The combination of speculative hype in the headline ("May Just Be") and the fact that this is YC-backed made me laugh out loud. Sometimes I forget that Hacker News is sponsored and run by YCombinator. The tone is always so rigorous and skeptical, until something made by YC comes along. Keep it joyful.
Biotech needs a serious kick in the pants. It has always been remarkable to me just how little automation is used in the field of molecular biology. There is a huge amount of work that involves humans doing repetitive tasks and then waiting for something to happen. This increases cycle times, limits the number of hypotheses you can test, and is rate-limiting for the whole field. You already have the problem that you are working on living things which need time to grow, reproduce, eat, etc...<p>Not saying any of it is easy to automate by a long shot. But that kind of innovation is going to be what is needed to propel the field forward.
It's disappointing that more biotech isn't ultimately funded by YC. I'm sure it's just due to the cost of starting and running a pre-revenue biotech is much higher than a company starting a pure software product.<p>That said, YC funding science is fantastic. Even if it is just 1 company, thus far. Biotech should be a nice hedge in the portfolio.
It will be interesting to see what gets funded. Actually getting a drug to market is a far different beast than get a tech product to market.<p>However, there are a ton of non-drug biotech plays that one could pursue. Lower risk and lower capital requirements. I wonder if that is what YC is looking to fund.
I remember meeting and hanging out with Jason Kelly in Cambridge (several times, I think the first one was at a Grey Thumb meetup, an artificial life themed group), the work on refactoring the T7 bacteriophage really sparked my interest in bioengineering and got me involved with DIYbio. Soon after Jason co-founded Ginkgo Bioworks.<p>Both as an amateur biologist and as a YC alumnus I'm really happy to see Ginkgo survive and grow. Just as one of the goals of DIYbio are to be to biotech what the Homebrew Computer Club was to personal computing, Ginko's systematizing and modularizing of biotech can be the Altair 8080 of life sciences.<p>(Edit: well, perhaps targeting truly amateur kit users is early right now, and it's more about modularizing aspects of biotech, I like the spirit I expressed in the previous paragraph :>)
Biotechs on the level that YC would fund don't have much incentive to ask for this money. The government has this one covered with the SBIR grants, which come with very few strings attached. While these are clearly not perfect, they don't leave too much room for low level investment.
For those wondering about "using designer microbes to convert CO2 emissions into fuel", take a look at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel</a>.<p>Basically the algae takes in CO2 and then the algae itself is turned into fuel. Another method is where algae takes in CO2 and "exhales" fuel which removes the need to "kill" the algae. Very cool stuff. On a large enough, and efficient enough, scale this kind of technology could become highly important. These methods are somewhat carbon neutral since the CO2 emitted from using the fuel is recaptured by algae again.
Isn't "designer organism" just another word for GMO(Genetically Modified Organism)? We have seen lots of regulatory troubles regarding GMOs, even for some of the most clearly beneficial ones.