The Climate Biotech Podcast
Are you fascinated by the power and potential of biotechnology? Do you want to learn about cutting-edge innovations that can address climate change?
The Climate Biotech Podcast explores the most pressing problems at the intersection of climate and biology, and most importantly, how to solve them. Hosted by Dan Goodwin, a neuroscientist turned biotech enthusiast, the podcast features interviews with leading experts diving deep into topics like plant synthetic biology, mitochondrial engineering, gene editing, and more.
This podcast is powered by Homeworld Collective, a non-profit whose mission is to ignite the field of climate biotechnology.
The Climate Biotech Podcast
Microbial Consortia for Industrial Decarbonization with Ginger Krieg Dosier
On the most recent episode of the Climate Biotech Podcast, we are joined by Ginger Krieg Dosier, an architect-turned-biotech entrepreneur who created biocement at Biomason and is now building BIOME Consortia to accelerate biology's transition from thousands to billions of applications. Ginger's journey from NASA kid in Alabama to founding one of climate biotech's earliest companies reveals how architectural thinking translates surprisingly well to biological innovation.
Ginger’s approach at Biomasontackled concrete, the second most consumed substance on Earth after water. By using microbes to precipitate calcium carbonate at ambient temperature instead of firing kilns at 1500°C, they cut both emissions and energy usage dramatically.
The pivot to BIOME emerged from a startling statistic: with an estimated one trillion microbial species on Earth and only 0.001% discovered, Ginger saw that the strain bank they'd built for biocement applications represented something far bigger. Today, fewer than 800 strains power all commercial applications - she believes we need billions by 2050.
BIOME’s two flagship initiatives address this gap. Atlas creates a digital microbial commons focused on access and interpretability, gamifying discovery and translation to engage more tinkerers. Arc tackles preservation, particularly of threatened environments like glaciers that lose tens of quadrillions of microbes to sea annually, while moving beyond minus-80 storage limitations.
Listen to learn why consortia-based biology may solve the scaling economics that sank many biomanufacturing companies, how visualization of the invisible microbiome could transform public engagement, and why the "age of complexity" might finally deliver on the 1999 prediction that the 21st century would be biology's era.
Bringing biology to concrete was very new at that time. And so the conversations with the industry were more about okay, here's what they can do. This is very exciting. We compared a lot of the work to beer production.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome to the Climate Biotech Podcast, where we explore the most important problems at the intersection of climate and biology, and most importantly, how we can solve them. I'm Dan Goodwin, a technologist who spent years transitioning from software and neuroscience to a career in climate biotechnology. As your host, I will interview our sector's most creative voices, from scientists and entrepreneurs to policymakers and investors. We're thrilled to welcome Ginger Creek Dozer for a discussion about climate biotech. This is a fun and special conversation for me because when I first started getting into climate biotech in 2020, Ginger's company Biomason was one of the first companies I found. It was one of those entrepreneur moments where it's like, God, why didn't I find that company or why didn't I start that company? Because they were doing really cool things with at-scale biotechnology, in this case, using cement as the high-leverage product in carbon capture. But today she's working on a new project called the Biome Consortia Institute, and we're really excited to learn from that. Before I jump in, let me just give a few words about Ginger. Ginger Creek Dozer is an architect and material scientist best known for pioneering bio cement, a process that uses microbes to precipitate calcium carbonate and bind aggregate at ambient temperature. After conceiving the idea as a faculty member at the American University of Charjah in the UAE, she founded Biomason in 2012 and led it through a decade of RD patenting and factory-scale production, culminating in the world's first biosement plant in Denmark in 2023. The core of this work is replacing the 1500 Celsius kiln of Portland cement with just a biological process, which cuts CO2 and energy usage. Ginger, we're thrilled to have you here today. Many of us know you and are huge fans of what you do. So let's introduce you to the audience. Who are you and where did you grow up?
SPEAKER_00:Thank you very much for the introduction. It's really it's an honor to be here today. So who I am, I would say I'm a very curious Earth citizen. You mentioned architect, so architect by training, entrepreneur by delicious necessity, and advocate for unlocking knowledge of the microbial world and economy.
SPEAKER_01:Where did you grow up?
SPEAKER_00:I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, rocket city in the U.S. My dad was at NASA, so I was a little NASA kid. And at the time we had astronaut parties every summer, but I really didn't care at those days. But today I look back and regret not spending more time with astronauts.
SPEAKER_01:I really love the downstream inspiration that came from kids who grew up around that. It's definitely something for us to think about today. Um, but I've got to ask you the obvious question. Did you always know you'd be one of the first humans pioneering building cement with recaptured carbon?
