The Climate Biotech Podcast
Are you fascinated by the power and potential of biotechnology? Do you want to learn about cutting-edge innovations that can address climate change?
The Climate Biotech Podcast explores the most pressing problems at the intersection of climate and biology, and most importantly, how to solve them. Hosted by Dan Goodwin, a neuroscientist turned biotech enthusiast, the podcast features interviews with leading experts diving deep into topics like plant synthetic biology, mitochondrial engineering, gene editing, and more.
This podcast is powered by Homeworld Collective, a non-profit whose mission is to ignite the field of climate biotechnology.
The Climate Biotech Podcast
Redesigning Photosynthesis to Boost Agricultural Yield with Chris Eiben
What if we could reinvent photosynthesis itself? GigaCrop founder and CEO Chris Eiben has a mission to dramatically increase crop yields by redesigning one of biology's most fundamental processes.
With half of Earth's habitable land already dedicated to agriculture and growing demands for food, fiber, and materials, we face a critical choice: convert more natural landscapes to farmland or make existing farmland drastically more productive.
The problem lies with Rubisco, the enzyme at the heart of photosynthesis. Despite millions of years of evolution, Rubisco remains frustratingly inefficient - it's slow and frequently mistakes oxygen for carbon dioxide, forcing plants to waste energy correcting these errors. Rather than trying to improve Rubisco itself (a challenge that has consumed billions in research funding), GigaCrop is building entirely new biochemical pathways using faster enzymes that don't make these mistakes.
The potential impact is staggering. In full sunlight, plants receive more photons than they can use - the biochemical process of carbon conversion becomes the bottleneck. By addressing this fundamental limitation, GigaCrop could enable crops to produce significantly more yield on the same land, transforming agriculture while preserving natural ecosystems.
Connect with Chris if you're excited about plant engineering or bringing game-changing technologies to market.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-eiben/
Half of the world's habitable land today is already dedicated to agriculture, and in the future we're going to be asking a lot more of our land than we were even asking today. So if we're going to need more things from land in the future, we really only have two options. We can either use all of the land on Earth, which I don't like, or we can use the land that we're using really efficiently, and that means to make that land really productive we're using really efficiently, and that means to make that land really productive.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Climate Biotech Podcast, where we explore the most important problems at the intersection of climate and biology and, most importantly, how we can solve them. I'm Dan Goodwin, a technologist who spent years transitioning from software and neuroscience to a career in climate biotechnology. As your host, I will interview our sector's most creative voices, from scientists and entrepreneurs to policymakers and investors. We're thrilled to welcome Chris Iben for a discussion about climate biotech.
Speaker 2:I've known Chris for years now and I can share it, with plenty of bias, that he's one of the most creative and rigorous biochemists that I met. He's my go-to brainstorm partner and, frankly, one of my cultural inspirations, because he embodies this idea that warmth and rigor can coexist and, in fact, when they do, that's one of the best recipes for a good culture. Chris earned his PhD in bioengineering at UC Berkeley, focusing on synthetic metabolism and protein engineering in the famous J-Bay, which is Jay Kiesling's lab. Chris has published academic work in pretty much all the top places, including Nature, biotech and ACS Synthetic Bio. Chris has authored several patents, many of which are now involved in your company today, and in addition to the scientific background, you've also had a great entrepreneurial training through the World Class Activate Fellowship. So to jump right in, chris, who are you and where did you grow up?
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks so much for having me on the podcast. I'm excited. I kind of have an eclectic background. I was born in California but my parents moved to Nebraska before I remember California at all. So I basically grew up in Nebraska and both my parents are from Iowa. My parents wanted myself and my brother to have a quote Midwestern character. We grew up in Nebraska and I was there until I was eight or nine and then we moved to Washington State and then I was there through college, went to the University of Washington for college and then eventually I decided it was too cold and wet and dark in Washington and I wanted to live in a place where there was sunshine more often. So I moved down to California and so it's been this long cycle, but eventually made it back to California.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been, it's been an eclectic route, so that actually we have that in common, where I was also born in California but then grew up in Idaho for probably very similar reasons, and then came back for college and grad. So it's a good background.
Speaker 1:That's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so today you work on beating photosynthesis. Did young Chris always know that he'd be declaring war on one of the most conserved pathways in all of biology?
Speaker 1:No, young Chris did not know this. I'd always liked biology. That's always been fascinating to me. You go outside and there's all these critters and all these plants and they're all different and they're all doing these different things. So I'd always really liked biology but I never really thought of it as like a career choice for a long time. It was probably I was in high school taking AP biology class and that was when I started to think maybe biology could be a career.
Speaker 1:But I was very into playing music. At the time I was playing a lot of guitar. So when I went to college my initial goal was to be in a band and make money playing guitar music. So I was playing two to four hours a day of guitar. Then eventually I got into a lab.
Speaker 1:I got into David Baker's lab, working with Justin Siegel at the University of Washington, and that was a really important moment for me because when I was younger and in school I was always a very creative person, but I didn't have a lot of outlets for it in school. So music was my outlet for the creativity, where I could control it. I could make what I wanted, I could have an idea and work on it. But then when I got into a lab where if you could argue like, hey, I think we should do this, and if you could present a good reason why you get feedback, and go back and forth, eventually you could win. Like they would be like, yeah, we think that makes sense, go do it.
Speaker 1:And that was something that I hadn't had enough of in school. And then that was the moment where, suddenly, the creativity part of me to get fulfilled through the work I was doing, and then guitar started to become less important. So I didn't think about being a biologist like when I was five. I just thought it was cool. But yeah, it was an undergrad when I started thinking about, okay, there's a lot that could be done with biology to make the world a better place and change the direction of where we're going and so on. And yeah, and I didn't start with photosynthesis either I started with microbes and thinking about more industrial biotech things. So I came into photosynthesis after spending a bunch of years thinking about industrial biotech.
