Dr Zach Serber Transcript
Hello, and welcome to Ask a Scientist. The podcast for kids and adults to ask scientists questions about anything they want to know. There are so many scientists out there doing a lot of cool scientific research. In the news, we’re constantly hearing about scientists and their new ideas and where those ideas are going to take us in the future. But just who are these scientists? In this podcast, we will learn a little more about who they are and what inspires them as scientists.
I’m your host, Victoria Crystal. Every other week, I’ll sit down and ask a different scientist questions written by you, the listeners, and by students from classrooms throughout the country.
Victoria:
Hello listeners. Welcome back to the next episode of Ask a Scientist.
This week, our guest is Dr. Zach Serber, the co-founder and chief science officer of the biofacturing company, Zymergen.
Zach, thank you so much for being here today.
Dr. Serber:
Thank you so much for having me.
Victoria:
We are so excited. We’ve got a lot of wonderful questions. But before we get to the questions, do you want to give the listeners a little bit of information about who you are and what you do?
Dr. Serber:
Sure! As you said, my name is Zach, and I have been interested in science since I was a kid and have been a professional scientist ever since I can remember, I started working in the lab when I was in college, I continued and got a graduate degree in science, I did a post-doc, and then went into industry. I left academia to find ways to apply the science I was most interested to the real world.
Victoria:
(What does Zymergen do?)
Awesome. That is very cool, and we are so excited to hear all about your work applying science to the real world. So, all of these questions were submitted by the listeners through emails and on social media.
And so, we will start off with a pretty good introductory question, I think. This first question comes from Alex. What does Zymergen do?
Dr. Serber:
Yeah, it’s a very good question. So Zymergen is a life sciences company. We work with microbes, single cell organisms, and use them to produce novel products, novel materials.
So most people, when they think of using life science in the world, in an application centric way, they think about the use of life sciences for medicine or for agriculture. As I say, people think of biology as a source of food and medicines chiefly, in terms of applications.
Zymergen does work on those problems too. But in addition, and in a way that’s quite a departure from the past, we also use life sciences to solve problems with materials, to make novel materials with interesting properties that solve problems in the world.
Victoria:
(Can you explain the uses for many of the new products your organization has developed?)
That is super cool. We have a lot of questions all about those materials. So this next question is from Joe. Can you explain the uses for many of the new products your organization has developed?
Dr. Serber:
Yes. There’s so many to choose from. It’s hard to narrow it down, but let me focus on a couple.
So, one that we launched as a product in about a year ago, is a novel film that is going to be used in flexible electronics. So, you may have heard about the exciting opportunities around creating flexible cell phones or flexible tablets. That’s really tricky and not just from a software point of view, but from a hardware point of view, it’s hard to make a screen that you can unfold or roll up and still have all the properties you’re accustomed to in a device. The challenges of that have stymied the industry for years for a decade or more. People have known that flexible electronics would have a lot of interest, but haven’t been able to come up with materials that can actually satisfy it. So one of our most exciting materials that we’ve developed is a novel film that has a glass-like hardness, but has incredible flexibility, and compatibility with all the other components of the electronic stack.
Another product we’re working on that is completely different, but relies on the same foundational technology is a novel mosquito repellent, a novel insect repellent, that has the same properties and efficacy of the mosquito repellents that you’re used to, like DEET, but without the toxicity. DEET, which is a very effective mosquito repellent is actually a pretty toxic molecule. And you don’t want to apply it any more than absolutely necessary. And these days you basically have to make a choice between getting bitten by mosquitoes or applying a mildly toxic or even not so loudly toxic insect repellent. In fact, the European Union doesn’t recommend the application of DEET for children under the age of 12, and nor should pregnant mothers use it. So it is a product that has compromised that has risk. Our product, our novel mosquito repellent, has the same effectiveness, but is completely mild. It’s is derived from nature. It’s a product produced in plants already, and we found a way to make them in microbes at large scale for inclusion in the next generation of insect repellent.
So those are two examples. Those are amongst the two closest to actually being on your shelves and that you can buy. But we also have a long list of additional products after that, that we’re developing in earlier stages. These include novel glues and adhesives inspired by the chemistries that mussels use to adhere to the bottoms of ships or docks.
Victoria:
Wow. Oh, that is incredible. Oh my gosh. This is so cool. Wow. Yeah. And I I’ve done some camping and I’ve accidentally gotten some DEET on my tent material, and it like kind of shredded my tent, you know, the vinyl that the tent is made out of. So.
Dr. Serber:
When I was a kid, I took a bottle of DEET and left it accidentally after applying it on the hood of the family car. And it took the paint off the hood of the family car. It is in a really effective solvent. They actually use DEET in industrial applications in silicon wafer manufacturing and other things. It’s not pleasant stuff.
Victoria:
(How exactly do you create the products?)
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Ooh.
All right. Speaking of all of these amazing products, this next question leads really great into what we were just discussing. Erin wants to know how exactly do you create the products?