SPEAKER_00:I knew that I wanted to grow a shell. When I was eight years old, my parents took us to the beach for the first time. It was after visiting Cape Canaveral. I picked up my first shell and I was just awestruck. I really wanted to know how to make it. And that's what got me into architecture. It's what got me into materials. I think for sustainability, it became about common sense. So looking at Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough, that was really an invitation for me as an architect because it was written by an architect to actually start digging into materials and trying to understand like what are we building with? And carbon is one of the biggest building blocks of nature. So that became a strong interest.
SPEAKER_01:Cool. Well, I'd love to walk through your background before we go into the organizations that you've built and started, because the naive view is what is an architect doing in biotechnology? But on the other hand, I think from my perspective, that's a perfect background. So can you just tell us a little bit about your schooling, what you were doing, and how architecture turned to materials, turned into what you do now?
SPEAKER_00:I think if I look back on the education of an architect, what's really amazing to me is the teaching of how to think in different skills. So, you know, whether you're designing a doorknob or a city plan, there's so many considerations to take into account. And when we start to look at materials, architects and designers are the ones that are in charge of making these decisions. And those decisions last the lifetime of a building. Having as much information in front of you is important. Like, how was it made? There's a story that I've heard that Bill McDonough, when he was teaching architecture at UVA, he brought in a pizza to the classroom on the first day, and everyone was enjoying the pizza. And by the end of the class, they were like, hey, where's the syllabus for this course? And he said, the syllabus is that you need to figure out where each and every ingredient came from on this pizza. And it was just fascinating because it starts to change that perspective of questioning where does this come from? You start to uncover exciting things about the global supply chain. So I think that in architecture, it is about thinking and using that knowledge to make the best decisions that you can for putting something out into the world that's meant to last and to take into account all the environmental constructs like temperature, heat, water, like where the local materials come from. Yeah. And I think when I first started working with biology, it was really about how to work with biology as a new material. And then microbes, of course. There's just, they're so exciting. There's so many things to uncover how they behave. The education aspect of how to think, how to ask questions, but then also being bold and just experimenting and playing. So I think that there is a bit of scientific inquisition that comes into the training of architects and designers to really dig.
SPEAKER_01:I like that. You know, what I would probably build on that is it's social thinking, right? Like from my friends that have architecture backgrounds, they say the word critique a lot. So you get comfortable with critique, and that's normally the form of you work all night and then you get three hours of sleep, and then you put something in front of your bespectacled professor who roasts you in front of everybody. But the idea of social thinking and handling critique, I think is actually a really important part of science. I'd love to see more of. And anyway, that's my opinion. I'm curious if that matches what you've seen.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, absolutely. For sure, from the perspective of architecture school, nothing becomes your baby because it might go away the next day with a new thought or a new critique. But then also just remembering that you mentioned the social responsibility. I think something in my education, I worked for the rural studio as part of Auburn University. And it was a fantastic program, still a fantastic program, going strong, where second-year architecture students go to impoverished communities and build these amazing architectures. But it's a from a social perspective, so it's not just, hey, we built this now, enjoy. It's part of this dynamic of working together and starting to really uncover solutions that make sense and bringing others in as part of the journey. Because at the end of the day, we're designing and building for each other. It's not, it's not for art sake and or object sake. Like these are meant to be painted, banged around. Lots of memories that happen inside of these buildings. So yeah, I think that you're right, like that the social aspect. And then now, of course, looking at what does that mean on a higher scale for the impact of how we design and what we design with.
SPEAKER_01:So I'm really enjoying this because now I'm understanding the practical meets principled ideas behind your work. I'm really excited to get to biomason and no biome. But first, I would just be curious to hear this arc. So you've you finished up at Auburn, you got a master's at Cranbrook, I think. All right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I took a position at NC State first teaching and then had an opportunity to go to the Middle East, American University of Charjah's in Charjah, UAE. It was such an exciting time, too, because this was 2007. There was so much construction happening. Dubai at that time had 1% of the world's cranes. So everywhere you looked, the skyline was just peppered with all these cranes and the Burj Khalifa was under construction, which is an exciting feat of concrete engineering for sure. Actually, a lot of the construction there is. Yeah. And then worked there for originally went for three years, ended up staying for seven. And then once the technology that I was developing met really in my second bedroom, that was the moment to actually come back to the US and set up a company.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's so cool. And this was the founding of Biomason in 2012.
