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.”
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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