WTF Happened to Synthetic Biology Stocks?

When we’re asked to describe what Nanalyze is about, we often use the following example. Your dad is sitting on the couch watching a 60-minute special on gene editing. When the show concludes, he believes that gene editing is the most amazing thing he’s ever heard of and he wants to invest in it. He types in “investing in gene editing” into Google and that’s where we come into the picture.

That’s kind of how we felt when we first read about synthetic biology, which essentially describes how to use tools like gene editing to create artificial life forms that do things. It’s really no different from the notion of nanobots, molecular machines that do things like “sweat” ethanol when exposed to the sun. Entrepreneur turned VC, Bryan Johnson, describes how someday we will literally “grow space ships” using synthetic biology. How amazing is that? The prediction is partially based on the fact that nature’s own molecular machines are the most efficient users of energy we know today, by orders of magnitude. He who figures out how to master life itself will be no different than God, and investing in God will produce heavenly returns. Right?

Not necessarily. We’ve gotten off to an extremely rocky start so far. Let’s set the gene editing stocks aside for a moment and focus on the 7 Synthetic Biology Companies to Invest In that we first wrote about just over 2 years ago. How h