SPEAKER_00:That's correct. Yeah, correct.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. So I need to sing your praises here, and then we get to hear about Biomason, which is that I am definitely in the wave of people who got into carbon capture in 2020. And then you look at people like Klaus Lachner that's been working on it since the 90s. And then I see Biomason that's been working on it for eight years when I first get into it. And it was definitely like, for lack of a better phrase, hipster cred for being into this, like way before it was cool and really trendy. And so once again, big shout out to the insight you had. But I it can't come from my mouth. So what is Biomasin? Why did you work on it?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and by the way, thank you for that. It was an exciting journey. I would say starting in 2012, like starting to meet with the industry out the gate to talk about the technology and what we were doing. I learned a lot about the industry very fast in terms of what the business model really needed to be. So concrete and cement are very heavy materials. They also require aggregates and sand to be able to make a concrete product. Having one plant that makes biosement around the world does not make sense. So from the very beginning, it was a licensing model. How do we make this so that it's super easy to use? You don't have to have a PhD to be able to do that. What are the most minimal changes to make in the industry while keeping a lot of the same infrastructure? So that was the starting position. And dear friend Evan Bayer or Eco Vative, we've been long-term friends. And he said, You're going to build a plant. You have to actually build a plant to show that it can be done. And I remember fighting him on this. We have to license as fast as possible. Like we have to be able to put this into others' hands. So, anyway, I guess the long story of that is that in starting something like this, there's a lot of an education component about what this is. Bringing biology to concrete was very new at that time. And so the conversations with the industry were more about okay, here's what they can do. This is very exciting. We compared a lot of the work to beer production. It also helped talk about how coral reefs grow. So things that people can relate to. And then they're part of that journey too, and bringing it in. So I would say the other thing that I was surprised, but it makes sense now, is that it was also seen as like almost an additive. This is something that you think of concrete in general, there's all kinds of things you can add to it to increase the performance, to make it cure faster, to make it more water resistant. So that became a channel for us to be able to have those conversations with industry on that. There's so many stories that I can go through, especially on building out the team, the different teams, the initial team, when you're going in those early TRL levels, all the way to even when there's only two or three of you in the building and you get a phone call from Bill McDonough saying, Hey, I'd like to place an order. And we want to put the phone down and be like, Let me get in touch with our sales department. You are everything when you first start. We said yes. How much and when?
SPEAKER_01:This was the same bill from the pizza story.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. Yeah. So he was working with a San Francisco firm. So the lead from the San Francisco firm contacted us and said, We we would love to have bio cement on the entire facade. And I I remember talking them into two courtyards. And it's the best decision that that we made because at that point we were in this tiny lab in an incubator type of space here in RTP in North Carolina. And by saying yes to that order, you just got to see how things start to roll. Like you need a bigger space, you need a bigger team, you need to get all these pieces in place and then manufacture. So we built a pilot plant to be able to produce that order. We took the order and actually hand-delivered it to San Jose, California from Raleigh, North Carolina, which driving on I-40, I can certainly tell you where all the potholes are.
SPEAKER_01:I'm sorry to interrupt, Ginger, but I want to understand this because there's so much beauty here. So the first thing is you had the strength as a leader to say, I don't want to do too much on our first order, so we're going to do less. Which first I mean, there's so much to unpack there, but I just want to underscore that's a really impressive answer because you could have you could have like, oh, we're just gonna say yes to everything and then set up failure. So that's amazing. And then when you hand deliver, you're telling me that you drove the truck full of the heavy, heavy cement from the east coast to the west coast to hand deliver it.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, we we did. And we put a we put quite a warranty on that first order as well. It meant a lot to the team. We didn't have much time to do this and to rally the team around it. We actually took the long goal. Of course, here's the delivery date. This is the size of this order, but then broke it down into what we need to focus on right now is the first brick on the pallet. That's it. So that that FBOP was the nickname for that. We took time for every celebration of milestone, even that first brick on the pallet. That's a major milestone. We also tracked how much that that progress was over time, and then leading up to the delivery and then leading up to the installation itself. So that was really important to be able to do to chunk it.
SPEAKER_01:That's really cool. And I'm trying to imagine what a bio cement plant looks like. Meaning, I can imagine a biomanufacturing plant, right? I'm imagining big fermentation tanks, but I don't know what to imagine when you're delivering cement. So could you, yeah, could you just give us a little bit of a sense of what is actually being built here?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it was gorgeous. So it actually took cues from the hydroponics industry. So we went and visited one of the largest hydroponics plants here in the US, which turns out to be an hour and a half drive from here. So they produce all the plants for Lowe's on the East Coast. We're talking like perspectival views where you cannot see the end. Like when you're in the greenhouse looking down, you actually can't see the end. It just goes into a point. It's beautiful. Wow. So yeah, it's already working with low-cost equipment. So we didn't need to build out something for this completely aseptic environment, but rather, okay, what does the industry use in hydroponics? How can we retrofit some of that to be able to produce this? So at that point, we were growing things in formwork. So it worked out really well. We essentially built a large greenhouse and built this semi-automated boom, which was great, to basically go over and then dispense the right amount. We took a lot of cues from the brewing industry. We did have a very large fermenter that was amazing that we bought on eBay and then did quite a bit of retrofitting on that. And these were live vegetative cells. You're on bacteria time at that point. So talk 24 hours a day. We ran that plant 24 hours a day. Yeah. So that's essentially it looked like a greenhouse with a lot of liquid handling and moving around. And then from that, we learned because we did it, we learned we're like, we've got to get out of form work. This is ridiculous. One, it's expensive. Two, it does not match the majority of the industry, which the majority of the precast industry uses vibratory compaction. So they have equipment that essentially presses out units, almost like wet sand castles, and then they're rigid enough that you can still move them in material handling, but they need to harden or cure, if you will, with the biosement process in that. So the next plant that we built, we we essentially burned the ship. When we moved to a new facility, I refused to bring that hydroponic plant with us because we had to leave it and work really hard to get out of the form work. So then that became the next laser focus to unlock the technology in that. And then we ended up buying equipment. Wow, you know, that the same the same equipment that the industry uses. We built this incredible facility and RTP for that with our series B funding.
