The Witch's Magic Cauldron

What makes technology so great?

Well, the best technology looks like a magic trick. It grants you abilities that would’ve had you burned alive just a few hundred years ago. It allows big hunks of steel to float across the ocean and fly through the sky. It allows cars to drive themselves and people to communicate instantly from thousands of miles away.  

I feel like that’s one reason I’m so fascinated by new technology. What’s possible feels unlimited. And, there’s a new innovation I heard about on one of my favorite podcasts (the All-In podcast) yesterday that stopped me. I had to rewind and listen to it again. 

At the end of the episode, one of the hosts began talking about “bioreactors”. I had never heard this term before and was fascinated by what Friedberg (the podcast host) said was possible with more advanced bioreactors. Friedberg made a claim that with an initial investment of about $3-400 billion the United States could build enough bioreactors to meet the demand for all of the world’s protein. 

That’s a pretty bold claim...

So, I went on a journey to learn some more. I wanted to know more about what is a bioreactor and why am I only now hearing about how awesome they are.

In its most simple explanation, a bioreactor is a “vessel that creates a suitable environment for cells to proliferate”.

Sounds like a petri dish, no? Nothing magic about that...

But the host then mentioned everything that the more advanced bioreactors can do today that has not been possible. New innovations have allowed scientists and entrepreneurs to be able to use bioreactors to grow just about any molecule you can possibly think of. 

The collective “we” can now edit the genome of yeast or another bacteria, put it into a bioreactor, and then “grow” huge quantities of life-saving drugs like insulin at a far cheaper cost.

Now that sounds like magic!

And, it doesn’t stop there. Bioreactors can be used to manufacture everything from animal cells (bioreactors are used to make lab-grown meat), bioplastics, human tissues, pharmaceuticals, and more. They can even make materials that we produce clothing with. 

New technologies are allowing us to edit and program cells to create almost any kind of molecule. This opens huge doors for more ethical and responsible manufacturing. 

And, it really does feel like magic. Mix up all the ingredients into the witch’s cauldron and out comes whatever we want. 

The process of “growing” just about any molecule we need is no longer science fiction. But, the next challenge to solve is how to engineer all of this on a mass scale. These are the challenges where all we need to do is let innovation compound over time and a solution will arise.

There’s tons of “innovation pressure” that will push this technology forward. Raw material prices are rising, manufacturing and agriculture have a large, negative environmental impact, and, as we saw from COVID, there’s far more cost than benefit to have our medicine manufactured in china. 

Thinking ahead ten to twenty years, this technology will reshape our world in ways that are difficult to imagine the second, third, and fourth order impacts. 

We could have a world where the idea of a waitlist to receive an organ transplant is a distant memory. We’ll think back on the packed feedlots from factory farms and slightly nauseated that that’s what we used to do.

The cost of our lifesaving drugs will drop rapidly. And, one of the largest sources of CO2 in our atmosphere, international shipping, becomes less and less needed as we can manufacture locally.

Plastics that take 20,000 years to decompose in our soil become a relic of the past (who knows, maybe we’ll be able to manufacture a plastic eating microbe at scale that can help solve the Great Pacific Garbage Patch…).

So, when you read online that our world is doomed, our Earth is past the point of no return, and we’re running out of everything, remember that there’s some of the smartest, well-capitalized people working on solutions right now. And, these solutions will bend the curve in an entirely new direction of just about every forecast from all the experts who love to shout the loudest.