🎧 Materials Built by Microbes: A Revolution in Materials Science
The transcript of my conversation with Joshua Hoffman, CEO of Zymergen
This is a transcript of my conversation with Joshua Hoffman, CEO of Zymergen. Listen to the full conversation on your platform of choice or on our podcast page. The transcript is open to members only.
My guest today is taking aim at one of the pillars of our modern way of life. The chemistry of fossil fuels has driven the creation and development of everything from the internal-combustion engine to the pharmaceutical industry. Modern agriculture would be impossible without modern fertilizers. And materials of every sort, from clothes, to toothpaste, to plastic owe their existence to fossil fuels.
Joshua Hoffman, the CEO of Zymergen, has made it his mission to disrupt an industry that is based on the chemistry of the dead and replace it with the chemistry of the living. Zymergen uses machine learning to manage the lives of precisely engineered microbes to create and develop novel materials across a wide range of uses. It's an area of immense complexity and risk, but one where the world d…