SPEAKER_01:I I'm having a moment of just being really impressed with the leadership to burn the boats. So it's two stories. One, you had the intelligence to take a smaller order than you could have, and then looking at something saying I've got it's good but not great. We need to get out of form work. And I'm picking up this language as we go because I have not worked in this the concrete industry. So I think I know what we're talking about with form work. So what would what is what was after form work?
SPEAKER_00:I'm sorry, maybe a question for clarification. Like the next ones, like after after we get out of form work, then what's the next?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, this is the question of someone who's not worked in heavy industry. So I'm understanding that form work and concrete is you pour it in a mold and you make a very specific shape. I'm guessing something like a an airport runway is not form work, and that's where the larger volume is.
SPEAKER_00:There you go. Exactly. So yeah, ready mix. Yeah, ready mix is the holy grail because you can make anything with ready mix. You still have site form work, place things to hold. Imagine someone who has a concrete driveway. You have that, the wooden frames that that go around it. But yeah, you're essentially casting outside. I think the big, the big difference was when you're doing pre-cast or like the in whether it's in-form work or out-of-form work, you're doing that inside. So it's a baby step. That's okay. We can control the temperature and the humidity and the air. Everything was based on human comfort. We push those little bacteria to be able to do what they needed to do within the constraints that we wanted to put on them because it had to be viable. This needs to go to someone else's plant. They don't need to change everything to be able to accommodate. But I think the big question is how do you go from inside to outside? So we did that in a few steps. We were fortunate to be contacted by several government groups. So one was DARPA. They were very interested in, okay, we think what you're doing is interesting and great, but how can you make it live forever so that you're not rendering it inert in the end? So we were part of this program called Engineered Living Materials, which was so fun. And that whole experience that actually shaped me. And I can use that as the bridge even to the work that we're doing today. But before that, there were some other exciting opportunities that came up to start teasing out how do you do this outside. So we noticed when we were using aggregate, it's not a waste product, it technically is. It's essentially when you have an aggregate mine, you're blasting rock into various sizes. So you can imagine that's not a precise science. So you're gonna have some particles that are too small to be used for asphalt or concrete. We loved it because for us it was like an engineered sand. I worked a lot with a sand from the UAE, which is very tiny and alluvial, meaning that's windblown and round. I felt like it was learning how to play basketball with a tennis ball. So I'm glad that I personally experienced that because it was just wonderful to work with the larger aggregate pieces. But essentially, when we were at the mining facilities, we noticed this water truck and it just kept going around eight times a day. We're like, what are they doing? Turns out there's a lot of dust and mining, so you have to control it. And how the industry generally controls it is you take a water truck and you drive it around eight times a day and you keep the dust down. We were like, huh, I wonder if we could make like a very light cement coating. On the ground to prevent dust from spreading up. So that became like our first forte into let's just push it. So there were some fun directed evolution studies. We just part of biomason's ethos was we're doers that deliver. So just go do it. You have this idea, go do it. Don't stop, don't stop to think and overthink it. Just go experiment and see what happens. So we did that. And then that also led to some additional work with other government groups on like helicopter landing pads, which we learned that dust is quite terrible for some of these very expensive pieces of machinery. So being able to somewhat harden the ground before it lands is important, or different runways for the Air Force. That was a fun project, too. Those were some of the steps that we were taking to get outside, if you will, from the interior manufacturing.
SPEAKER_01:Here at Homeworld, we're proudly pedantic about problems and framing good problems, but also celebrating that when you find a really good problem, that's the start of great work. Right. And so I'm really excited by this idea of you had first you had to be on the mind to see this ridiculous example of driving around all day with a water truck and then seeing that as an opportunity that grew into a lot of things. So I'm really excited about this, and then really excited about the microbiology needed to be able to accomplish these. And I'm pretty sure kind of hovering on the microbiology will take us to your next step. It's one of those things where it sounds easy, right? Not just find a bug, make it grow, make it obviously it was hard. So what were some of the challenges there? And then if you could then take us to why that was inspiring for probably what you want to do next.
