High-Stakes Adventures
Before Jay Keasling’s synthetic biology lab at Berkeley started work on a high-quality, low-cost antimalarial medicine, the treatment commonly recommended depended on the wormwood plant, grown on large plantations. Unpredictable weather and market forces resulted in large price swings, making supplies at affordable prices unreliable. With genetically engineered yeast, Keasling and his colleagues found a way to dispense with the plant and produce the drug’s active ingredient, artemisinic acid, from sugar instead. When Prism profiled Keasling in 2007, he was still figuring out how to produce the drug on a large scale. Fast forward a decade: He says 51 million treatments have been delivered to Africa, and a company in Bulgaria has the capacity to produce up to 150 million treatments a year, enough to meet half the world’s need. The breakthrough showed the power of biotechnology to leapfrog cost and environmental hurdles and produce a range of products, including some we didn’t know we needed. But the field has yet to fulfill its promise, as our cover story reports. A big reason is the expense and time it takes to move a product to the marketplace. Our story and a sidebar by Mary Lord describe one company with a deep-pocketed CEO, Intrexon, that’s venturing into consumer products and another, Ginkgo Bioworks, taking a more gradual, business-to-business approach.
In the TV series Fantasy Island, the lead character played by Ricardo Montalbán promised visitors to his Pacific paradise that they could live out their fantasies—for a price. This year in Tahiti, an organization called Blue Frontiers is working to realize its leaders’ utopian dream of a self-governing, sustainable floating island. Who knows if they’ll succeed? The financial challenges are daunting, and engineering work has barely begun. But with rising sea levels threatening coastal areas around the world, their idea has a practical appeal. Ellen Uzelac’s on-the-scene account of the project is a fun read.
If you turn this magazine over, you’ll find Jennifer Pocock’s colorful and appetizing introduction to Salt Lake City, host of ASEE’s 125th Annual Conference. See also ASEE President Bevlee Watford’s latest letter to members and the Society’s Annual Report for fiscal year 2016-17, both in the ASEE Today section.
We hope you’ll find food for thought in the February Prism. Your comments are welcome.
Mark Matthews
m.matthews@asee.org