Out of the Blue and into the Black: The Pursuit of Innovation and a visit to the DSM Biotechnology Center

Here’s the BioChurch, here’s the BioSteeple, Open it Up, Where are the People?

Now, let’s move to the design of workrooms and workflows. If you were to step back into time, say 10 years, at a company like Amyris, you would have seen lots of young scientists with lots of pipettes, and lots of manual work in preparing petri dishes and executing the day-to-day of developing and testing strains.

Now, think robots. Computer-assisted design is giving way to computation-driven design. Predictive software and server farms that seek to optimize molecules through modeling, design, engineering on a digital scope and pace.

The clean room is getting cleaned of the people. More and more computational skill sets are in demand, not artisanal training once considered a mainstay of biologist training.

Information science and biological science are smashing hard against each other, and something is being born in the Collider. Today, we’re seeing more changes coming into biology from the disciplines of information science. But don’t be fooled. The biggest story will arrive when the winds of change shift in the other direction and information science becomes more adept at utilizing nature’s storage system in an approach known as DNA computing.

Sounds pretty pie-in-the-sky, right. Well, try this BBC report: “How DNA can be used to store computer data”