SPEAKER_00:I think some of those we we learned in in retrospect, like we were working with a very robust microbe that you could be we we grew some things in buckets, and that was part of our ethos too. Like the the a concrete plant, they're so dusty and dirty, like it has to grow in a concrete plant. So we just did a lot of that pre-work by growing things in buckets. When it came to the engineered living marine, well, we called it engineered living marine cement. So what we were working on there was unlocking a mechanism. So being able to have this consortia, if you will, that could almost be like an engine that could continue to go. So one waste becomes the other's food source, and anyway, so you're taking that cycle. So we needed to go recruit organisms that would participate with the organisms that we were using at that time. And so that was so much fun. And that opened my eyes. I really enjoyed the work around going out to find different diversity, different pieces of parts to move together to become part of the consortia. So we ended up building a strain bank, very large strain bank. It was very exciting because it didn't take long to actually build this out. Then you start to dig in and uncover like these different mechanisms. You just have more questions than you have answers. And the thing that struck me was that wow, like I just did not realize at that time. That's when this 2016 paper came out that there's an estimated one trillion strains of or species of microbes on the planet. We've only discovered 0.001%. That changed my life. That statistic changed my life. And I realized as we're building this strain bank, this is something that, of course, is very valuable for biomason and biosement. But what about sharing and having multiple strain banks? Like they're just there are not that many that are out there that are focused on specific types of applications. You might have strain banks that just have a bunch of different microbes in them, but but looking at almost like curating them, being able to get them ready for applications. So that that's that's the transition here. So again, biome, biome actually stands for biologically induced organization of matter and energy. So we're kind of word. Everything is everything we consume is either grown or mined. And then we just looking at this beautiful world of biology. There's no waste, everything is just cycles of energy and material that just move around. So being able to harness that in and really start to try to pick it apart and understand it. That that became almost like that early moment for us of wow, there's so many different applications for biosement. And actually, there's so many new applications that could be considered. And especially when we start thinking about the 19th and 20th centuries, humanity was in this mindset of silver bullets. We need we need one material that can solve all of these challenges. And I think we're, at least where my brain is today, is recognizing that ubiquity actually has some downstream consequences. We're paying for that. You can make cement all over the world. Portland cement is the second most consumed substance on the planet following water. But it's all the same everywhere. So I think with biology, what's so interesting is that you could have biosement applications that are different depending on where you are. Like if you're building in the UAE versus you're building in Japan, completely different environments to be outside, if you will, on that. That just becomes part of the rationale of we need to build this large pipeline to be able to go from discovery to application and in a much faster way than we've historically been able to do.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, as a joke, I would love to see somebody quantify how much resources is needed to get all trillion species. If you really want to have a strain bank that big, this is what it's going to cost. You know, uh what I really like about this combination is um I always think about breadth versus depth is really important, right? And where I think biology and biotechnology is suffered is that every depth is siloed. But it's going deep in one thing. Going deep in biomanufacturing of ethanol might not really inform going deep on bio cement. But oftentimes for people to work on the like the molecular scale side, you need to have some line of sight to depth. Also, I really love the story of hydroponics as a really good scaffold for going after the problem in the first place. As a quick little tangent, shout out to Sonia Salmon, who works at NC State, because when she was saying she was using the textile industry to do biotech, I thought that's really clever. You need to find those scaffolds. So I love your background of doing cement, which is the gnarliest, lowest margin, operated at extra level, or don't even try spiel. But then now you're going really wide with biotech and new strains. And there's there's people like Cultivarium, right? Trying to build the new genetic tools, and there's great teams like Two Frontiers Project, going to crazy corners of the world and then doing really good metagenomics. So this is really important. And I love the last thing I'll just rant on is I did my PhD in neuroscience and very proud. And my joke is I'm a recovering mammalian supremacist. And what helps me recover from that is finding these whoa, bio can do that kind of moments. So I'm so curious. Am I characterizing this right? That for Biomason you were going super deep, and then now with biome, you could be going more horizontal and developing the breadth for bio. I'm curious, kind of what is motivating those going go going wide.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, starting with there's a quote that I remember reading years ago, even before starting Biomason, that the 21st century would be the age of biology. This was said by Steve Jobs by Craig Venture 1999. Yeah, yeah. So I remember thinking like, what does that mean? And I started rethinking like, what does that mean? So in looking at, okay, today there are less than 800 strains used in commercial applications. We have only thousands of microbial solutions versus I think the billions that we need to be able to unlock this. And then just digging into what does an age or era mean in it, comparing it to the Stone Age, for example, or the Bronze Age, it's really when we start to design with that in mind. And we actually build out social infrastructure around that. So I am just so excited about what does this bioinfrastructure look like? What is this pipeline? Like, where are we stuck? Like what's holding it back? Biomining, like a perfect example of where biology is actually needed today because we we've already mined all the good stuff. So now, you know, what does this economy look like of going into waste streams that we can use or