Speaker 2:I love it. There's a common thread here, which is that basically everyone who studied biology 15, 20 years ago all gripe that there was no creativity in it. Right, it was. Much more of this connects to this and memorize this and there's a KCAT thing and it feels much more like geography, right, Whereas now I think it's much more engineerable, almost feels kind of like what computer science has become. In some ways has that ambition of well, you could do this, you could do this, could apply to this. And I think, if I remember right, in your David Baker days, you had a first authored paper on the folded outputs, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we had this Diels-Alderase enzyme and it had gone through some rounds of improvements. It's a de novo enzyme, so it's an enzyme that didn't exist in nature before they made it, or at least it wasn't known to exist in nature at the time. And so, yeah, when I was in that lab, they'd come up with this tool that allows you to look at proteins and try to make changes to those proteins and understand what those changes would do if they'd make the protein more stable, less stable, if it'd make the protein more active, things like that. And yeah, that was a great experience for me and I also really liked it because it had, like a visual component. There's this you see this protein and you can have it in 3D space and you can move it around and look at it. And I've always been very much like a very visual learner, but there's a lot of things in school where it doesn't matter if you're a visual learner. It's like you don't get credit for it, it doesn't like help you. But this was one of those things we really did and I could look at the protein and be like, oh, the active site looks pretty open. Maybe I should kind of put a lid on it to hold those substrates in the active site a little better. Maybe that would improve the protein. And yeah, it was much more interactive than the honors biochem class that was memorized.
Speaker 1:Which of these enzymes use magnesium and those types of things? And I totally agree. I think biology is much easier to learn if you think about it from. What would you do with this perspective, instead of having a class that meticulously explains all the parts of a screwdriver? That's a boring class. But if you teach someone like, hey, you can do stuff with this, you can build cars with this, you can build gates with this, you can build a house with this.
Speaker 1:I'd always taken that sort of viewpoint in biology, especially with microbes. When people think about micro-metabolism, usually they're just like I don't know. The microbes do these things, but they're not that interested in it. But usually the microbes are trying to solve a problem. It's I have this food source, but I need to make these chemicals to build myself out of. How do I route these together? Or they'll say I have this other food source and I have to make these other chemicals.
Speaker 1:So it's problem solving. Right, you have an input, you have an output and you have to problem solve. How do I get the input to the output? And that makes it much more interesting than just being like I don't know. There's 15 different biosynthesis pathways for this molecule and I don't know why. I just know that there's a lot of them. But when you start asking like, okay, why did has oxygen available to help make this chemical? And this other microbe doesn't have oxygen around, it's got to have a different pathway. And that makes it a lot more interesting and engaging than just which ones have magnesium in the active site.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I feel like now we're going through your chronology into the J-Bay days. When did you start feeling like you were?
Speaker 1:being creative like at the same level that you were creative with a guitar. So I think I've been pretty lucky. I've worked with some good people and I've been given a lot of freedom to try things. As you get better at something, your ability to be creative at it also goes up. I started playing guitar when I was 16 and I probably peaked about 10 years after. That's a little while, but the whole time I felt like I was the maximum level of creative.
Speaker 1:It's only in retrospect where you're like, yeah, five years, and I wasn't as good as I was the maximum level of creative. It's only in retrospect where you're like, yeah, five years in, I wasn't as good as I was 10 years in. For me, how I think about it is that whole time I felt like I was creative. As soon as I got into lab and as soon as I started to do experiments and try to understand why we were doing the experiment or what would be a better experiment. That whole time after that I felt creative, and so in that same light, I hope that I still haven't hit peak creativity right. So maybe 20 years from now I'll look back and be like, yeah, I thought I was good, but like it turned out, the more you know, the more you can combine.
Speaker 2:That's really funny. If the mathematicians get their Fields Medal with a max age of 40, us biologists should get our Fields Medal equivalent. I think us biologists should have our equivalent, but the max age is like 80.
Speaker 1:This is an interesting thing about biology, right, especially like with synthetic biology. There's so much nature has done so much R and D, nature's been around a really long time generating all this, so much life has existed that frequently there's a lot of opportunities just to combine stuff. But the more you know, the more you can be creative. And well, what's the limit to knowing more stuff, having been exposed to it? So it's just time, if you consistently make time to make sure you're exposed to new biology things and learning things, in biology you've got more tools in your toolbox to go do stuff, whereas with, like the Fields Medal or for some math stuff it's the requirement to get it to work is to just a priori deduce from nothing or from first principles and build it out of just like itself, and that's a very different problem. So with biology you might run into a paper sometime in your career and it'll change the whole course of what you're doing, because now you've discovered a new tool or you have a new about some more enzymes.
Speaker 2:So that's a perfect reference to. In preparation for this conversation, it was really fun to go back through your body of work and find things, and this is just a perfect example of what you're saying. One of your papers in your PhD was you pulled out a pathway from butterflies and moths to be used in biomanufacturing and that's just one of the wildest. I guess I don't really have full context there, but just to see Lepidoptera make the six carbon compounds and we're going to put that into microbes. You can talk a little bit about that, but I think that's just a perfect example of like. When I read that, I'm just like what?
Speaker 1:Yeah, in grad school I was working on making novel compounds, and the thought process when I was in grad school is I thought there were two good areas to work on in biology. One area is making things that have never been made before. So if you're trying to compete with organic chemistry, which has been around for hundreds of years, right, organic chemistry is really good at making a lot of stuff. So if you're going to use biology to make things and you're competing with organic chemistry, making new things or making things that would be difficult for organic chemistry to make, is a good place to make stuff, because now you can make things that are useful and there wasn't a way to make it 50 years ago. So that's where this Lepidoptera project came from. Basically, one of these classes of molecules that are made in biology are called terpenes, and they're these repeating five carbon units that get stacked onto each other and then they can cyclize with themselves to make these really complicated chemical structures that have lots of carbon bonds, lots of stereocenters really hard things to make with organic chemistry and a lot of terpenes become important for humans, like a bunch of drugs have these terpene molecules in them. So Taxol is an example. Taxol would not exist without terpenes, right, and it's a hugely important cancer drug.
Speaker 1:The terpenes. You have these five carbon building blocks that you stack on top of each other, and it turns out that Lepidoptera for some reason have evolved to not only use five carbon building blocks but to also use a six carbon building block, so terpenes. Typically, usually, when you look at terpenes, usually there's either five, 10, 15, 20 carbons in them, something like that. But now, if you have a six carbon building block now you can make terpenes that have six, 12, 18, so on, and in our case we only ended up adding one extra carbon, so we made it a C16 molecule.
Speaker 1:But since then people have shown C17, c18 molecules. Like, we thought we were making those C17 and C18 molecules, but we didn't have a very good signal-to-noise on our mass spec at the time, and so basically, that opens up a large new space of things that you just couldn't make before, and so making new things with biology that have never been made before, or making new chemicals with biology that never been made before, a fruitful place to go and do research. The other area is to try to make what we already use today more efficiently, right, and that's the other sort of types of projects I worked on in grad school and ultimately that's the stuff that kind of slowly over time led me to where I am now.
