to make something is already solved: just make a gene and transfect yeast. That's hard to do and you might get low yield or a nonfunctional product, but at least you don't have to worry about something like retrosynthesis.
On the Chintapalli paper: excellent, I loved the note Orca posted on this topic (some discussion here: https://splittinginfinity.substack.com/p/links-14) so it's great that it's out in a more cite-able form. I'll give it a read!
When chemistry replaces biology it can feel promethean. Shun the legacy machinery, take our fates into our own hands. Cars so we don’t have to enslave horses to move around. Steel so we don’t need to wait for a forest to grow to build a bridge. Synthetic fertilizer to end our parasitism on bird poop etc.
The new biological technologies like enhanced agronomy or precision fermentation often seem about intensifying and fortifying our dependence on nature. Chemical technologies by contrast seem to be about cutting ties and going our own way.
The bio way fits with a lot of peoples biases about what’s natural and right. But with 10B people on planet earth, humans and livestock now the overwhelming majority of large land biomass, more than half the inhabitable surface of the planet cleared for our use, at some point this picture that we still exist as part of a natural system starts feeling fake. The spectre of Moloch is totally there but going our separate ways starts feeling like the kinder thing to do.
That's a great way to frame it: with the low efficiency of agriculture any system that feeds billions of people won't be very natural. Building a more efficient system feels icky but saves a lot of wildlife.
How about a chemical synthesis path where water containing the relevant chemicals is pushed through a porous substrate containing attached enzymes. A technique similar to how lactose free milk is made.
Like biosynthesis, but only using the parts of the cell you need and skipping out all the other stuff.
Yes! This is used for example when processing algae into algal biofuels.
These kinds of separations work well for high value products, but they're expensive enough to be cost prohibitive for things like food products (with some exceptions). Separations are a big cost driver for precision fermentation:
It's a slightly different situation because sometimes you can get the yeast to eject the product into the culture medium rather than destroying the yeast to harvest the product. Even then, the costs are high enough that fermentation companies are struggling to produce food products (but finding success in pharma).
I'm thinking of a synthesis path that doesn't contain any bacteria as such. More like you start with sugar and ethanol in water. (Or something, different syntheses would have different starting ingredients.) Then you run it through 3 successive tanks of enzyme beads (enzymes on solid substrate). Then add citric acid and another 2 enzyme tanks. Or something like that.
You are using enzymes. Everything is room temperature and water solution phase. But you only have the chemicals you need in the mix. So separation should be minimal. There might be an odd methanol that got chopped off, but other than that.
Also a good approach, and feels closer to nanotechnology than using fermentation.
I think for enzymatic reactions in industry they have to immobilize the enzyme on a support so that they can be reused many times (since they're so expensive). It would be pretty exciting to see a company make this cheap and build on the handful of competitive enzymatic processes, out there.
There are some good points here. First, historically, human materials needs have outstripped the biological world’s ability to supply them. Many examples here, but chief among them is fertilizer.
The idea that we could restore huge plots of land to nature by artificially creating beef/milk/eggs instead of “growing” them is enticing.
But a word of caution, as I discussed here: https://www.lianeon.org/p/the-paradox-of-processed-food our ability to do this without negative health effects is only as good as our understanding of nutrition and the body. In other words, we must proceed with caution.
Nuts and bolts, I don’t see bioproduction being disfavored since it’s “hard to tame”. We’re getting a lot better at bending it to our will. I think it’s losing ground for reasons of metabolism and chemical environment. Biological systems grow up step by step and each step needs to take place in an environment that’s basically congenial to all the others, so you get complicated pathways that take place in mild conditions, and overall energetics that are the sum of many punishing overpotentials. And of course it can't handle compounds that can't form in water, at neutral pH, at STP, etc.