Dr. Serber:
So that is our secret sauce, and that’s what gets me jazzed to get up every day. Because the stack of different technologies and different scientific disciplines we’ve had to bring together to do this routinely has been the major challenge over the last several years of building our company and building our scientific foundation.
So we combine many different disciplines of science altogether constructively to make new products. We have chemists, we have material scientists, we have microbiologists, we have geneticists, we have data scientists, we have roboticists. All of these people are working together to develop these products.
How do we do it? Well, we begin by identifying a need out there in the world, some problems that hasn’t been solved to date. And then we look for chemistries, novel molecules, that can be made from biology that seem likely to be capable of solving that problem. And we then, once we’ve identified the molecule, the bio-based molecule that can solve the problem, we make a microbe that can produce that a molecule. We can take that microbe and put it in a large vat, a fermentation vessel, feed it sugar water, and it will turn the sugar water into the molecule of interest. We purify it and incorporate it into the end product.
So it’s a very different manufacturing process than is the source of most molecules and most chemistries in the world, which are usually derived from a barrel of oil. Almost every chemical in the world today with few exceptions are derived from petrochemistry from oil that is broken down and then reconstituted through chemical reactions into a diversity of molecules. What we can get for biology is a very different set of molecules. And many of those molecules have properties that are extremely interesting and capable of solving problems in the world. And that’s what we tap into.
Victoria:
(Where do you get the microbes you use?)
That is so cool.
A really good follow-up to that is from Taylor. Where do you get the microbes that you use?
Dr. Serber:
All over the place. So, there are a handful of microbes that are used by scientists as model organisms, as model systems routinely. These include E. coli, which people probably have heard of, also Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is Baker’s yeast used to make beer or bread. But in addition, the natural world is full of literally millions and billions of microbes that not only have never been studied, but no one has even identified them as of yet. In a single teaspoon of soil from your backyard, there are going to be over a hundred thousand different species of microbes. The majority of which no one has ever studied or looked at.
And from all that diversity comes huge opportunity. And so we have developed expression systems of different microbes capable of making these products. We also sometimes harness those microbes themselves for interesting applications like plastics degradation. So you can find microbes in the natural world that do all sorts of interesting chemistries to solve all sorts of problems.
Victoria:
That is super cool. Oh my gosh. I can barely imagine like a, you know, a teaspoon of soil. Oh. With all those microbes. That’s incredible.
Dr. Serber:
And it’s a really interesting environment. We can’t see it of course, but it is as intricate and complex as any macroscopic ecosystem on the planet. You go to the African savanna or the jungles of the Amazon, and you see all that abundance of life and all that intricate ecosystem dynamics. You have that all in that teaspoon of soil as well at the microscopic scale. It’s just happening beneath our feet and we don’t know it.
Victoria:
(How are you able to use microbes to make material?)
Wow. That’s incredible to think about that whole ecosystem in there. That’s amazing.
All right. Our next question comes from Harris. And you’ve touched on this a little bit, but if there’s any details or anything else you want to add. Harris wants to know how are you able to use microbes to make material?
Dr. Serber:
I think it’s, I’ll expand on my previous answer and say that life is basically chemistry that we, you and I, we eat food. And then we have enzymes in our digestive systems that break down the complex foods we eat into very simple molecules, which we then through biochemical process reconstitute into complex parts of our body. So, if you eat, if you have chicken for dinner, you break down the proteins in the chicken into amino acids, which then get reconstituted into proteins, human proteins, that you use to live.
In a similar fashion, we can take the enzymes that are in a microbe and change them to make arbitrary biomolecules. So, we can, for example, find a molecule in a plant that is an effective mosquito repellent. And then find which enzymes in the plant are responsible for making that molecule and then move them into the microbe and have the microbe to it.
And you might ask, well, why not just harvest it from the plant? And you certainly can, but usually the plant is making these interesting molecules in minute quantities. They are rarely a significant portion of what the plant makes. And moreover, growing cycles can take very long time. It can depend if it’s a, for example, a molecule from a tree, you might have to wait decades before you were ready to harvest it. So by moving the biosynthetic pathway from the plant into the microbe, you now can not only do it much faster, but also upregulate it, amplify it, so that the microbes makes lots of it. And you can then make it something reasonably inexpensive.
Victoria:
(Where are Zymergen’s products used? Where can we get them?)
That is so cool. Oh my gosh. I’m just in awe. This is fascinating.
Let’s see here. The next question comes from Jane. Where are Zymergen’s products used? Where can we get them?
Dr. Serber:
Right. And by the time this podcast airs, I expect you will be able to. We have customers lining up in particular to buy our flexible electronics film to incorporate into the next generation of devices. It will be unquestionably used in flexible displays of a variety of sources from big companies that, you know, but unfortunately, because they’re not yet public, I can’t name them. But in addition, these films are going to be incredibly useful for touch sensors in a variety of applications that may even extend beyond consumer electronics. So, it’s not just going to be tablets and cell phones, but it could also end up in the dashboard of your automobile or home appliances and other, other applications that are less obvious.