Speaker 2:Amazing. I really like that breakdown of one do things that haven't been done before to make what we currently do better. And, just as a reference for people listening, the last guest we had on this was Maria Stolfi, who's also working in the JBA, also working on terpenes, doing really awesome work. But now, yeah, I'm super excited to talk about GigaCrop, which sounds like the second one, which is do what we already do, but better. And let's just start with the punchline. You just raised a massive round from a who's who list of investors. So, chris, what is gigacrop?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so gigacrop. Our mission is to drastically increase crop yields, and there's a bunch of reasons to do this right. Half of the world's habitable land today is already dedicated to agriculture, and in the future we're going to be asking a lot more of our land than we were even asking today. Right, there's going to be more people on Earth in the future and I want to make sure that all those people have the food, the fiber, the materials to have great lives. But it's difficult for civilization to make more land, so we're starting to have some limits on this and, unfortunately, there's two ways to get more stuff if it comes from land. Right, you can either use the land that you're currently using more efficiently, so make that land more productive, or you can take land that we're not using and convert it to what we use.
Speaker 1:But there's a problem with this. Civilization has been pretty smart. We started using the best land first, so every hectare of new land that people bring under cultivation either is less efficient at producing things than the last hectare, because we used the good hectares first, or the new hectare that people want to bring on has something that we like or is important on it Rainforest is an example. So if we're going to need more things from land in the future, we really only have two options we can either use all of the land on Earth which I don't like or we can use the land that we're using really efficiently, and that means to make that land really productive. And so that's ultimately the mission of Gigacrop to maximize and use the land that we do use as efficiently as possible so that we can leave more land available for the natural environment, more land available for the natural environment.
Speaker 1:So then the question is okay, that's a good goal. How do you do that? And plants are already trying to be very productive, right? They have millions of years of learning how to be productive. And so this goes back to that earlier statement of find more efficient ways to do old things, right? And so when a plant grows, it's doing this process called photosynthesis, so basically, it's taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and eventually turning it into sugars, and it uses sunlight and water and CO2 to do this, plus the enzymes in the plant, and it becomes one of these questions of okay, so is there a more efficient way to do this than the way that they happen to do it now?
Speaker 1:And if you start to go out and look in biology. It turns out there's more than one way life on Earth takes CO2 and turns it into useful molecules. Generally they call these carbon fixation pathways, and carbon fixation is like one half of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is two halves One half is like capturing sunlight and then one half is capturing sunlight and then getting it into a usable format in biology, and the other half is okay. Now I've got these energy resources, I want to take CO2 and apply my energy resources to it to turn it into sugar or some other biomolecule that's more useful than CO2. And it turns out that there's at least six natural carbon fixation pathways on earth. So nature has come up with a bunch of different ways to take CO2 and turn it into different molecules and, as I said earlier, each of those pathways is appropriate for a different niche. It just turns out that the pathway that plants use, the Calvin-Benson cycle, happens to be a really good pathway for a huge niche. Right, it's really good for plants. It's relatively good compared to the others if you have oxygen in the atmosphere and so on. But the reason I provide all this backstory is that, okay, there's more than one way nature has figured out how to use CO2. And plants have been very productive with the way that they use theirs. But it's not clear that there couldn't be other ways to do this, and so that was the starting place for what we ended up working on, which is okay. Can we do better than the natural pathways that plants use?
Speaker 1:And, from our perspective, the key enzyme that's the problem for plants, that makes it so they're not as productive as they could be is this enzyme, robisco. It's that first step to convert CO2 into sugars in the plant. But the enzyme is slow, just in general. But it also has a tendency it has a hard time recognizing if it's using oxygen or if it's using CO2. If it uses oxygen by accident, the plant has to go fix that mistake, and this ends up being really costly to the plant. It requires a lot of resources to fix that problem, and plants have been trying to make hibiscus better for a long time, like hundreds of millions of years.
Speaker 1:I didn't think I could make hibiscus better because so much effort has gone into it by biology, right, but it turns out there's other enzymes that are faster than hibiscus in nature, and they still use CO2. And the reason they're faster is they use a fundamentally different chemistry. So, even though the overall reaction is similar, they grab CO2 and attach it to something else. Because their chemistry is different, they don't have this problem recognizing oxygen versus CO2. So they don't make the mistakes with oxygen.
Speaker 1:The problem is they make chemicals that plants aren't necessarily expecting. Plants are expecting sugars to come out of photosynthesis, but now it's a bounded problem. All right, here's better enzymes to grab CO2 and attach to stuff. Here's some sugars we know plants would use if they had more access to them, because they already use them. All right, we have an input and we have an output. How do we connect these two things? It's problem solving again, and so that's like a lot of. There's a lot going on in that response of what gigaprop is, but suffice it to say our goal is to massively improve photosynthesis to enable us to use an appropriate amount of land and still have lots of material goods and health and happiness and wealth, and we do that by trying to do better than what plants currently do with carbon uptake.
Speaker 2:It's fascinating and it's worth just waxing broadly on Rubisco for just one quick cycle, because there's no other word for it, I would say, but philosophical. I think there's a lot of philosophy more generally about biology that's illuminated by looking at Rubisco, meaning that the most abundant protein on earth is Rubisco. When somebody comes into climate relevant challenges, the first thing they stumble over is Rubisco. And then everyone says, gosh, if I can make this 1% better, I could capture more carbon. And so there's two things, both from the science history of it, and then there's the kind of the dollars that have gone into it, right? So there's been the RIPE project in Illinois and there's a lot of projects that have taken billions of dollars trying to make Rubisco better. And it's a very funny backstory because I finally saw a professor and I'll keep him unnamed where he opened up his talk by saying everyone says Rubisco is dumb. It's not dumb. Never say that again, right? We have this very natural human hubris, which is that I can measure it in this lab and one out of three times it misfires. And now you have to spend all this extra energy fixing accidental oxygenation. What a dumb enzyme, right? And then there's that, I think, the next phase that people go through is this humility which is, oh, wow, maybe biology is optimizing for something that my one-dimensional viewpoint is not capturing. And then people go through the oh, it'll be too hard.
Speaker 2:And then I think this is where people branch it's that there are some. There really are great people working on the. No, we can make Rubisco better. Right, we had Ahmed Badran here, like who we know, a wonderful guy who's on the podcast. Homeworld support him with a grant, and there's really great people that are still working on the make Rubisco better camp. But then I think the like, the humble view on the other side of that is, takes you the other direction, which is let's just skip Rubisco. Right, and there's a lot of challenges. Rubisco is in huge copy number, it's blah, blah, it's all and throughout the plant, and so I can imagine that there's enormous challenges to try to get around Rubisco. So I don't know how much you can talk about, but all it seems to me that initially that all the challenges that you'd have to make Rubisco better you'd probably hit trying to just skip Rubisco at all.
