Cofounder, Zymergen
Search every verified Zach Serber interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Zach Serber, cofounder of Zymergen, has described synthetic biology as "unquestionably fact" while acknowledging that the field has been associated with hype and past failures. In a 2020 panel, he noted that Zymergen initially avoided the term "synthetic biology" because of its association with money-losing ventures, and said the company kept a low profile for years, only announcing its first product — a flexible polyamide film for consumer electronics — when it was already on the market. Serber has emphasized the importance of demonstrating results rather than making promises, and has argued that a strong profit motive is necessary to attract new entrants to the industry. In earlier talks from 2015 and 2016, Serber described Zymergen's approach as "radical empiricism," combining microbe engineering with software and automation to search for commercially useful genetic perturbations. He stated that the company was prototyping 360 novel biomolecules with DARPA support, focusing on materials with fast adoption cycles and low regulatory hurdles, such as adhesives and coatings. Serber has said that biology can provide a richer palette of chemicals than petroleum, and that Zymergen aims to make biology "the petroleum of the future" by producing superior materials, medicines, and agricultural products without reliance on fossil fuels.
“At my company at Zymergen we have one area we've focused on is consumer electronics ... it is an area where materials innovation means the difference between winning in the market and losing — if you have the right materials embedded in your device that confer advantage properties you can take market share and the cycl...”
“There are famous polyamide films which were first developed by companies like DuPont back in the 60s ... we were able by employing monomers available from biology a set of monomers that retain the attractive thermal mechanical properties of the polyamide films but were optically transparent and they set the stage for f...”
“We made the first announcement about it when it's actually on the market when you can buy it — I hope that there will be other companies that take that stance that have to acknowledge that there is a lot of skepticism and the surest way to turn around that skepticism is to show up with a product developed with your tec...”
“It's unquestionably fact though of course people can be forgiven for suspecting it might be fiction because of all the hype — the lessons learned from that first debacle are helping us make more reasonable projections as to what is possible.”
“What we need to do to bring that about chiefly in my mind is introduce a strong profit motive behind it — if all we do is break even no one's going to flock to this industry; we need to be economically successful enough to attract new entrants motivated by the prospect of building the next great company.”
“In the early days of Zymergen we actually shunned the term synthetic biology because back in 2013 it was so much associated with money losing — you didn't want to leave that taste in the mind of your investors, we focused on our business model and engineering biology and developing products.”
“Microbes are these amazing little chemical factories. Cells are in fact themselves little factories; they take inputs — chemistries, chemicals — and perform reactions internally and with those reactions subsist they create more of themselves and occasionally produce other products as well.”
“We have built an 80 billion dollar industry around fermentation products almost entirely based on what microbes natively produced.”
“Because we don't know very much about biology what they did was simply expose that cell that produced a little bit of glutamate to mutagens ... and every once in a rare while they would find a descendant that would produce more.”
“If you recall in the summer of 2008 a barrel of oil was $150 ... the economics of the situation have flipped — a barrel of oil is now closer to $40 — and under those circumstances the economic proposition of displacing petroleum doesn't work.”
“Roughly 85% of a barrel of oil goes into energy; the remaining 15% goes into materials — the revenues generated from the sales of both are about the same, which means there's a disproportionate impact economically of the materials component of that barrel.”
“All the companies that I'm aware of that tried have gone out of business or been acquired because going head-to-head against all those depreciated assets is that hard and even if you have a superb microbe that gets really low costs the incumbents will block you and make it very, very difficult.”
“With partially the support of DARPA we are prototyping 360 novel products that can be made via biology ... we are not working on fuels and we are focusing on a variety of different kinds of materials in different classes.”
“We have in the last year generated six million data points all ready for analysis and we are building a data science team to help us solve these problems.”
“Biology will become the petroleum of the future; it will become the source of all chemistries both for medicine and for materials and for agriculture ... we will have superior materials, superior medicines, superior agricultural outcomes all without reliance on petroleum.”
The panel featured industry peers Jim Lalonde from Inscripta, Zach Serber from Zymergen, and regulatory expert Martha ...
Zach Serber, Co-founder and CSO of Zymergen, talked about how technology is being applied to unlock the power of biology to make sustainable products with inherently better properties to serve a wide range of industries and applications. Zach is devoted to finding alternatives to petroleum. He co-founded Zymergen to expand the impact and reach of industrial microbial fermentation. Zymergen applies radical new methods to design and improve microbes by rewriting their DNA. This capability allows the company to generate novel chemicals and advanced materials far faster, at lower costs, and with l…
Dr. Zach Serber, co-founder of Zymergen, explains his company's efforts to marry synthetic biology, machine learning and materials science to endow microbes with new genetic programs for creating impossible materials with novel and valuable properties. He spoke at DARPA's "Wait, What? A Future Technology Forum" on Sept. 9, 2015.
Zach Serber, Chief Science Officer and Vice President of Development at Zymergen, delivers a keynote address at DARPA’s "Biology Is Technology" symposium in New York City on June 23, 2015. The two-day event was held by DARPA's Biological Technologies Office to bring together leading-edge technologists, start-ups, industry, and academic researchers to look at how advances in engineering and information sciences can be used to drive biology for technological advantage.
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