Nature Co-Design Part 1
Let's roll up our sleeves and pull apart the Boston Consulting Group and Hello Tomorrow artifact that gave us a $30 trillion economic displacement figure that all and sundry quote
This week I’m bringing the cows in against an earlier promise to give you TL;DRs that are neither short nor sunmaries. We're kicking off with Part 1 of a TL;DR on Nature Co-Design. This is the Boston Consulting Group and Hello Tomorrow artifact that gave the world a $30 trillion economic displacement figure that all and sundry quote. I guarantee that once you can trace this figure, you’ll see it everywhere. Indeed it’s the second time I’ve mentioned it in five posts.
I re-read Nature Co-Design (2022) and quickly realised that it would not be possible to give you a TL;DR in one part. For context, I made 101 annotations to the report and it’s only 44 pages long. If you haven’t read it, then I strongly recommend you give it a gander.
Nature Co-Design (NCD)
I learnt to read synbio in the same way I learnt to read Shakespeare. After a few hundred papers I’d inhaled the dialect like a rookie poker player in a room full of cigar smoke.
The language is electrical engineering drunk on cybernetics smoking a pipe full of quantum physics, all while ordering a 3am kebab stuffed full with genetics. For those deep within the discipline of synbio it can be difficult to step outside this language, but for new entrants it creates a high barrier to entry. It’s only a slightly higher barrier to entry than being stone cold sober in McDonalds at the witching hour and trying to hold a conversation with someone who imagines they are a kitten.
Now refract the dialect of synbio through the prism of management consultese and you get Nature Co-Design.
It is genuinely a wonder these two languages didn’t hold hands sooner, with their design-build-test-learn cycles, metabolic circuits, knock downs, rewiring philosophies and minimal genome traditions - one has to wonder, am I talking about restructuring your company or your strain of S. cerevisiae? Nature Co-Design not only knows and flows with this language, it creatively extends standard nomenclature so that its economic implications are more easily identifiable.
Let’s take a look.
In the first and second industrial revolutions, we relied on raw materials extracted from the earth to generate energy and build new materials. In the era of nature co-design, we consider the feedstock and engineer the organisms that will consume it to manufacture the products we desire with precision, or we take the properties required from a material and work at the nanoscale to create them. This approach starts from the problem and drills down to the atomic level to build a solution from the nanoscale up.
This is an elegant summation of multi-scalar thinking, a concept deeply ingrained in engineering, neuroscience and quantum biology. You’ll notice, however, that this quote neatly sidesteps the time, resources and compute required to conduct today’s life science experiments. These inputs are critical for successfully engineering at the nanoscale. Never let a consultant get away with underselling you the true scope and cost of a project.
True costs aside, the bare bones of the biomanufacturing revolution are captured in the quote.
Consider the feedstock
Engineer the organism
Manufacture with precision
This flow boils down 80% of biomanufacturing to its essence. Yet it also misses a core element of the NCD story. Calling this engineering is more an artifice of language than a representation of fact. Magic continues to deeply pervade the act of biological instantiation. Every global pharmaceutical company can attest to this with the same wizened smile as a PhD student caught staring at their failed experiment. No matter how many computer assisted design programs there are, no matter the degree and generality of our AI models, life will as life does. That emergent phenomena flows from complex networks numbering more connections than there are stars in the universe shouldn't surprise anyone.
Due to the intrinsic complexity of nature co-design a non-reductionist approach is required. Biology is nonlinear, the whole being far more complex than the sum of its parts. As a result, nature co-design businesses will need more “biological” thinking and management, particularly when it comes to dealing with the inherent complexity and lack of predictability in biology.
That this quote appears in a report by BCG is quite frankly stunning. Let's explore what it means to think and manage “biologically”.
Waste as Feedstock
When you pick up the circular economy tin “waste as feedstock” is written on it in big bold uppercase letters. The first step in thinking bio is to know that all waste is valuable and food for something else. Even the foulest tailings pool imaginable will probably be sustaining some happy-go-lucky Holly Golightly extremophile that's evolved a fitness peak so niche their genome might as well be an R&D claim for Rio Tinto. To think bio is to realise that nature is a clear winner when it comes to breaking down mixed waste media at room temperature.
For example, it is difficult to develop a single recycling modality for the waste oil of 15,000 restaurants. Each restaurant’s oil will be slightly different to another, with impurities and compounds specific to each cooking process. Each oil with be patterned by a unique supply chain and carry imprints born from the general vicissitudes of life. A synthetic biologist, however, will approach this problem differently. NCD dictates that we assume life has solved for biotic questions, we just don't know the solve yet. The joy is in finding out how life has dealt with a particular problem set given all possible solutions available in the near-infinite biological design space.1
In the new nature co-design production equation, feedstocks can include sugar, corn, algae, carbon dioxide, methane, or any carbon-containing waste stream such as cotton or even plastic waste. Waste in one value chain can become a resource in another; this has an impact on economics as well as on the size and the location of production plants since proximity to waste streams can become an important variable.