Speaker 1:So I have a couple thoughts. So the first thought is that I'm like whatever the best technology is that can give us the best future should win right. I'm making bets on what I think it is and I feel very strongly about them. But I'm not the only person on earth who's making bets about what technologies they think they can win. And generally what I say is I don't think I can improve Robisco, but that doesn't mean that somebody else out there doesn't have an insight that I don't have. But I think the question becomes okay.
Speaker 1:The baseline for improving Robisco is all these creatures on earth that require Robisco to grow right. It's like super important for them and they're working really hard to find the new Robisco and they haven working really hard to find the new rubisco and they haven't. So that's a baseline. So if somebody wants to make rubisco better, they need to be able to communicate why they think they can do better than this unbelievable grind that evolution has gone through, searching for better rubiscos. And there might be approaches to do that. I'm just skeptical of approaches where it's just oh, we should try some more mutations. I'm pretty sure they've been tried. But if there's a reason why you think you can do mutations that either nature hasn't done yet, or if there's some insight into things that have been limiting nature to look for more enzymes, then it might be possible to make Robisco better. But if someone figures it out, that would be great.
Speaker 1:And then there's also a question of like how much improvement you can get and how much that improvement translates into other things. If you can make Hibiscus 10% better, that'll have some benefit. But if you can come up with a different way to get CO2 into the plant, you might be able to have a much higher improvement. You might be able to double the amount of carbon a plant can take up in a season. And there's a question of is it reasonable to think that we could double the productivity of Robisco or something else, right?
Speaker 1:So between those two things, my viewpoint is that because Robisco has had so much evolution that has gone on with it and it's been so pivotal to life on earth, that all the really easy stuff with Robisco definitely has already been done. It's already been gone through that selection process. The medium level stuff's already been done. The hard level stuff's already been done. You have to be unlocking something that's completely different than what nature has tried, because otherwise I think nature will have already found it. And to give you a sense of what we're talking about number-wise and I hope I get these numbers right I'm going to be close.
Speaker 1:I think there's 2.5 times 10 to the 27th of a single species of cyanobacteria on Earth. So they're a bacteria that use the Calvin methane cycle in Rubisco and they double about once a day and they've been doing this for 2 billion years. Okay, so every time they double they're picking up mutations in their genomes and some of those mutations get picked up in Rubisco and some of those mutations are better and worse. But how many days are, in 2 billion years times this number of individuals every day testing this? That's an incredible number to be competing against, and if someone has a strategy to do it, hey great, but that seems like a really hard. Those are huge numbers to be trying to compete with.
Speaker 2:I can't help but imagine a PhD student right now hearing this while pipetting and just saying F this, I'm out, putting down the pipette, walking away, taking a day off, because I think that's a really good lens on it. What I would say is, frankly, I would even push that maybe, even if you have the new design of Rubisco, the biggest fear I would have and this is maybe what you guys are still going to be dealing with in GigaCrop is you still have to get it into the plant, and the genetic engineering of something that's going to be in all the chloroplasts is extremely difficult, and that to me seems like the ultimate bottleneck. Even if you do the impossible and normally this is where I'd insert an alpha fold joke, but that's well-ran Even if you do the impossible, then you have to do the genetic engineering, which to me seems extremely hard and to whatever degree you're comfortable talking about it is does the gigacrop approach get around that concern of the massive edits you would need to do in a Rubisco based approach versus your approach?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, in a plant Robisco is actually in two different places. In the plant, which is the DNA, is in two different places. So Robisco actually has two subunits there's a large subunit and there's a small subunit. And the large subunit is coded for in the chloroplast genome and the small subunit is coded in the nuclear genome no-transcript. So if somebody wanted to try to improve Robisco it would be easier. Like the ideal mutation would be in a small subunit because it would be much easier to incorporate that into a crop later.
Speaker 1:Part of the difficulty of engineering the chloroplast genome, part of it's that it's another membrane-bound compartment and you're trying to direct the DNA there right, which is hard. But the second thing is the chloroplast genome has many copies inside of a single chloroplast. So let's say you get your gene in there Now in order to you want that gene to only be yours, because all of let's say there's a hundred copies of the large subunit and you get one. You get yours in there one time. 99% of the large subunit that's getting made is the old thing. So if your thing had a 1% improvement, you only get to have 1% of that because only 1% of the large subunit that's being expressed is yours Trying to get that to the a hundred percent of the large subunits in the chloroplast. Now yours is also a separate problem that becomes difficult. None of what we're doing has to be in the chloroplast genome, so we don't have those types of problems, and this is an important thing to be thinking about.
Speaker 1:If you're thinking about good projects to work on, it's not just, ultimately, it's the package that matters, right?
Speaker 1:If you can make an amazing Robisco that's impossible to use in actuality, it doesn't end up solving the problem.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, when you're designing a system, you want to pick and choose. Sometimes it's better to choose a solution that's better for your system, even if within itself, it's less elegant, and this matters for academics, but it matters an incredible amount for founders. But it matters an incredible amount for founders, right? And so, from our perspective, when we're thinking about the novel carbon fixation pathways, different ways to wire photosynthesis, we start thinking from a plant-centric viewpoint, like we know that we want to end up in plants, and plants have their own constraints that are different than the constraints that microbes might have, right, and I guess I'm just saying it's important to be thinking about the whole package of what the final thing that is delivered, because it's very possible to make amazing technology that doesn't make any difference to the final package, and then there's no way to package it into something that is useful and then it won't go anywhere. And then you spent five, six years on a PhD making something that isn't as useful and that can be very frustrating in retrospect if that happens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that we as a field can be doing more to kind of educate very early stage biotechnologists, because there's a lot of things you can get really sucked into, like the wow, this is the super shiny thing. This is why I almost in every one of these conversations I'll make some snark about AlphaFold, just because it's such a trap. Right, it's all, just AlphaFold it and I'll get something that looks cool and buy them all, and then I'll feel cool about myself and post on the X. But then there's this other side of it's really messy. These deployment things are super messy.
Speaker 2:And so when we look at mining, that's another thing where people think about proteins first, don't think about mine economics first, and so the practicalities of deploying in plants, frankly, I think, are still really opaque to me, and my experience with the agricultural industry is that what they've done, like the agricultural frontier, like technological frontier, is way beyond the academic technological frontier. They just don't talk about it because you've got four giant companies and it's just not in their interest to be publishing where their science actually is right. You can just get a sense of where their science is based, on, what kind of companies they're looking to invest in, and so I'm sure you've probably learned a lot of stuff by doing, because it's a transition, right? I don't think you were five years ago, maybe you weren't working in photosynthesis fully yet, and then you end up making this transition to plants.