ores that are hard to get to, something that biology is really good at, and it can be distributed and it can be localized and it is disruptive. So there's a lot of different, I think on the application side is where we get excited because we need to translate fast. And the fastest way that we can do that is having others translate. So, how do we how do we go from the thousands to billions? Where are we stuck? Discovery, I think with the campaigns, like there's so many amazing campaigns. We're uncovering things. We're working with several organizations on this, different strain banks as well, being able to connect the knowledge that we already have. So looking at like the digital infrastructure, being able to have more of a microbial commons. And then on the other side, so you go from discovery to translation to application, but then there's preservation, which I'm personally very interested in because I think just historically we look at how technology changes over time and things that we can see now that we didn't know before. And maybe we wish that we would have kept some of these original artifacts or pieces that we could learn from now. So the what we're calling the ARC essentially is that preservation for this microbial intelligence that maybe we've yet to uncover. There's certainly a lot of new tools today to help debottleneck. So we've got to get faster on characterization. Like that's clearly a huge bottleneck. But even before that, I think it it's also the imagination. So being able to have more bioliteracy, what's possible, get more people involved, get more disciplines involved. Like, how can we get 8 billion kids around the world? Or there's 8 billion of us, but 8 billion minds thinking about microbial solutions, I think is really exciting. And if that were to happen, would we be ready? What are the different pieces in the operational pipeline that need to come together? So we're, yeah, we're very lateral right now, just seeing, like observing, like where the bottlenecks are, where can we put more energy and attention to uncover faster? And I think that the two major initiatives that we're working on right now, one being Atlas, which is the digital microbial commons, and then ARC, which is more the preservation, meet in the middle in terms of here's something of value. We collectively think this has value, so we are going to preserve it. But then how do you open that up so that it's not just the scientists that really have that insider knowledge, but rather it's something that we're all thinking about. And I'm personally very excited about even I was so cement focused, cement myopic for so many years. I thought about the microbiome. I of course would read things about it, but when I was able to think more broadly and realizing just how much has been uncovered with a human microbiome, and it touches all of us, and there's a lot, there are more and more probiotics are on the market. So that becomes an enabler to how we think about microbes in general. And then I can go into demonstration work, like we're makers, we love developing technology. There's there's certainly a lot of frontiers. I think that the microbiome of a built environment is a very big frontier for us to consider. You mentioned from a neuroscience perspective, like there, I mean, there's a lot of documentation about how microbes affect our mental wellness, our immune system. I could go deeper into psychobiotics, but I think I'll like weak that out. But, you know, what about when you go into a forest and it makes you feel better? What is that? There's a lot of things going on, but certainly there's a lot of microbes that are in the forest too.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I really love that. This is one thing that I'm spending a lot of my personal time with is trying to rotate things to be on the same axis, right? And if you can put human health and physical, like physical problems on the same pro axis, then it's really you're in a really special thing where you can say, look, like we are working on a VAT that does X or a technology that's X, and we're both making humans healthier and we're making buildings last longer. Then I think you're really in a special position. You'll have to excuse me for a quick facetious moment where laugh. I'm just when you said that we've had the Bronze Age and all those other ages. In my mind, I just started laughing. I said, What is the age of bio? Like it's got to be something better than the sludge age, right? The scum age, the biofilm age. And whatever bio is, it has to be sexier than the AI age because that's the default name for where we're at. So, Ginger, we're really gonna need you to use all your background here to come up with. We have to beat AI age and we have to do something better than the sludge age. Do you have any ideas?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, wow. Oh, that's such a beautiful question. I think what's exciting about biology is that like we don't have x-ray vision or microscopy vision. So we really can't see and know how everything comes together, but we see the product. So when you think about growing everything or growing anything, you're seeing the final product. So what I think is exciting is that we can also start to unlock new material performance. I love what you're describing, like in terms of the vectors having a and this or the so what. Okay, so what? What else does it do? How does it affect me today? And so being able to combine advances, so being able to, I don't know, like even disrupt like the color industry and not just with microbial dyes, like that has to be done. That really should be done. That's something that I know a lot of people are working on. But there's other things too that we can do with crystals in color. So when you think about the coatings that are required for airplanes, they're very heavy. And when you add weight to your payload, a lot of things change, like your size of steel. So being able to think about using biotech to have crystals that can be used instead of some of the pigments for paint is exciting. And I think the examples like that, like I would love to see a world in which we're starting to just fold in more and more biology until it becomes this huge ball, you know, that's starting to turn. Biomining, I think, is a good start to that because it's a story that more people should know and be excited about. Maybe you could have a ring, like yeah, it was biomine. So that becomes the story that can permeate. But yeah, just how, you know, I mentioned microbiome, that's an easy one. But the probiotics for the built environment, I know there are people working on that. That's again something that gives the individual agency to being able to describe that. I think biology also has the potential to be very personal and complex. And taking cues from the AI era that we're in, we have we we are fully embracing complexity for the first time. And I think our questions are just getting better. And we're advancing by being able to push that. Uh we can't even imagine what we can't imagine right now, what biology can do. But I certainly think that it'll come and it'll sneak in like a thief in the night and replace things. But I also think that it will reveal new performance properties that we haven't even dreamed of.