So, the short answer is soon. In 2021, you will be able to buy our products. And look to our website to see where.
Victoria:
Awesome. I will include the link to your website in the description of this episode, and I’ll also put it on our podcast website. So listeners can periodically check back and get updates on that as 2021 progresses, and into the future, future years too.
Dr. Serber:
Wonderful.
Victoria:
(Do big businesses sell any of Zymergen’s products?)
This is a good question from Chris, a good follow-up, although since it’s not public, you may not be able to answer this one. Chris wants to know, do big businesses sell any of Zymergen’s products.
Dr. Serber:
I assume, the answer is definitely yes, but not quite yet. Some of the biggest brands in the world are keen on incorporating these bio-based materials into their products, because they provide attractive properties to the product that people want. I mean, I mentioned the flexibility aspects of our film, but also it doesn’t shatter. And so, any place where glass is used is a potential place where our films could be used instead. It has the same kind of optical transparency and clearness of glass, but you can make it extremely thin, extremely flexible and won’t break. And so it’s only a matter of time before the film gets incorporated across a huge range of different applications.
Victoria:
Oh, that’s fantastic. Yeah. The number of times I have either shattered a cell phone screen or shattered the glass protector that goes over the screen. It’s ridiculous.
Dr. Serber:
Me too. Me too. It’s a common problem. And we all just get used to that. After that first week of the new device, it’s going to have cracks in it almost inevitably.
Victoria:
(How many items do you produce in a year?)
Yeah. I very much look forward to a phone or a tablet with the screen that won’t shatter.
Okay. This is a good, interesting question. It comes from Austin. How many items do you produce in a year?
Dr. Serber:
Yeah. I would say it depends on what’s meant by items. So, in terms of new products, right now we’re launching about one product a year, but we’re still a very young company, and we’re scaling up. And our ambition soon is to be launching as many as three new products a year across a variety of applications, everything from consumer electronics to personal care products, to agricultural products, or medicinal products.
Another way of reading that question is how much of this stuff are you making? And because these, at least for the time being our specialty, items or the film, if you think about the film that might go on a like electronic device on a cell phone or a tablet, and you think about the amount of weight, you could actually make enough film to put on every device in the world for a few thousand tons worth of material. And a few thousand tons is, depending on how you look at it, either a lot or a little, I mean, a few thousand tons is a lot of a lot of stuff, but compared to certain other commodity chemicals, not all that much. And over time, we expect that as the use of this kind of new material from biology grows, the volumes will grow as well, and start to actually make a significant dent in petrochemical materials and have a positive environmental impact by doing so.
Victoria:
That would be awesome. I’m just thinking back to what you said earlier about you put the microbes in the big vats and give them their sugar and let them do their thing. So how much, like how much material would you get from one vat of microbes?
Dr. Serber:
You can, the vats come into all sorts of sizes.
So, we have laboratory vats that are about half a liter in volume. And from that you can make a few grams of your key chemical or key molecule that’s used to make the film.
But these vats can grow to the size of small buildings, 10, 12 stories tall, the size of grain silos that you might’ve seen. These kinds of vats are currently already being used to make products like ethanol for transportation fuel in large volumes, and would look almost identical to the kinds of vats we would use to make these materials. One of those large vat could easily make tons of it you know, in a day or a week, in a couple of days.
Victoria:
(What is the most unusual item your company makes?)
Awesome. That is so cool.
All right. And back to the listener questions, this is kind of a fun one from Dante. What is the most unusual item your company makes?
Dr. Serber:
It depends on your perspective.
In terms of end use application, I am particularly proud of our products that are relevant to consumer electronics, because no one holds up their cell phone and things that the materials within it would have come from anywhere other than traditional petroleum sources. No one thinks about bio materials making their way into consumer electronics. And the fact that we can show that not only can we do that, but can actually introduce attractive properties to the device by doing so. And that you should be seeking bio solutions, not just because they’re environmentally sensitive, but because you can actually get superior performance from them. That’s really exciting to me and very unexpected.
Unfortunately, most people subconsciously associate sustainability bio sourcing with inferiority. If I were to hand you a knife. And say, this knife is compostable. If you put this into your compost heap, it is going to degrade. You’d be excited that it was compostable. But you’d also probably subconsciously think this is going to be a pretty lousy knife, is probably going to bend when I try to cut something tough with it. It’s not actually going to be as good as a traditional petroleum based plastic knife. And that subconscious association we all have, that if you are going with the green solution, it has to be inferior solution, is really unfortunate and unnecessary. And a legacy we’ve built based upon the sort of mediocre quality of renewable products that have been generated.
And one of our goals, one of my goals, personal goals is to change that instinct. I want you to think when you use a sustainable product to actually come to expect that it might even be superior in the performance that it provides, as well as being environmentally sensitive.
Victoria:
Yeah, that’s awesome. That is fantastic. And I hope that all the listeners listening to that can, you know, think about that bias that they might have, and reassess that.
