Zach Serber on terminology
From Synthetic Biology - fact or fiction? · · DMCBiotech
“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.”
On , Zach Serber, Cofounder at Zymergen, spoke about terminology during Synthetic Biology - fact or fiction? on DMCBiotech.
About Zach Serber
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.