Speaker 1:Yeah and yeah, there's a lot going on, so there's so many sub layers here. I would say, like the first layer to go back to the beginning is one thing I think it's important for people to also think about is like you have a series of problems to solve. If you're trying to package something into something that'll be good, can go out in the world and people will buy it and use it, even if no one's buying it. If you're making something that you want to have impact, it needs to be good enough that people will adopt it. So you're trying to make a package that's adoptable, that's usable, and normally, to create that package, you'll have a series of problems you need to solve and it's important to get a sense of like how hard those are and rank them compared to each other right, because, for instance, if you decide that putting the pathway into a plant is more difficult than another part of your system, then that means that you need to have a really good strategy of how you put it into the plant right as opposed to something else. So it's funny because sometimes you get these projects where someone makes something amazing and everyone thought that was the core problem, and then you take a step back and you're like, oh, actually it's this other place in the system, how do we package?
Speaker 1:It Ends up being a harder problem to solve. I think a lot of therapeutic proteins are this way. Right, it's. Oh, if we can get this protein, if they could do this enzyme activity, then we could cure this like rare disease where someone's missing an enzyme. But it turns out that solving immunogenicity is harder, so you can't just inject this enzyme into the bloodstream because your body is wait, this enzyme's not for me, and things that are not for me I'm suspicious of, and so there was a time when people were saying like, oh, making new enzymes was the hardest part, and it turned out that was hard, that was really hard, it's still hard, but this immunogenicity problem has ended up being actually harder than that, and so it's good to know what these blockers are in these different systems.
Speaker 2:So I'd love to kind of explore the technical challenges that you've gone through to the degree that we can talk about it, of course, from your arc of when you started the company, going through Activate and I think we've probably known each other since a little bit before you started your company and I'm going to drop a story in the middle of this arc which just always stood out to me as just it's one of those little micro stories.
Speaker 2:I don't even think it was memorable to you, but it was so memorable to me when we were just like catching up on a phone call one day and you're saying, yeah, our company's starting and we need this chemical that plants don't want to make. And so I went to all the contract research orgs and they tried to make it, and then they couldn't do it. So then I said, dang it, I just have to do myself. And you just figured out the pathway, engineered it, and so you as an individual could do what five or so full teams couldn't do. And then, yeah, now it works, now I can get back to work. It's like God that takes you to where you are today.
Speaker 1:Yes, I would say that when I went to grad school, I always knew I wanted to do startups. I either wanted to be in a startup or a startup or produce IP that would be useful for startups. And the reason for this is because, from my perspective, the true measure of the value of a technology, or how useful technology, is that people use it. And sometimes in academia, certain like papers will come out and they'll be highly cited, but then it doesn't get adopted. It produces like a lot of interest and there's a lot of people who see it, a lot of eyeballs on it, but then I never actually see it go into the world and do things, and that was always a letdown for me. Like I wanted to optimize for let's make stuff that people want, that people will use.
Speaker 2:On one second. For climate, that's a hundred percent true. For therapeutics, it seems like a science paper maps directly into the startup. You know that a flagship or whatever would fund. But for things in the climate or ag, it's exactly what you're saying Like big, shiny paper goes nowhere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it can, and I'm not here to criticize academia overly much. There's reasons that the incentive structures are different and it generates lots of papers and generates a lot of people doing interesting stuff. But for me, my North star was like let's build something that is used, that becomes beneficial in a way you can measure. So let's see here, I went to grad school and I wanted to work on things that would end up in startups, and Jay's lab was great for this because Jay's also big into innovation, into trying to get startups, trying to nucleate ideas and get things going in startups. So it was a really good environment to be in, because we had a similar philosophy on what are good problems to work on. Why would you work on them in that sense? So then, after my PhD, I knew I wanted to get into startups and I was lucky enough to win an Activate Fellowship, and the goal of the Activate Fellowship is to train someone who has, like, a strong technical background to be a founder, which is not the same skill set, and I think there was a really useful framework that came out of this that I would recommend people think about when they're thinking about startups or if they're thinking about starting a company, which is that there's kind of four problems you have to solve at the same time and they are like the tech what is your technology? Who's your team to build the tech? How are you going to finance this, or how does it eventually become self-supporting Some version of that? And then, who uses your product? The market. So, tech, team, finance, market those are the four areas and every startup's different, but a lot of times what I'll see is people will over-solve for one of those four areas at the expense of the other areas, and this is a common problem, for why you can get really exciting science papers that don't end up translating going into the rest of the world. So the technology will be super awesome. Translating going into the rest of the world so the technology will be super awesome, right.
Speaker 1:But maybe they require an element that there's just not much of on earth, right? So, like, a good example of this for climate is like people were saying you have these, you get up in the jet stream, you have five 600 mile an hour winds, right, and the jet stream is all over the place. You just need to be up so many feet. Why don't we have like balloons that will have wind turbines attached to the balloon. You float the balloon up to that right height and now you have tons of wind going by fast, really fast. You can generate a lot of electricity and that's a great interesting thing to work on.
Speaker 1:But the problem is they propose, hey, we'll use hydrogen or we'll use helium for this. And you say, okay, helium makes sense for blimps usually, or for balloons usually, because it's not flammable. But then you go and say how much helium is on earth and you go calculate it out and you're like, okay, if helium becomes limiting, because you can't, there's not a convenient way to make more helium. You'd have to run a fusion reactor to make helium. So you're not going to make more of it.
Speaker 1:And you go calculate it all out and you're like there's not enough helium to do this. You could do this and maybe you could make hundreds or thousands, but it's just compared to the problem you're trying to solve. It's not going to move the needle that much and it might still be worth doing. But then you know what your core problem is right. So they over-solve. For tech it's super cool, it has no downsides and it can't scale, or it can't scale enough to solve the problem that they say that they want to solve, and so a lot of the times I get frustrated with academic papers. That's the reason I'm frustrated is they oversolve for this one piece of it and just to jump in for a second.
Speaker 2:I'm a connoisseur of really bad pitches, and so the idea of a company to solve fusion in order to create enough helium to solve the power crisis is a very good, very bad business.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and they're like what do you do with? All the energy you made and you're like, we, use it to make more helium.