Dr. Serber:
Yeah, I mean, today there are non-DEET-based insect repellents, and frankly, none of them work very well. They don’t repel mosquitoes the way DEET does. And so, you see that goes back to that unfortunate choice you have, either to use an inferior product that is non-toxic or a better product from a repellency point of view that is toxic. And that’s an unfortunate choice, which we’re trying to eliminate. We want you to have both, the non-toxicity as well as efficacy, the ability to repel mosquitoes.
And whenever every product we make, we have that in mind. How do we use biology most productively to create a superior solution? If it’s an inferior solution, we’re actually not interested in pursuing it. We really, a criterion for us to go ahead with developing a product is it has to be better than the status quo and not just environmentally, but also in terms of what it does for you, the benefits it provides.
Victoria:
That is fantastic. Will your insect repellent, will that be available in 2021, for consumer purchase?
Dr. Serber:
We’re expecting 2022. So, we are still in the mode of about one product a year right now. So, 2021 is the year where you can actually take our film off the shelf and have it in your device. In 2022 is when the insect repellent will first become available.
Victoria:
Awesome. Awesome.
Well, I’ll definitely be getting some of that in 2022.
Dr. Serber:
Yeah, I’ve used it. I mean, we’ve made small batches of it. And it’s incredibly effective. I used it with my whole family in, and it also smells nice. So it doesn’t leave that sort of sticky feeling that kind of greasy feeling that you’d get from DEET products as well. It’s a much more pleasant product to use.
Victoria:
(Have any of the new products been used in the space program?)
Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah. I do not like the smell of the DEET ones and yeah.
All right. Let’s see. Our next listener question is from David. This is interesting. Have any of the new products been used in the space program?
Dr. Serber:
It’s a good question. And I find it an interesting question because space exploration requires materials with extraordinary properties. Conventional materials often don’t withstand the rigors of space, whether it be being in zero gravity, or near absolute zero temperatures and the absence of an atmosphere, or on re-entry for a certain kind of devices or certain kinds of space vehicles.
So while none of our products have yet made it into a space program, it is certainly possible, in fact likely, that our products will cater to the space industry in the future. Because we are making products with extraordinary properties, many of which are useful to space exploration. It just hasn’t gotten there yet.
Victoria:
Yeah. I can, you know, imagine the films being used in all of the screens and stuff that are used to program the ships and how they move and, I don’t know the correct terminology for that, but you know, all the fancy buttons and screens and dials well.
Dr. Serber:
And some of the films we’re making or have a class of film called polyimide films. And polyimide films, the first generation that are petroleum-based were actually invented in the 1960s for the space program, for the Apollo missions. And used not just on the inside of the spacecraft, but on the exterior, because they were so durable, they have incredible thermo tolerant properties that made them attractive. and mechanical properties. And the most famous of these films is called Kapton. And if you Google Kapton with a K you’ll find pictures of it. And the most distinctive feature of Kapton film is it’s got an Amber colored, yellowish. So while it’s extremely durable and flexible and has all these wonderful properties, it’s not optically clear. And so, if you were to use it on a cell phone, everything would be have a yellowish tinge to it.
What we’ve been able to do with biology is reinvent polyimide films that have all of those attractive mechanical and thermal properties, but are also optically transparent, optically clear.
And so, it’s not the least bit farfetched that these materials could end up in space because that’s part of their inspiration. That’s part of where they came from in the first place.
Victoria:
(If a lot of materials like insect repellants, and parts of cell phones, could be made in an environment-friendly way, why is it that we don’t get to see a lot of manufacturers do it? Is the environment-friendly way of doing this expensive? What is stopping most of the world from doing this?)
That’s awesome. So, cool.
All right. Let’s see. This next question, kind of a long question, from Jacqueline. If a lot of materials like insect repellents, and parts of cell phones, could be made in an environmentally friendly way, why is it that we don’t get to see a lot of manufacturers do? Is the environmentally friendly way of doing things expensive? What is stopping most of the world from doing this?
Dr. Serber:
It’s such an important question. And unfortunately, it doesn’t have a single or simple answer. And I bet if you asked 10 people in the industry, you probably get 10 different answers. But I’ll give you my perspective on this.
There’s a lot of inertia around the way we’ve done things in the past. And the petrochemical world we live in today is not all that old, it really began about 150 years ago, but it became the status quo about 70, or 80 years ago. The revolution of plastics and materials derived from petrochemistry has unquestionably enhanced the quality of human life and made certain things possible. But it’s come at a cost, it’s coming at an environmental cost, which people didn’t fully appreciate in the beginning. Some people even deny to this day, but I think most reasonable people can acknowledge and realize that there are many unfortunate and unintended consequences of our reliance on petroleum.
Switching is hard. Not only is the technology around employing biology still relatively young and immature and needs to be advanced, but as mentioned the cost position can be quite different. So because petroleum has been the status quo as a source of all these interesting materials for so long. They’ve had decades to optimize all their chemical processes to bring down their costs. They built huge chemical plants, which are already paid for, and you don’t have to continue to put into the price of your product, the cost of manufacturing the plant. Whereas if you build a new bioprocessing plant, you have to invest in original money to build the plant and that adds expense to your product. So, there are certain advantages of being the pre-existing technology, in terms of cost position, in terms of customer’s familiarity.