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so we're gonna call it the complex age. And that's gonna be better than that'll hopefully capture both of them. So I wanna I wanna briefly, the last few minutes we have before we go to the rapid questions, just touch on what we can talk about with the Atlas project and the ARC project. And the way I just I want to just shake your tree of knowledge and see kind of what you can share, what you want to talk about there. What I'll just use it to set it up is that uh you are a I know that's such a loaded phrase, but you're a biotech maximalist in an age where there's a little bit of pessimism going on. And by a little bit, we've had massive layoffs of the past two years, right? And a lot of biomanufacturing plays failed, and failed not at the series A, series B, but like at the series C where they had no more excuses why the economics didn't work. And you're coming in with this big fresh air, and actually the counterthesis for I think the big cynicism that emerged from that biomanufacturing is this is me just butchering an argument, but basically, like people are caring about the top fancy stuff, like the top of the funnel, coming up with new microbiology discoveries, but those doesn't really matter because people aren't thinking about what it looks like at scale. And I think you're a credible voice about talking things at scale up because you can say, I've done this in the lowest margin product there is, right? And you're choosing optimism, which I love. And I'd just love to hear unpack this and so obviously there's optimism behind what you're doing, it's landing in the world in two forms Atlas and ARC under Biome. Really curious, kind of, how you're thinking about scale and what the projects are with both of them.
SPEAKER_00:Maybe something to add to the age of complexity. Thank you for that. That's a great. I'll start using that that now as we describe collectively together. I think the consortia is something big to unpack. I I I learned this. I think we've learned this in agriculture, certainly, with monocultures. I know Cultivarium is been talking a lot about this. This is coming up more and more that we can actually start to design consortias, which is a beautiful concept and thought. And especially when it comes to looking at even like far out applications, which, you know, if we were to build a moon base with biology, because clearly we're not going to be able to ship some cement up there, we have to be able to find ways of using what we have. And it always goes to the feedstocks and energy cost. Autotrophs, being able to marry these different or take, think of the consortius and the roles of each microbe that that go into that. That's that to me is a really exciting place to be because from the very beginning, you're looking at your TEA analysis and you're being able to really think through all the way through the scaling process by solving it with biology. And that was something that we definitely did at Biomasin too, was if any problems would come up, it was usually easier to solve the biology than it was to solve some of the other things that are not in our control, but we can control the biology. So, yeah, so that's a quick aside, at least in terms of the complexity and consortia. And I think within that, rolling into Atlas, there's been several efforts that have been going around. What we're doing is we're combining those efforts. We're just essentially helping pull together all these different elements so that we can open this up. Access is very important. I've heard that, especially with what's going on with a biotech winter right now, that we're also increasing tinkers, which I'm personally excited about because I think we need more people tinkering and playing around and seeing what's possible. So, what are the tools that they need to be able to do that? And I, from personal experience, looking back as an architect, this was not a familiar world. I had to figure out my way through it. And a lot of times I would need to just go source things myself or find people to talk to and share. So, more of that collaborative, collective type of mindset that comes together. As we're building out Atlas, the tenants, one of the biggest tenants is access. So being able to have that access. And also not just access, but interpretability and being able to how do you start generating momentum within that? People need incentives. We love reward systems and point systems. So being able to gamify this, if you will. And that's what's exciting is that it is about discovery, but it's also about translation collectively, like starting to dig in. Like I think we have some good examples with Alpha Fold to be able to have collective insights and what. Possible. So that would be a dream to be able to have that type of impact from Atlas. And then on ARC, it's a similar model. There's certainly a lot of places around the world that we haven't collected that are those environments are under threat. There's some exciting work starting up around glaciers, which I'm personally excited about, mostly because glaciers are super awesome that you have the aerobiome like putting down all these amazing microbial spores over millennia, like in your course going down. And we're losing them. In one minute, we lose tens of quadrillions of microbes to see. So I think that there's some good urgency there, but also some agency and action that we can come to. Part of ARC is around building up the storage or preservation. Getting away from minus 80 is a personal goal of mine. But then also, how do you share that? How do you have this? It's almost like a library versus an archive or an ARC. So being able to have those repositories available so that you can dig and continue to learn more, curate them, here's some possible applications. But it's really, I guess, going back to some of those conversations of organizing things and where they can go. Because if we went out and had this magic wand of zapping everything and figuring out, oh, okay, this is exactly what this is doing. And this, where does the imagination come from? How do we actually take that and materialize it or translate it into an application? To me, that's the big challenge. So that's what we're hoping to achieve by providing more tools and then providing more demonstrations of what's possible and combining efforts in that way.