The energy story explains our long slow transition from biomaterials. The materials of the future have always been made out of energy. From copper to bronze to iron, from iron to Al and Mg, from mud to brick and stone to concrete, wood to engineered wood and plastic, cotton or rubber to nylon or synthetics, the materials future has been getting less about an investment of material and more about an investment of energy. And so biology’s advantages in distributed production and chemical complexity feel less relevant for making the materials the future is made from.
Incidentally, Mahati Chintapalli has a new paper this month on the tradeoffs between chemical and bioproduction in IECR. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.iecr.4c01958
> Nuts and bolts, I don’t see bioproduction being disfavored since it’s “hard to tame”. We’re getting a lot better at bending it to our will.
Fair enough. People have suggested that bio is nice because the process to make something is already solved: just make a gene and transfect yeast. That's hard to do and you might get low yield or a nonfunctional product, but at least you don't have to worry about something like retrosynthesis.
On the Chintapalli paper: excellent, I loved the note Orca posted on this topic (some discussion here: https://splittinginfinity.substack.com/p/links-14) so it's great that it's out in a more cite-able form. I'll give it a read!
Word.
When chemistry replaces biology it can feel promethean. Shun the legacy machinery, take our fates into our own hands. Cars so we don’t have to enslave horses to move around. Steel so we don’t need to wait for a forest to grow to build a bridge. Synthetic fertilizer to end our parasitism on bird poop etc.
The new biological technologies like enhanced agronomy or precision fermentation often seem about intensifying and fortifying our dependence on nature. Chemical technologies by contrast seem to be about cutting ties and going our own way.
The bio way fits with a lot of peoples biases about what’s natural and right. But with 10B people on planet earth, humans and livestock now the overwhelming majority of large land biomass, more than half the inhabitable surface of the planet cleared for our use, at some point this picture that we still exist as part of a natural system starts feeling fake. The spectre of Moloch is totally there but going our separate ways starts feeling like the kinder thing to do.
That's a great way to frame it: with the low efficiency of agriculture any system that feeds billions of people won't be very natural. Building a more efficient system feels icky but saves a lot of wildlife.
How about a chemical synthesis path where water containing the relevant chemicals is pushed through a porous substrate containing attached enzymes. A technique similar to how lactose free milk is made.
Like biosynthesis, but only using the parts of the cell you need and skipping out all the other stuff.
Yes! This is used for example when processing algae into algal biofuels.
These kinds of separations work well for high value products, but they're expensive enough to be cost prohibitive for things like food products (with some exceptions). Separations are a big cost driver for precision fermentation:
https://splittinginfinity.substack.com/p/unlocking-precision-fermentation
It's a slightly different situation because sometimes you can get the yeast to eject the product into the culture medium rather than destroying the yeast to harvest the product. Even then, the costs are high enough that fermentation companies are struggling to produce food products (but finding success in pharma).
I'm thinking of a synthesis path that doesn't contain any bacteria as such. More like you start with sugar and ethanol in water. (Or something, different syntheses would have different starting ingredients.) Then you run it through 3 successive tanks of enzyme beads (enzymes on solid substrate). Then add citric acid and another 2 enzyme tanks. Or something like that.
You are using enzymes. Everything is room temperature and water solution phase. But you only have the chemicals you need in the mix. So separation should be minimal. There might be an odd methanol that got chopped off, but other than that.
Also a good approach, and feels closer to nanotechnology than using fermentation.
I think for enzymatic reactions in industry they have to immobilize the enzyme on a support so that they can be reused many times (since they're so expensive). It would be pretty exciting to see a company make this cheap and build on the handful of competitive enzymatic processes, out there.
There are some good points here. First, historically, human materials needs have outstripped the biological world’s ability to supply them. Many examples here, but chief among them is fertilizer.
The idea that we could restore huge plots of land to nature by artificially creating beef/milk/eggs instead of “growing” them is enticing.
But a word of caution, as I discussed here: https://www.lianeon.org/p/the-paradox-of-processed-food our ability to do this without negative health effects is only as good as our understanding of nutrition and the body. In other words, we must proceed with caution.