How Synbio Will Save The World

Reprogramming microbes so they eat toxins and CO2? t’s not science fiction. It’s happening right now.

- Jeff​ Bercovici

In an office park on a leafy side street in Mountain View, California, a few miles from the headquarters of Google and Facebook, NovoNutrients CEO David Tze is showing off a technology so powerful, it just might avert human civilization from its 200-year collision course with disaster.

Striding past humming electrolyzers separating water molecules into their component elements and liquid chromatographers analyzing the molecular components of samples, he stops before a fluorescent-lighted cylindrical water tank with tiny specks floating in it. “These are the only macroscopic organisms we have here,” he says. “These are Artemia.”

Artemia salina, that is, a crustacean found in brackish waters and better known by its common name, brine shrimp. If you’ve heard of brine shrimp, it’s likely because, in 1964, a man named Harold von Braunhut began marketing them as a pet-cum-novelty toy under the brand name Sea-Monkeys.

The cutting-edge science I’m looking at is a 55-year-old children’s amusement from the back of a comic book?

“Yes,” Tze confirms. But, he adds, “we don’t give them the offcial Sea-Monkey feed. They just get our product.”