I think it will change. It will change in our lifetime though. I think that the writing’s on the wall, and I’m to back to a point I made earlier, I think it’s really important that when we envisioned bio-based solutions, we focus on superior performance because we don’t want people to think that environmentalism comes at the expense of quality. Quality can be high or even higher when you start with biology and that will help usher in a new era of bio-based products, even as we bring the cost down. Because bringing the costs down will take some time.
Victoria:
Yeah, that makes sense. Would there be any way of, retrofitting might not be the right word, but like taking the plants that are already in existence and altering them to do bio-based work instead of petrochemical?
Dr. Serber:
To some extent, yes, but not as much as you might like. And in fact, one of the intrinsic advantages of the bio-based manufacturing, where as we Zymergen call it bio-factory, is that it is intrinsically less capital intensive. By which I mean, the plants you build are simpler, safer, and cheaper than the equivalent plant you’d make in petrochemistry, the petrochemical plants.
I mean, I used to live in New York and would visit New Jersey, and the Jersey turnpike is flanked by oil refineries, which you can smell from miles away. And what you see as you drive by, or just miles and miles of tanks and piping and flames leaping up. And all of that infrastructure and complexity is well, honestly, somewhat hazardous, it’s prone to explode unexpectedly and when disaster strikes, and it very, very expensive to build and to maintain. Contrast that with a vat of sugar water with microbes in it for a fermentation vessel, like you might see at a brewery or at an ethanol plant, these are simpler infrastructure, it’s safe, it happens at standard temperatures and pressures. And I think, it’s just a matter of time when we catch up with that kind of infrastructure, we just have to build it.
It’s easier to retrofit an existing fermentation facility for one of these new generation of products than it would be the oil refineries in New Jersey, for example.
Victoria:
Okay. Cool. So like, you know, an old brewery moves out, and then you take over all their.
Dr. Serber:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It’s also more general purpose. The one way of thinking of one metaphor we use is the fermentation vat is the hardware, and the software is the microbes you put into it. So you can put a microbe and sugar into that sugar water that makes a flexible electronic display, or a microbe that makes an insect repellent, and it can be exactly the same VAT that you use to do those two things. And it’s just a question of which microbe you choose to put in it. So it’s also got a lot more flexibility than the traditional petrochemical industry in which if you want to make a given chemical, you have to build a whole bunch of bespoke and specific infrastructure to support the making of that molecule. And once you’ve decided to make it, you’re kind of, you’re stuck with it, you have to make that molecule forever more with that infrastructure, which creates all sorts of distortions in the economics and in the market, which is complicated. But if you’ve built a company and you’re making a molecule, you’re gonna do everything you can to keep that molecule in the marketplace.
Victoria:
(What are fermented foldable screens? What is the process to make them?)
Yeah. Yeah.
All right, let’s get back to some listener questions. You’ve talked about this a little bit, but if there’s anything you can add or want to add. Sierra wants to know what are fermented foldable screens? What is the process to make them?
Dr. Serber:
Yeah, good question.
The key ingredient, the magical ingredient, that makes these flexible displays have all their thermal and mechanical properties, as well as being optically transparent, comes from a special molecule we make from biology. It’s a biomolecule.
The fermentation vats with microbes in it make that molecule. We then purify that molecule and with other molecules, polymerize it to make a plastic. Albeit one that is partially sourced from a bio starting point. That becomes the film that we use in the electronics.
So it’s genuinely a hybrid process between something which is pure bio manufacturing based on microbes, generating an ingredient, which is then incorporated into a more classical chemistry process of polymerization to make the display. And the display, as you might imagine, a cell phone or a device is very complicated and has lots of materials and parts in it. It becomes one layer of a multicomponent device.
Victoria:
(What are techniques to break down plastics?)
Awesome. So cool.
Let’s see. This next question comes from Mark. What are techniques to break down plastics?
Dr. Serber:
Hmm. Yes. So, this is another area of keen interest for Zymergen. So not only are we learning how to make better products in a better way, we’re also interested in participating in dealing with the legacy of petroleum, which is a lot of plastic waste that has gotten into environment and all in all over.
And one of the attractive features of plastics from a commercial point of view is that it doesn’t rot. If you have wood or cotton or some other natural product, eventually, there will be a microbe that will degrade it. Rotting is effectively microbial degradation of your material.
Plastics, because they’re new to the world, haven’t co-evolved microbes that eat it. And so, part of why we wrapped things we want to preserve in plastic is that nothing is going to get in there. There are no microbes is going to eat its way through. Whereas if you were to wrap your product in, I don’t know, balsa wood or cotton under the right conditions of moisture or whatnot, it will actually attract microbes, it will start growing on it.
