The Protection Election, in a Year of Choices: Trump v Biden, Law-and-Order v Defund-the-Police, Border Walls v Bridges, and Even Crop Protection Care of FMC, Zymergen

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... In the world of biotechnology, it’s the same, which is to say that everyone wants protection, but no one agrees on ‘protection against what?’

Some people want to be protected against famine, disease, resource depletion — via the blessings of genetic engineering. Others want to be protected against genetic engineering gone wild. Some are craving frankenburgers, some are running away from plant-based foods as fast as their feet can carry them.

For years, there has been a pitched battle between supporters and critics of genetically modified crops. GMO started off as a descriptor of a type of innovation, and now it is a negative brand attribute. Long before young people are exposed to the science of biology and rational debate, they will see “GMO-free” on food labels.

Real Clear Politics tells us that at no time in the past 11 years has a majority of the American public believed that the United States in on the right track.

American’s confidence is low, according to the Conference Board, so why isn’t the country stampeding towards a choice for change? It could be that Americans disbelieve that politicians can deliver the changes that are needed. It could be that the country is undecided about what it would like to be protected against.

Lately, we have been re-considering our choices, and the balances by which we live our lives. We wish to do more with less, we hear about re-cycle, re-use, reduce. We often find ourselves turning to nature these days. Organisms create defenses, new forms of metabolism, new forms of converting a gas or sugar into a material or energy or into a shield against predators.

It’s interesting. A hundred years ago, nature was seen as something to be tamed, feared, survived, dominated, done without. People didn’t love the force of nature as they experienced it then, flood, drought, famine, disease. They saw Nature as chaotic and nothing to be loved, though they may have retained nostalgia for simpler times.

Yet, just as rising interest in “natural ingredients’ is paired with rising interest in ‘synthetic’: rising interest in things simpler and natural is paired with the rising fascination in ‘machine learning’.

The search for protection using natural ingredients, made simpler through machine learning.

Of Zymergen and FMC

Let me tell you a story along those lines, about a company called Zymergen and one called FMC, neither of which you may have heard of. In chemical circles, FMC is well known enough, and its profile jumped in the past few years when the EU ruled that Dow and DuPont could not merge unless they sold off some crop protection assets where there was concern over monopolization. In recent days, FMC and Zymergen announced a new collaboration focused on creating breakthrough crop protection solutions.

Zymergen is much newer, and make take a little explaining, even if you have heard about them through the staggering amounts of capital they have been raising as they target new sectors to serve, such as this $300 million capital raise aimed at supporting more efforts in chemicals and materials, word of which surfaced this month. We are bio-manufacturers, they say helpfully at Zymergen.com.

The flood of new capital tells you that Zymergen is expected to be a disruptor, and its base in the San Francisco Bay Area might lead you to suspect it is working in either life sciences or digital technology. Either way you guess, you’d be right, because Zymergen works at the junction where digital and life sciences converge. Or, better, perhaps, bio + engineering.

One of the most important things we do is to teach crops to grow well in closer and closer proximity to each other. Yes, we teach them to better tolerate the world around them, and we provide them shields against external threat. It’s one thing to domesticate a plant, and another thing to civilize it. It takes a special form of tolerance to put up with ‘urban’ conditions that farmers impose of ‘rural’ wild-type plants. One plant steals the others sunlight, water, nutrients. One spreads disease to the other, or shares parasites, or pests have a twofer. Just getting corn to grow straighter so that you get more plants per square yard — that’s a big deal.

And while there are many ways to protect, we have to pick our protection strategy carefully. We can’t kill the plant along with the pest, we can’t scare the nation while improving yield, we can’t poison the soil in the name of health, and we can’t clear the field of one pest only to make room for another.

Companies like FMC are good at threading the needle, more or less — lately, they’ve been eyeing the pool of natural diversity and wondering “what can we find in nature that will help us?”

After all, lots of organisms know how to fend off ants. Have a look at any garden filled with rosemary, lavender, thyme, mint or catnip. No ants. Point of it is, nature has perfectly good defenses for noxious things.

Gimme Some Action

In the world of crop protection, people describe the things that defend plants as “actions’” and “activities”. The finding of modes of action is the holy grail of crop protection and everyone is after them. These days, the more natural, the better.

That’s what FMC was on the hunt for, as the search for new modes of action became a search for a partner like Zymergen.

“How you can solve the problem? You can tell people that you do things differently, but you have to pivot, broaden.” FMC’s chief scientific officer is Kathy Shelton, she came to FMC with the DuPont acquisition and works out of the amazing lab that DuPont built not long ago, the Stine Research Center, in Newark, Delaware, just west of Wilmington. They might as well have called it the Ezra Pound Research Center, because Pound was the one who said, when asked how to make something special, said “make it new”.

FMC bought the lab in the acquisition, and acquired the team, and has continued to expand it. Shelton summed it up succinctly, “We want to create new actions, specific to the pests, efficacious and safe.” READ MORE