Episode 93. Jason Kelly is the co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. He has a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

References:

https://www.ginkgo.bio/autonomous-lab

OUTLINE:
00:00 – From Jurassic Park Pilled to MIT
03:00 – Founding Ginkgo During the 2008 Crash
07:00 – Tom Knight & Thinking About Biology Like Software
11:00 – Why Biology Lacked Abstraction (Until Now)
16:00 – The Foundry Model: Centralizing Biology
20:00 – The 5 Levels of Lab Automation
23:00 – Automation vs. Autonomy (Subway vs. Waymo)
27:00 – The Technical Bottleneck: Connecting 150+ Machines
34:30 – The Zymergen Acquisition & Strategic Pivot
38:00 – Level 4 & 5 Labs: The Future of Programmable Biology

Episode 92. Ashlee Vance is a renowned tech and science reporter, filmmaker, and founder of Core Memory, a podcast and blog that chronicles the lives and discoveries of scientists and engineers (https://www.corememory.com/). He wrote the definitive biography on Elon Musk and has been documenting the modern space race and recent developments in AI, among other things.

Episode 91. Michael Koeris is the Director of the Biotechnologies Office at DARPA. Michael completed his PhD at Boston University and did postdoctoral research in synthetic biology at MIT. He spent time early in his career at Flagship Pioneering, is a former founder and executive of multiple biotechs, and was formerly a professor at the Keck Graduate Institute.