So, we are interested in finding microbes in nature that at least a little bit are capable of digesting plastics. And there are some, we have found some. I mentioned before that a teaspoon of soil has over a hundred thousand microbial species in them. Some of those, rare species, can actually digest plastic just a tiny bit, not enough to broad, not enough to make a material impact on plastic waste right now. But, we want to take those starting points and basically evolve them to do a better job of digesting the plastics, to improve their capacity. If we were to, if humans were to disappear off the planet right now, our plastic waste would eventually naturally evolve microbes that could digest them, that could use them as a food source. Nature abhors a vacuum, it doesn’t like leaving carbon lying around undigested. Some organism is going to evolve the capacity to consume it. It just may take thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. And what we’re doing is effectively just speeding up that process, finding a starting point and coaxing it along, making it easier for evolution to have its impact, to develop microbes that could be then ultimately used to degrade all the polyethylene and polypropylene and other plastics that dominate our ecosystems.
Victoria:
Oh, that would be amazing. The amount of single use plastics that there are, it just, is kind of revolting.
Dr. Serber:
Absolutely. We need to find some better way of disposing of it. And I mean, one of the huge problems that people confront is mixed waste. So recycling streams get completely confounded by having multiple different kinds of plastics. And they often have to be segregated to be recycled appropriately, and that’s expensive and time-consuming.
If you have a microbe that will make you eat one kind of plastic and not another, you don’t have to sort, it will simply digest what it can and leave the rest alone. And you can envision an ecosystem or a consortium of microbes, each evolve to digest a different plastic that could be used as a kind of soup to digest the majority of all those wasteful plastics that we have generated over the decades.
Victoria:
(What processes are being used in the medical field for microbial engineering? Was any of microbial engineering used to cress the COVID vaccine?)
Oh, that would be incredible.
All right. Let’s see. Switching gears a little bit. You mentioned these products in the medical field. So we’ve got a couple of questions about medically related things. Sierra and Mark, both want to know what processes are being used in the medical field for microbial engineering. Was any of microbial engineering used to create the COVID vaccine?
Dr. Serber:
The short answer is yes, though not by Zymergen per se.
So microbes and their ability to make complex molecules in fermentation is useful for a variety of industries. And there are ingredients in the mRNA-based vaccines of Moderna, for example, that are based on enzymes that are made microbially. The long pieces of RNA that they use can also be made microbially. So, there are definitely ingredients in the vaccine that are made microbially.
In addition, Zymergen has been looking to develop COVID-19 therapies. These are not vaccines, but rather medicines you would take if you caught the disease and wanted to reduce your symptoms or improve your likelihood of getting better faster, or without, you know, dire consequences. And it’s based on that same soil, those same soil microbes. So those soil microbes produce many molecules that have drug-like properties. And we have sifted through those genomes, through the DNA within those microbes, looking for molecules that are going to be efficacious at blocking COVID-19 infection.
Victoria:
(Are you working on any treatments for the COVID virus?)
Oh, that is so cool.
And I think that answers Kevin’s question, which was a couple of questions down the list. Kevin asked, are you working on any treatments for the COVID virus?
Dr. Serber:
And indeed we are. It’s still early days, but we have found molecules from our collection that block one of the enzymes that’s involved in COVID 19 infection. And we’re producing that molecule in larger volumes currently with the intention of testing it in certain cell culture models to show that it’s efficacious. We know experimentally, it blocks the enzyme. What we need to do is then scale that up and try it in a cell culture assay as part of it as a stepping stone to ultimately developing it as a novel therapeutic.
Victoria:
(What products will you work on in the future?)
Oh, that’s incredible.
Okay. Speaking of things that you’re working on, Emm wants to know what products will you work on in the future?
Dr. Serber:
What won’t we work on in the future? As I mentioned at the beginning, people associate biology with medicine and agriculture, feeding us and healing us. And if you got a degree in biology and you wanted to work in industry, if you didn’t want to be a professor or a teacher, your most likely path is to a drug company or a pharmaceutical company or to an agricultural company.
I think though, that won’t be true 10 years from now, that the reach of biology into different areas will only grow. And we’ll see. I mean, the fact that our first product launches in electronics is very surprising to us now, will seem commonplace a decade from now. And we see the relevance of what we do to everything from generating new materials, but also to other fields like waste remediation and mining. So when mines are trying to extract ore, and extract, for example, copper or gold for rocks, there are microbes that can help facilitate that process. There are also microbes that can help detoxify the waste streams that come from that.
There are applications obviously in medicine and in agriculture, but also in things like consumer care, skin care. The hair dye you use in the future may be derived from a biomolecule, for example. And there’s so many advantages of these biomolecules in that they’re just less likely to be toxic, they’re part of life already, and are more likely to degrade. And there’s so many intrinsic benefits of using bio-based molecules in a variety of industries.
Another one would be packaging, you know, all the things you buy from Amazon come wrapped in all these layers of plastic and cardboard and whatnot. We can see a path to replace all of that stuff with things generated from molecules and chemistry made via fermentation.
Victoria:
Oh, that would be incredible. And it sounds like if the listeners are interested in this, there will be ample opportunity for them to have a career in it when they get older.