Speaker 2:What are you talking about? But to talk about things that are more based in good ideas. You went through activate and then at some point you realized, okay, I'm definitely going to do this company. And then it wasn't an immediate arc, and so I'm just kind of curious about that arc of like what was the big moment where people started taking you seriously? And kind of baked in there is that little mini story you just passed. You told me one day I was like god, like that's the sign of a kick ass, founder yeah, and so when I first started, I wasn't working on as far as like a company goes.
Speaker 1:I wasn't working on the photosynthesis improvement. I was trying to make a different chemical. I was making hydrogen peroxide and there's a bunch of reasons to using enzymes. So they use enzymes enzymes to make hydrogen peroxide. But it's not the technical side. That's the reason to not do this project, it's the. So I got the activate fellowship. I was working on hydrogen peroxide production.
Speaker 1:Covid happened almost the same time. So now I'm like in my apartment trying to make progress on this, and when I came in, my thought was like, well, if I can just make enzymes that are fast enough and I can make a graph, and if the bar on the far right side of the graph is tall enough and it gets over some line, some level, then suddenly it'll be successful. Right, that was my worldview, having been doing science for a long time. Oh, if you just solve the tech problem, everything's solved. But it's COVID, so I can't be working on making that bar graph because we're not allowed to go into lab. So I ended up doing a lot of phone calls and I'm calling people who would use hydrogen peroxide, and most of it was, at least half of it goes into the pulp and paper industry. So I'm calling the pulp and paper industry, asking them like hey, if I could make you hydrogen peroxide, would you want it and what would you pay for it? And those kinds of questions. And as I was doing that it became apparent that they didn't really want it.
Speaker 1:So, like a pulp and paper mill, they sell paper. They don't think of themselves as like a chemical utilization company and they use the hydrogen peroxide for bleaching so you can have white paper or white pulp. But in aggregate it's maybe one percent or two percent of their total costs and, like across the industry, it's billions of dollars. Right, it's a real number of dollars to solve, but for them it's a utility. Like they just want to make sure. If you can get it to them cheaper, that's great. But what they really can't handle is if there's a single day where they don't have it, because any day that they don't have hydrogen peroxide they have to turn off their pulp and paper mill. And the pulp and paper mill is like $1.5 billion and 40% of that will be debt. So every day they need to generate a certain amount of money to be able to pay off the debt to run the mill. So if your hydrogen peroxide is offline for a week, they won't make any money the entire year. So they just have zero risk tolerance for anything.
Speaker 1:And there were jokes about this in the industry. They would say oh, this certain pulp and paper company, they don't even want to be the second to adopt the technology. The joke is they want to be the third group to adopt it. And it's like how are you going to sell into that? That's a really difficult place to sell into and because of the technology I was using to make the hydrogen peroxide, it didn't have a lot of flex. You couldn't change it to other things very easily. So I was like you're either going to make hydrogen peroxide really well or you're not going to make anything with it. And this was good for me, because as soon as I realized this, I was like this technology doesn't have a path forward, so I'm not going to keep working on a thing if there's no hope of it working. That's a really bad idea.
Speaker 2:I didn't know this part of your journey and it's actually really rare to hear someone who's so deep and so good at the science side also have the willingness to do the unsexy thing of calling people and having awkward conversations. My PhD advisor has this snark, but it always. I thought it was really funny. He was like six months in the library can save you a day in the lab, and in this case the joke goes the other way Six months in the lab would have saved you one awkward phone call. I love that you had that insight and that induced this pivot into what you're doing. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Pivot's a generous word in this case, like it was, it's a completely different. The only thing that's similar is that I was interested in both. But this is important to mention, though, right, because there are circumstances where, in a startup, you want to pivot. You're like I have this core tech. It can't do exactly what I wanted. You're like I've invented a wheel and I've decided I can't put it into a horse, and you're like but maybe I can do something else with the wheel. So you invent the car or you put it in a cart, or you invent a train, and the wheel goes in the train. Right, like it's either going to get used to this way or there isn't anything else for it to do. And if that's, and so there's a lot of wisdom in understanding what it is that you're making, and sometimes you shouldn't pivot. Sometimes the answer is you should just stop working on that. That's the wrong thing to work on.
Speaker 1:And yeah, it took me about six months to figure that out. And it's not like I hadn't tried to do this research before. It's just I had done it in an academically minded way, like I did Google searches and I went out and I read papers about what is hydrogen peroxide cost, how much is used and all this information and that was useful information, but, like the true people who knew don't they weren't writing papers to read. So the only way to do it is to go out and talk to them, and I think one of the things that I learned from this whole process is that there's amazing people in every industry, even industries that are very conservative, and they're doing some things that are very similar. I ran into a guy in the pulp and paper industry who's amazing. He's 70. And he's just his whole career has been doing R&D and pulp and paper mill and he knows I got a mutual intro. I called on his cell phone and is like super loud and I was like hey, are you? Isn't that a good time to talk to me? He's like, yeah, I'm on a bleaching tower, like the guy who was in Brazil, like working to do something, and I'm like talking to him on the phone about hydrogen peroxide use and the guy's awesome because this is what he cares about. This is fashion, he knows it and he's really pushing for innovation in this industry.
Speaker 1:The industry could really be benefited by more innovation, but it's hard. There's a lot of pushback against trying to do new stuff, and so, whatever industry you're going into, it's really valuable to try to find those people, because those people can make a huge difference. So this idea of six months in the library could save you a day. It's if you can find those people who really are excited about stuff who can really help you. They're in every industry and if you find them, they can save you like years, like they can save you years of time by telling you like here's the nine companies that tried things that are similar and here's why all of them failed.
Speaker 1:You're like that's awesome, now I don't have to spend like you can vicariously learn like nine billion dollars of r&d that failed. And then you're like, okay, let's not do it that way. We have to do it a different way or we have to understand why we can do what they did better, and the answer of what was 20 years ago is not generally the right answer, right? Okay, so we have better tech now, so maybe you could execute on what they were doing better, but you'd still make something that's uneconomic.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, so you got there faster for less money, but you got to a dead end, so this is all super useful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the one thing I would just say in this is that Jamie, our geobiotechnology lead, works with the mining industry, and I think she came back with this phrase and I'm paraphrasing it incorrectly but you need to have a technology that someone is willing to risk their job to adopt, and so you need to find that person that is willing to get fired to adopt you and I thought that was an amazing phrase because you do need that one stakeholder.