To think and manage with a bio mindset means sourcing waste becomes the most important job of a manager. The logistics of aggregating waste for use as a feedstock are nontrivial. The first step along this journey is for us to stop calling it waste and realise that it's an inherently valuable asset.
Stop paying other businesses to dispose of your waste and transform it into your own value flow.
Bioprocesses are not always amenable to massive scale up at the level of modern oil refining and chemical manufacturing. As we have seen with rooftop solar and household battery rollouts, this can be a good thing. It generates new types of economic webs that tier bioinspired redundancy across the system. Distributed systems are diverse systems.
‘Waste as feedstock’ finds form in economic webs of low scale highly distributed waste valorisation. This is a new type of economics, and to draw a link from last week's scenario, I'm calling this displacement economics 2.0.
It has the same look and feel as when the printing press first appeared in Europe.2 Smallscale operators are in competition with massive multinationals, but local players will be more nimble, quicker to adapt to local supply chain disruptions (rather than importing those disruptions through global networks), and better placed to locally reuse valorised waste streams. This ultimately cuts down on the carbon costs of trade logistics. The closer waste is to valorsiation to manufacture to product reuse, the less carbon is used in shipping and transport. Circular economies should be designed as tightly as can be. I’m not advocating small is beautiful, I’m fully behind local webs of waste reuse.
We are only at the beginning of learning to aggregate waste biomass on the scales necessary for sustainably running gigatonne carbon infrastructure. But we have to start somewhere.
Different Economics
On one side is traditional cost development with capex, opex, and materials, and on the other side are the economics of the organisms, which can be designed to produce higher concentrations of the desired biosynthetic product. A higher concentration allows for more efficient down-stream processing—the isolation and purification of the product—which is an important cost factor. Consequently, increasing the organism’s production allows reducing cost. Microbes can also be designed to increase yield and reduce the required feedstock. Or they can be designed to grow faster, thus reducing capex and opex.
Economics is going to bend, break and reshape because of NCD. For the astute manager there are so many levers to pull: more yield, a different feedstock, altered growth factor, optimised bioreactor design, different down-stream processing, the list goes on and on. Each option offers minor design optimisations that contribute to overall system-level improvements giving you Moore's Green Law. Put simply, biomanufacturing productivity is going to improve at an accelerating rate.
Organisms bring software stack mentalities into manufacturing modalities. With NCD a manufacturing process begins with a minimum viable organism (MVO), and then iterates endlessly. Companies will need Chief Biology Officers and biodesign teams just like they do Chief Technology Officers. And without inhouse expertise, a once-and-done approach of outsourcing organism design and deployment may not work. There is significant diversity to the business models that will populate this space. All of these business models will place front and centre the idea of organisms as capital expenditure.
In nature co-design, organisms take on the role that used to be that of “traditional” capex, which decreases in value, while the importance of feedstock and material costs, opex, increases. The choice and the procurement of feedstock becomes strategic, requiring thorough examination as it impacts cost along multiple dimensions, not only as input but also as output. Production location becomes an important variable as it can directly impact feedstock cost, especially if it is waste from other processes, meaning a premium could be paid, rendering feedstock purchasing costs negative.
I.e. someone is going to pay you to take waste off their hands and you are going to valorise it for sale. Two income streams for one product, potentially for the same customer or the same local area.
Displacement economics 2.0 is going to look and feel funny. It’s different because we’re growing our economies based on the natural potential of biomass, so there is a built in linkage between economic potential and natural possibility. Our civilisational limits are only bordered by biomass growth boundaries. It’s different because waste is valuable and we’re under-pricing it right now. There is significant arbitrage value to be made just on biomanufacturing intermediates with carefully selected negative-cost waste streams. As financial markets begin to build out these products, the forwards and futures markets will be filled with weird and wonderful arbitrage trades. Methanol to morphine, cellulose to SAF, even the triangular arbitrage trades of FOREX might make an entrance if the spot markets mature enough.
Waste is a feedstock and this changes economics. Not only can biomanufacturing displace existing product classes, more importantly it can displace their inputs. If we work with energy and food webs, we can act with one eye to their ecosystem interlinkages. As we displace carbon from waste and return it to the economy we’re going to begin disrupting ecosystems that have evolved a parallel reliance on our linear economies. We're preparing to plow the front end of the carbon cycle and we’ll constantly need to monitor how this impacts natural relations. There is no such thing as waste when it comes to biology, just webs and cycles and recursive infinity.
Life knows waste is valuable and biology will build empires and ecosystems wherever the end points of biomass aggregate.
The TL;DR series gives you (not) short (not) summaries of (maybe) carefully selected reports on engineering biology’s potential. It offers diving boards for reflection on the hinge and anchor points of the bioeconomy.
The caveat here is that you need deep expertise in bioinformatics and topology to begin to map out what the design space even looks like, let alone draw a line around one of many light cones of potential that might constitute the design space for a given organism across the number of generations you can feasibly work with given your limited compute, tools and resources.
The printing press first appeared in China in the 8th century, made some notable advancements in Korea in the 13th and 14th centuries and then really took off in the 15th century when a good old fashioned religious war provided some opinionated grist for the typesetting mill.