Hacking life.

AuthorWeissmueller, Zach
PositionSoundbite - Interview with Austen Heinz of Cambrian Genomics - Interview

Austen Heinz is founder and CEO of Cambrian Genomics, a company that does genomic sequencing and can "laser print" custom ONA. The implications of such technology could be profound, theoretically allowing people to design new, more efficient forms of animal life--if opponents of genetic modification don't get in the way. In February, Reason TV's Zach Weissmueller spoke with Heinz about his startup. To see more of the interview, go to reason.com.

Austen Heinz

Q: What exactly is the product?

A: With [the 3D printing company] MakerBot, you'd print out, say. a plastic dinosaur. With Cambrian, the idea is eventually you'd be able to print out your own little dinosaur that actually walks across the table.

Q: Where are you in that development process now? What do you produce here in this laboratory?

A: Right now we produce DNA for the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Q: Your company has dramatically brought the price point [of creating DNA] down.

A: It's directly related to a phenomenon I think everyone has heard of, which is DNA sequencing. Fifteen years ago, no one got their DNA sequenced because it cost $6 billion. Now that can be done by a machine that can read millions or billions of ONA strands at a time. We simply leveraged sequencing technology to reduce the price of making or writing DNA.

Q: How do you see 3D printing shifting the way science is done in America?

A: Virtualization is going to take off. You'll be able to go from idea to finished product without ever touching anything physical. That's not how things work now. You go to an academic lab, it's miserable. They're spending 90 percent of their time cutting and pasting DNA from different creatures they collect from across the country. We want that to be 95 percent design analysis and 5 percent manual work--if there's any manual work.

Q: How do you feel about the regulatory environment for genetically modified organisms [GMOs] and the biotech space?

A: In the United States, we're pretty open on...

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