Speaker 2:Just to phrase things quickly, I would love to make sure that we get to the pivot and that, and then we can wrap up with the four rapid questions, because you are a founder CEO and I don't want to take too much of your time. So you had this insight. I love the pivot. And then just to wrap, what was the arc from pivoting to doing better carbon fixation and then the path to raising this great round, and then also, I want to make sure that we end on. We'll go through four rapid fire questions and we end with how do we help or what are you looking for? So you make the pivot and then how long was it to the fundraise and all that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I make the pivot and I have to give Activate a lot of credit because this is a very large change and they supported me through it. They were like, ok, you don't think the old thing will work, like, what are you going to do? And at the time my ideas on photosynthesis were too early to get commercial funding Right. The risk was too high, the technical risk was too high. So I went out and was like, ok, if I can move this forward and I can't raise around with the data I have, then I need to go out and try to get grants to support it. I wrote a bunch of grants, talked to a bunch of different people. It took about a year. But after about a year we got. We got a grant from the Grantham Foundation, which is a nonprofit. I really liked them. I really liked their thought process of how they go about thinking about what technologies can make a big difference. So I got a grant from them and that started us going to get some more data.
Speaker 1:Probably about a year after that I applied for another grant and this was an RPE grant. This was their RPE Open. So RPE is really great that I think it's about once every three years. They have these open calls where they basically say so. Normally they have structured grants where they say, hey, we have this area we think is interesting, right? So the area might be fusion, the area might be like next generation airplane engines, it might be electrify, the structure might be around trying to come up with room temperature superconductors.
Speaker 1:So usually they have an idea of what they're asking for and then people will send grants back in. Then they have this open program. That's basically. Well, if you have an idea that we haven't covered in a program, submit it. So they get all sorts of very different applications there. And this was the perfect fit for us, because they've done some plant projects before, but not a lot, and so this was a good opportunity to apply and the amount of benefit we can have on the cost of making biofuels, on pulling CO2 out of the air, on displacing emissions and so on, is very high. And they recognize that that, and so then we also got a grant from them and that allowed us to get to the point where we could have a data set that was compelling enough and to have modeling saying hey, you can have these types of impacts to get around rays which playground global led, and then juniper, which was climate or climate. I'm gonna get the name wrong, but they're Juniper. Now it tells you it's a good name change because it was too many words before.
Speaker 2:Great team funding really specific around Climate Biotech.
Speaker 1:I think it was like Climate Capital Bio was the name of that, because there was Climate Capital and then there was Climate Capital Bio and now it's Juniper To get them on board, for us to demonstrate that our pathway isn't just good on modeling, that we can actually build it in the real world and that it's not just math on a sheet of paper, that it actually works the way that we predict it works.
Speaker 2:That's so good. You got into a top-tier fellowship to work on one project. You then did human testing, realized that it was a dead end, did a massive pivot, went through two grants to then eventually raise funding from two fantastic investor groups. So it's a really just from someone who's seen startups and been around startups for a long time, it's a really good entrepreneurial journey. I know we're going to be short on time, so let's wrap to the four rapid fire questions and then at the end, I want to make sure that we ask what you're looking for and how people can get in contact with you. But the four questions we ask everybody is what is a single book, paper, art piece or idea that blew your mind and shaped your development as a scientist?
Speaker 1:Oh, that's a good question. It's funny because what ends up happening is they all blow your mind and then, like you get used to it and then like you forget. I remember I was in high school and people talked about, like the RNA world. There's these theories of how life would have started and then how you can get from that into the world that exists today. And I just remember thinking about that and being like, oh man, that's like really an interesting thought, but how would you ever make progress on this? That's billions of years ago and you could never do those experiments again. There's just no way. Like how would you ever make progress on this? So I just filed it away as like unsolvable and didn't think about it.
Speaker 1:And then, 20 years later, a friend of mine was like here's like a review on this thing that you might be interested in. It's on it was called geology to biology, which is this people who've been working on this problem of hey, could you have an RNA world? How would it evolve into other things? And I was reading that paper and I was just like I can't believe, like how much progress has been made on that problem, cause I just was like this thing is entirely unsolvable. There's no possible way anyone could ever make progress on this. And you read through this paper and you're like man, they've made a ton of progress on this. I am shocked, and a lot of it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:So it's one of these things where it's like, again, if you take an organism or microbe or plant and you look at the world from its viewpoint, you try to understand why it's doing what it's doing. It's like you're learning Sanskrit, like you're learning this like language or this way of thinking that's just foreign to you, that very few people know. But it's very beautiful and elegant once you really understand it, because you understand oh, this is its way of interacting with the world, this is how it solves the problem. The world, this is how it solves the problem. And so reading that paper was beautiful because it was like, as I was reading it, I was like here's another person who went through all the effort and has learned Sanskrit, but for something that I wasn't doing Like, you have access to this really deep, beautiful understanding of this thing that I wasn't expecting. On a Tuesday I'll get to the. I'll get the actual name of the paper for you, but I don't remember the name offhand, but it was. Yeah, that was a real. That was really amazing to read.
Speaker 2:I would love we'll throw it in our newsletter, as advocated for by Chris Ivan. All right. Question two best advice line that a mentor has given you.
Speaker 1:As like a single liner. It wasn't a mentor, but someone had a quote that I liked, which was art doesn't scale, which hurts me because I love art. I liked which was art doesn't scale, which hurts me because I love art. I really I love art but and you can make art and it can be amazing. But there's a reason why art's expensive. It's because a single person has the ability to like, make this thing right in their style, authentically, and so on, and the reason it's expensive is because they can't make millions of them.
Speaker 1:And I'm not saying you shouldn't make art, but it's important to recognize if what you're making is supposed to be art or if what you're making is supposed to be engineering, or if what you're making is supposed to be what's your approach to solving your problem. I really liked that quote and the more that you are a founder and you're building a company. It's all about trying to take something that's not reproducible right and trying to get it so that you can do it reproducibly and scale it and make it so you can teach other people how to do it reproducibly. It's just a quote that I really liked. There's like a lot of surprising wisdom in a couple words there.
Speaker 2:I love it. It's almost scaling art and startups.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If you had a magic wand to get more attention or resources into just one part of biology, what would it be?
Speaker 1:So this is an interesting question. I've had this debate with folks in the past too, right, and so I wouldn't say there's kind of two questions in this question, right? So one is okay. One question is if you could magically solve one problem in biology, what would be the most impactful to solve? And the second one is, okay, what's a good use of money now? So, okay, here's a problem that if you could solve it would be amazing, but there's no way to solve it today. And here's another one where, like, this is a practical problem and you could solve it for a couple bucks and it would be very helpful, but we can actually do it. Now. What I would say is that if you look at other engineering fields let's say, we'll look at for instance, if you want to make new airplanes and better airplanes, what you do is you go in a computer and you design an airplane, you design everything, you test it all on a computer and then you build one airplane and show that it flies.
