Meet Barry Canton. Barry works in a dull-looking warehouse on the Boston shipyards. It’s beside a large dry dock where they raise cruise liners from the water to scrape off barnacles and repaint their undersides.
On the opposite side of the dry dock is a tatty warehouse built by the US military. Its lifts are strong enough to take Humm-Vees to the fifth floor, but all it houses nowadays are artists and artisans, who unwittingly look across the dock at part of America’s energy revolution. Unassuming Barry from Sutton is part of a group of dockland geeks who could revolutionise fuel production for the coming century.
Barry, his wife, their lecturer and a few fellow college classmates left MIT two years ago to start their own business, Ginkgo Bioworks, named after a rare plant classed as a living fossil. At the time there were plenty of research businesses going belly-up, and broke scientists were offloading lots of usable but unsaleable equipment. So Barry and his team did some scientific skip-diving, grabbing equipment for free or for cheap and fixing what need to be fixed to equip their lab. They fitted out their premises largely with orphaned machines, carted out the back door of college labs, and quietly went to work.
Two years later, things are a little different. US Vice-President Joe Biden has just cut a $6million cheque made out to Barry, his team and their collaborators to develop a new fuel from genetically-modified bacteria. That’s some good recycling.
Their work is, publicly, much-maligned stuff. The Ginkgo team deal in Franken-science, DNA-tinkering, injecting genetic material into a nasty little bacteria that most people treat with heavy doses of bleach spray. The modified E-Coli organisms that Ginkgo produce do not do what regular bacteria do. They emit fragrances, flavourings, and now a fuel that you can pour straight into the petrol tank of your car. Barry’s team are making a bacteria that ‘eats’ Carbon Dioxide and ‘poops’ a clean, lead-free, sulphur-free petrol. And they have plans for much more. Their collaborators are working on bacteria that make foodstuffs. Bacteria that produce malaria drugs. Bacteria that kill cancer cells.
Of course, you’ve never heard anything about this Dublin-born scientist because, despite pitching the story widely to Irish newspapers, no-one wanted, or had the budget this feature. But it’s a story worth telling. So here it is, as it could have been, below the fold.