Dr. Serber:
Absolutely. And I would say that a broad interest in multiple branches of science is most important. if you were a pure biologist, it wouldn’t be enough. Or rather if all we employed at my company were biologists, sure, we do wonderful science, but we wouldn’t have made the progress we’ve made. It’s by having this really fun and dynamic group of people who each love their individual disciplines of science, but are also eager to share what they know with other experts in other fields, and to cross fertilize their knowledge, where all this potential comes. I mean, material scientists, people developing the next generation of cell phone displays, rarely find themselves talking to a microbiologist under normal circumstances. And part of what we’ve done is create a really nice environment in which those people who might ordinarily never talk, talk to each other daily to solve these problems. Because the material scientist is looking for novel chemistries that biology can provide to create cool new properties.
And what I love about my job is, is cheaply about just facilitating those conversations, is creating the environment whereby we have the right people working together in the right way to come up with these innovations daily.
Victoria:
(What is your job like on a day to day basis?)
Oh, that’s wonderful.
And speaking of your job, we’ve got another group of questions that are all about your job and you and your career. So this first question in that category comes from Celia. What is your job like on a day to day basis?
Dr. Serber:
It’s been a while. The last eight years of my life had been a wild ride.
So, roughly eight years ago when you’re hearing this podcast, at least I started Zymergen with two other friends. And to today, well, when we’re recording this at least, the company is now about 750 people, which is really fast growth. Growth fueled by all the potential of this technology across all these different parts of the world.
And so my day to day changes day to day. The work I used to do a couple of years ago is quite different than the work in my day to day today. These days, my chief job at the company is to set the overall technical direction, is to tell us collectively where we’re going with the technology. This includes, for example, what markets we’re going to try to go after, what classes of move materials we’re going to prioritize and develop. It includes how we’re going to enhance our capabilities, our platform to do so. And by platform, I mean, we employ a lot of robots and software to accelerate the normal course of biological research, and all that takes a lot of orchestration and coordination.
And so it’s been, honestly, it’s been probably 10 years since I’ve done an experiment myself in the laboratory, which saddens me. I mean, I, was an experimental scientist and I loved it. But what I’m doing today is interesting in a different way. I have lots of friends and colleagues who are scientists in the lab, performing the experiments. And my job is chiefly to make sure that everyone knows what everyone else is doing and that are having the right conversations at the right time. And we’re all pushing in the same direction. We’re all trying to get the same thing accomplished.
Victoria:
(What is the favorite part of your job?)
Awesome. That sounds great.
Chris wants to know what is your favorite part of your job?
Dr. Serber:
Learning. Definitely learning. I was trained initially as a physicist and learned more and more biology as my career progressed. And these days I’m learning tons of chemistry and material science. Some of my closest colleagues are experts in these areas that I don’t have a good big background in. And I’m learning from them constantly. There’s always more to learn. And it’s not just the foundational understanding of chemistry, material science, not to mention data science and machine learning and robotics, but it’s then having learned enough to be dangerous, to figure out how to combine forces with all these people with all these different backgrounds to do something amazing, to push the frontier of what we can do with science.
Victoria:
(What is your educational background? What brought you to your current work?)
That’s awesome.
All right. You mentioned this a little bit, but this is a great place to have this as a follow-up question. Austin wants to know what is your educational background and what brought you to your current work?
Dr. Serber:
So I was definitely a STEM kid in school. I was a nerd. I was a kid who would read books about science and scientists, and took all the possible science and math courses I could as a high school student.
I went to college, and actually took me a little while to decide to become a physicist. And ultimately my major in college was in biophysics. I took courses as well. And in college, I took one course in neuroscience and neurobiology. I thought that was interesting. And I was awarded some money and then went and did a master’s degree in neuroscience, which was a bit of a departure from my past, but it was super interesting also. I did not oversea, it actually did that in Edinburgh, Scotland.
One of the wonderful things about science in general is it’s so international. It’s scientists share I find a passion for truth and for discovery, irrespective of language or culture or other backgrounds. And. you go to these international science conferences and everyone has a common language, which is a passion for discovery, for uncovering newness, for understanding how the world works, and that breaks through any other kind of barrier. And so I find science is wonderful in part because of its international flavor, its ability to find common ground amongst people with otherwise very different backgrounds.
Anyway. So I did one year abroad studying, which was fun. I came back, I actually taught high school physics for a year in New York city before then moving out to California for my PhD program, which was in Biophysics. I specialized in a technique called NMR spectroscopy, which is akin to MRI scans, but for chemicals at a very microscopic scale. And then I did a post-doc also in California in Chemical and Systems Biology, studying evolution and data science and bioinformatics.
I bounced around. And the bouncing around has been fun. I think people believe sometimes, I think mistakenly believed that when you go into science and you focus, it’s so as to become a deep expert in a single field. And certainly, you can do that, but I think what you learn through a career in science is how to learn, and how to come up to speed on a new topic quickly and how to be creative and innovative in a new area. And that’s more what I’ve done with my career, is move around from field to field, picking up enough and moving on to another thing.