SPEAKER_01:And the people listening to this aren't going to be able to see me smiling, but um this is a perfect way to end as we go into the rapid fire questions, which is we've been talking about breadth versus depth. Uh, I've been really interested in glacier biology too. And you find these really weird things, like you don't think about ice nucleating proteins, or there's also cloud microbes, which is really interesting. But I'm always thinking about the surface, the top of the glaciers, and very fitting, you're going deep and taking the core, and there's a master class, a master class of pitching there, right? Which is that we need to go now. You can't push us to your philanthropy next year. Like this core is gonna be there, and if you don't move, we need to go draw. Um, so I love it, and really I'm a huge fan of all the work. I'm gonna throttle this into the four rapid fire questions at the end, and I hope there's many further conversations that we get to have. But the four questions, we're just gonna fly through them, and I'm gonna do my best to shut up after the answer, which I'm sure is gonna be very good, and go to the next one. So the first question, Ginger, what's a single book, paper, art piece, or idea that blew your mind and shaped your development as a scientist?
SPEAKER_00:So Biomimicry from Janine Baneus, pushing to reveal nature's intelligence. Um, when I read it, it was more about here are scientists that are describing what they're doing and then applications that can come from that. And then today, actually, there's another book I would say post-biomeson. It would be Sapiens. I that book blew my mind. The last line in the book blew my mind. We are we're hurting animals, and the future is what we imagine it to be. So that gives us so much agency today on imagining the future that we want.
SPEAKER_01:I love it. Second question What's the best advice line that a mentor gave you?
SPEAKER_00:So when I first wanted to grow cement, I was talking to a mentor. Cement's a very amorphic material. You can make anything out of it at any scale. And so his advice was to start something simple and common as a brick. So it's something that's the lowest common denominator of architecture. You prove it out in a unit-based system, then you can go into multiple applications.
SPEAKER_01:And all people with math backgrounds and physics backgrounds who have done iterative proofs in their life would smile and nod when they hear that. Very cool. If you had a magic wand to get more attention or resources into one part of biology, what would it be?
SPEAKER_00:I would say the magic wand would be to see the invisible microbiome all around us. Maybe it's something that can be added to our phones. Maybe it's new types of glasses, but we're essentially talking about how do you visualize an invisible world that has so much influence on us on this planet, the weather, our health, our bodies, animals, plants, architecture, everything. So being able to actually see.
SPEAKER_01:And to also get beyond just the omics, like just like to get beyond proteins and DNA, because biology is doing even more than just those two. And the last question what is one aspect of personal development that you think biotechnologists need to spend more time on?
SPEAKER_00:I would say I love the theme in our conversation today around social. So I would say social psychology. We're doing all of economy is for all of us, humans, of course, taking into account the planet, but by by starting to ask more questions like so what? So maybe this is about dissolving the ego a bit, but also thinking about what does this mean impactfully? Like what does it mean today? Because most of us are just wondering what we're going to eat for dinner. That's actually part of our animalistic behavior. So, how do we address the so what type types of questions? So being able to take in that internal criticism, external criticism, and actually make biology and make things that matter today.
SPEAKER_01:I love this answer. And Ginger, it's been an absolute pleasure to get to geek out with you and learn from you. As we close this out, please, please have the last word and just say where can people find what you're up to? Is there is there a biome resource that people can learn from? And would you have any call to action?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Oh, wow. And by the way, thank you for this. It was really fun geeking out with you and one of many future geek out sessions, I hope. Biome is relatively new. We're a consortia, it's certainly about aggregating all of our minds and intelligence together. So please reach out, or visit our website. We'll be doing some updates here in a bit. We're relatively new, so we're still figuring out what a few things mean in terms of partnerships. But essentially for us, it is how do you go from thousands to billions by 2050? Not one country person or individual can figure this out alone. So we it's really about a movement around the power of biology and what biology can do, but also how do we unlock it even faster? So we'll be putting out some more information there. If you have an idea of what maybe a paper to write, let's talk. We need to just put the word out as much as we can, but starting to combine more of our efforts that we're doing today so that we can have access for ourselves, for humanity today and in the future.
SPEAKER_01:Ginger dozer, thank you so much for coming by.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Climate Biotech Podcast. We hope this has been educational, inspirational, and fun for you as you navigate your own journey and bring the best of biotech into planetary scale solutions. We'll be back with another one soon. And in the meantime, stay in touch with Homeworld Collective on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Blue Sky. Links are all on the show notes. Huge thanks to our producer Dave Clark and Operations Lead Paul Himmelstein for making these episodes happen. Catch you on the next one.