Speaker 1:And in biology, if you want to, like, make a better enzyme, historically what people did is they would make like 10,000 different enzymes that are all slightly different. It'd be as though they were like here's. They'd be like we're going to make we're going to make 10,000 airplanes and then we're going to randomly take a hammer and smash different parts of the airplane and then we're going to see which of those airplanes were able to fly better as a result of us smashing different parts of the hammer. Most of the airplanes fly much worse as a fact, because you just smashed them up with a hammer, but every once in a while, like you bent the wing in a new, better angle and you get a better airplane. And in biology right now, there's a lot of. We can design stuff that's directionally correct, right? We know an airplane needs wings, so we can make sure it has wings. We know it needs to be light, so we can try to design it to be light. But it can be difficult to know. Okay, here's a hundred designs. They all look equally good to us. We can't tell which one's going to win. And then it turns out that two out of the hundred are really good. And so I think, if you can get to a world where the modeling for biology is good enough that you only have to build two constructs and one of them hits your goal, like, whatever your performance milestone, you build only two, one of the two will hit the goal.
Speaker 1:It drastically changes what types of things we get funded, what types like what level of difficulty of projects you can go execute on and how quickly you could build all this stuff. The oil industry is happy to pay $5 billion to build an oil rig that takes seven years to build because they know it will work. It's going to work. They've built all these oil rigs in the past and so it's not a big deal to take. It's a five billion dollar bet and it almost always pays off and so they do thousands of these right.
Speaker 1:And if you really could prove and people are really confident like it's a billion dollars to build this microbe or this plant or this enzyme but you have 99 certainty that after the billion dollars it will work, you can fund like unbelievable things that we can't fund yet. So I would say that if I could solve one problem and we're getting closer AI is doing a good job. It's not solving everything in biology, but it's been pretty useful for enzyme design stuff or enzyme improvement and I know that firsthand because we're using it various ways to make things go faster and get improvement faster and figure out things we wouldn't try otherwise. To make things go faster and get improvement faster and figure out things, we wouldn't try otherwise. But yeah, if you can get biology down to two constructs 99% certainty that one of the two will hit your goals, the whole field will be revolutionized.
Speaker 2:That is one of the most unique answers I've ever heard. All right. Fourth question, then. I'm not gonna hold you from any more CEOing. What is one aspect of personal development that you think biotechnologists need to spend more time on?
Speaker 1:I'm just going to go with a more general response. Anything that if you're trying to do something that's really hard, any person who's trying to do something hard will have to grow probably to be able to accomplish the thing that they're trying to do. This is true for biotechnologists, this is true for top level athletes, this is true for almost anything. If you really want to be at the very top of the field, it's really hard. And I would say that there's this mindset that when people talk about growth, that growing is like being a tree. That just is like bigger in all directions. You're just like I'm a little bit taller, my roots are a little bit deeper and I'm just like a little bit of a bigger tree. And that's what growth is like, and I would say that frequently that's not what growth is like. A lot of times, growth is more of being a tadpole turning into a frog.
Speaker 1:It's in order to become the frog, your tail has to die and fall off. There's this romanticized idea of what growth is like, and growth is very frequently painful, and very frequently the thing that drives the growth isn't that the person wanted to grow, it's the fact that they recognize that what they're doing will not work. So they have to change. They have two choices they can either stop or they can be forced to grow and change in order to keep going, and that's not a fun process, right. But you have to be open to getting feedback and you have to be open to being like hey, what am I doing that's working, what's not working? The answer can't just be I don't know. Just do everything stronger, better, faster. It doesn't scale well to try to do everything stronger, better, faster. And if your plan is just okay, my goal is to like. You're like like I'm in Portugal and my goal is to get to North America, I'm just going to swim the Atlantic Ocean. There isn't a stronger, better, faster that will get you there. You will die in the ocean. It like it doesn't. It will not work. So then you're like okay, the answer isn't just stronger, better, faster. It's like I have to actually change what I'm doing or change how I'm thinking about this, or if I'm going to move forward.
Speaker 1:So my advice is growth is hard, growth is painful. There is no substitute for it. And to be honest with yourself and with the people around you, so that as you go through that process, there's people who've done it before or who knows how hard it is, even if they don't know what you're going through, and to take it really seriously, it's really hard. There's very few founders I've met who are like everything's great, right. They say it's great. You talk to them long enough and eventually they're like oh, this is like really hard and you are your own constraint. If you're trying to push something forward, you have to survive, so it's. I think that's something we don't talk about enough. You have to really put a lot of effort into it and pay attention to it and help other people out if you see them having trouble too.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's so good. I can't help but throw in this one funny metaphor, because I think the tadpole versus a tree is magnificent. There is a funny story about trees, about when they put the biodomes out in the New Mexico desert. Trees don't grow well in biodomes because without wind they don't grow roots. So the problem with growing a tree in a biodome is they fall over.
Speaker 1:Right as soon as wind shows up when they like.
Speaker 2:They're really unstable, but yeah, I love that and that's. I think it's a really beautiful, a beautiful concept. Chris, this has been such a pleasure I love getting to. Every time I talk with you, I always leave smarter and wiser. Now that I know that you have an artistic background, it actually fits a lot of the interactions we've had.
Speaker 1:One of the things that's important to know about photosynthesis is that in midday sun it in midday sun it's not the photons that are limiting. The plants receive way more photons than they can actually use. The biochemistry of taking a CO2 and converting it into something else is the slow step right. So the energy's there. It's really just can you use it right? So the potential improvements we can have are really high.
Speaker 1:I mean we didn't talk too much about the different types of ways you could improve plants but from my perspective, these sort of like novel carbon fixation pathways, these like new rewiring photosynthesis they have the highest ceiling for improvement. They're hard but if you get them to work, it's a phase change in yield and it's a phase change where it'd be very difficult for other technologies to be able to compete because the ceiling is so high for what we can do. I'm building Gigacrop to have this big change right and to make this big impact, and it's going to take time to do that and it's going to take more than just me. Suffice it to say, people who are excited about plant engineering, people who are excited about trying to get game-changing tech into the world, always happy to have a conversation.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Climate Biotech Podcast. We hope this has been educational, inspirational and fun for you as you navigate your own journey and bring the best of biotech into planetary scale solutions. We'll be back with another one soon and in the meantime, stay in touch with Homeworld Collective on LinkedIn, twitter or Blue Sky. Links are all in the show notes. Huge thanks to our producer, dave Clark, and operations lead, paul Himmelstein, for making these episodes happen. Catch you on the next one.