Victoria:
That’s wonderful. I think that’s so great for the listeners to hear that, you know, you don’t, like you said, you don’t have to do that deep specialization in something, and no innovation comes from this variety that you’ve experienced. So that’s cool.
Dr. Serber:
There’s huge opportunities to innovate at the interfaces of disciplines. The traditional silos of chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, these are human constructs, these are artificial. And it’s so much more fun to bounce between them and to find things at the interfaces.
Victoria:
(What is your most significant discovery?)
Yeah.
Okay, this is a fun question from Harris. What is your most significant discovery?
Dr. Serber:
That’s it. I think the insight that got the company started was that biology has the potential to create such interesting chemicals, such interesting molecules, most of which have never been contemplated as sources of materials or product innovation. And so the insight was we can create better products with biology in a better way.
That discovery was a hypothesis eight years ago, and is now proof, had been proven over the last eight years. We have shown unequivocally and repeatedly that we can indeed make better products, a better way with biology.
Victoria:
(What is the future of plastic in our world?)
That is awesome.
All right, we’re coming down to the last couple of questions, both about looking to the future. Kelly wants to know what is the future of plastic in our world.
Dr. Serber:
It’s a nuanced answer to that question.
So plastics has bad connotations. It is a dirty word in environmental circles for all the appropriate reasons. And yet plastics do amazing things. They have amazing properties that allow us to have higher quality of life, frankly. And, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
So the future of plastics, the optimistic future of plastics, is one in which we do continue to have plastics, but they are sourced in a different way. They are made from biology rather than from petroleum. And they’re disposed of in a different way, which is that they are compostable, that they’re made degradable by virtue of their original design.
And so I think the plastics of the future will have better properties in the plastics we make rely upon today and be very, almost unrecognizable based upon our current exposure and thoughts around where plastics are.
Victoria:
(What things do you think we’ll see in the future that you think are most important?)
That’ll be amazing.
And this is our last question from Dante. What things do you think we’ll see in the future that you think are most important?
Dr. Serber:
I think we are finally, as a society, as a civilization, coming to terms with what is sometimes called by economists as externalities, that when you pursue something, when you make something in a given way, there are unintended consequences. And often these externalities are environmental. So who pays for the waste that’s produced by chemical plants, and for the hazards introduced into the environment? No one, or everyone simultaneously. There’s no one particularly takes the blame and we all suffer the consequences.
And I think I’m looking forward to a future in which we. And I think the next generation realizes this intrinsically, that this can’t go on, that we have to come to face to face and confront the externalities, these unintended negative consequences, is the ways we’ve run our world for the past generation or three, and do it differently.
And so, what we’re doing to participate in a brighter future is not enabled by regulation or by any kind of laws encouraging it. We’re looking for ways to create value by making better products. We’re going to find customers and be economically successful because the product should be better. I didn’t bring this up earlier, but the customers who are buying our films are buying the films because they’re really cool. The fact that they’re bio-based and environmentally more sensitive is also interest adjusting to our customers, but it’s not their primary motivation. They’re buying them because they have nice properties that give their electronics cool features. The environmentalism comes along for the ride. And I look forward to a world in which the environmental motive becomes as strong a factor.
And we’re moving in that direction. I’ll be at not, not fast enough, not as quickly as I’d like, but I think that’s what I’m looking forward to most.
Victoria:
That will be awesome.
All right. So I kind of have one more question for you. Do you have any questions of your own for the listeners?
Dr. Serber:
Well, if you’re listening to this podcast in the first place, you’re probably, at least part of you wondering about whether you might have a future in the sciences. And I would ask why not? Why any hesitation? A life of science and technology is an exciting stimulating life that has all these benefits. You get to work with really cool people. You get to work on really interesting problems that are creative and thought provoking. And if you choose wisely, you get to have a positive impact in the world.
And in my company, when we ask people why they like working there, they cite those three reasons. They like the people they work with, they like the intellectual stimulation of the problems they face on a day-to-day basis, and they like the impact we’re having in the world. And different people will put different emphases on those three motives, but everyone shares those three motives. And broadly speaking, a life of science is a place where you can fulfill all three and it makes for a wonderful, a wonderful career, a wonderful life.
Victoria:
That’s fantastic.
Yeah, that is Ask a Scientist for today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Dr. Serber:
Thank you very, very much for having me. And please, I look forward to if people have questions via social media or want to reach out, I’d be happy to engage.
Victoria:
Awesome. Do you have social media accounts that you want to put the handle in?
Dr. Serber:
I have a Twitter account, which is @zachserber. and I actually don’t have a Facebook account. But I also have a LinkedIn account. You can Google my name and you’ll find it. And in a pinch people could even email me, and my email address is available on the Zymergen website.
Victoria:
Awesome. Yeah. And I’ll put the link to the website, and then I’ll also link to your LinkedIn in the description of the episode, so people can just click on that to find you.
Dr. Serber:
Wonderful. That’d be great.
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