Why Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Betting Big On The $1T US Bioeconomy

After being at the helm for over a decade of internet juggernaut Google
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, former CEO Eric Schmidt has switched gears and one of his latest activities is being an advocate for the fast-growing US bioeconomy, which is valued at over $1T. During his keynote at the 2022 SynBioBeta conference in Oakland, CA last year, he passed along advice for the next generation of biotechnologists, detailing what is needed from different stakeholders to fulfill the potential of the global bioeconomy to solve the world’s biggest problems. I caught up with Schmidt again recently, a year since his talk, to see what progress has been made. You can see the full Q&A here.

“I think it’s time. It’s time to take the work of the last 10 or 20 years and make it scale to a global phenomenon that is 4-30 trillion dollars. You all will do that. That’s why I’m here.” Schmidt explained to a packed house.

Over 60% of goods in the world can be manufactured through biology—this not only represents an opportunity to make these processes more efficient and sustainable through biotechnology but millions of new blue-collar jobs across several industries. From the scientists and engineers that bring new products to life, to the people who operate the bioreactor, to those who create regulations that enable such innovations to reach their markets, and finally, to the founders of these new enterprises.

In biotech, companies like Genentech and BioNTech have demonstrated how years of lab research can turn into solutions that scale to serve billions. For instance, food and agriculture companies like Impossible Foods are driving down the cost of sustainable protein. Additionally, newer waves of biomaterials companies like LanzaTech, Visolis, Geno, and Biomason are making it possible to grow everything from concrete to wood, using only a fraction of the natural resources that conventional methods use.

“In the past, we used to say plastics, plastics, plastics. Now we’ll say protein, protein, protein,” said Schmidt.

Interestingly, Schmidt made it clear that to stop local companies from outsourcing their operations, the US needs to build a national, shared infrastructure that boosts the domestic bioeconomy. Put another way, the US needs to build an official governmental home for bioeconomy interests.

From a regulatory standpoint, the Bioeconomy Executive Order put into place by the Biden administration last September will systematically shift how the US coordinates and strategically advances its bioeconomy goals toward multiple objectives, including carbon management, economic development, biosecurity, biosafety, and the workforce of the future.

“One can hope that these actions will include a deliberate focus on moving engineering biology discoveries from lab to market, helping new technology developers through new loan programs for biomanufacturing infrastructure, as well as through newly streamlined, clear regulatory processes,” Schmidt remarked.

Investments in the next generation of bioproduction equipment, such as bioreactors, are also needed to reach commercial scale. With that in mind, in June of 2021, BioMADE, a Department of Defense public-private partnership effort to bolster US biomanufacturing, issued a special Project Call on advancing bioreactor design and development, with support from Schmidt Futures and sponsorship by the Engineering Biology Research Consortium (another non-profit, public-private partnership). Almost a year later, in March of 2022, BioMADE announced five new projects on bioreactor innovation.

The BioMADE model enhances the likelihood of successful partnerships for numerous reasons. Principally, a thriving bioeconomy depends on distributing production evenly across the country, not just in the known coastal hubs of biotechnology such as Boston and San Francisco—a benefit for BioMade, which is based in the US heartland and centered in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN. Moreover, members co-invest in projects, presenting opportunities to go further than they may be able to in many academic or for-profit settings. Lastly, the BioMADE ecosystem strongly emphasizes sharing the new tools and technologies that they create while preserving proprietary information—a collaboration model that is desperately needed to advance the field in the public interest.

When you’re the head of a company like Google for a number of years, it would be difficult to not have an opinion on AI and its impact in the future. When asked about it, Schmidt, notably pointed out the importance of developing an AI-biology symbiosis. “At this moment, the use of AI tools in the scientific and engineering research ecosystem is still in the early adopter stage,” he said. “Even though the exponential growth of machine learning and cloud computing and the dramatic advances in generating data about living systems through next-generation DNA sequencing and single-cell genomics are already game changers, there’s still a lot more to discover. And AI can really drive this process of scientific discovery.”

Yet, after we assess all the sharp insights that Eric Schmidt has provided about how to advance the bioeconomy, it may be this last point that is the most valuable—and seemingly, the most simple: collaboration and diversity. This is an area that Schmidt has been vocal about on numerous occasions, and to drive his point home he anecdotally recalled that despite being in direct competition with Yahoo, they sometimes celebrated each other, knowing that a win for either company was really a win for the industry. In the same spirit, he called on the next generation of synthetic biologists to see their competitors not only as opponents but as partners too. Silicon Valley has taught us that diverse groups of talented people can build solutions that scale globally. Synthetic biology is chic and contemporary as science disciplines go, and more people need to get excited by the potential this field holds because things like the bioeconomy will not grow on their own. And growth in these industries is what’s needed to improve the human condition.

Thank you to Sofia Sanchez for additional research and reporting on this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta, and some of the companies I write about, including LanzaTech and Visolis, are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference. For more content, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter and follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.