To be fair, humans have only spent about ten thousand years developing technologies.
Biology has had a 4 billion year head-start on us. Humans, however, have recently invented two very important technologiesreading and writing DNA.
In 1952, Rosalind Franklin took the first X-ray picture of DNA. Her image showed that DNA was a
double helix, a twisted ladder of paired letters that made a molecular code. The code was made up of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs instead of 0s and 1s like computer code, but it was digital, and its structure
implied that someday we would be able to read and write it.
In 1976, Genentech brought DNA writing to the world by building on the
academic work of its founder Herbert Boyer, who cut-and-pasted the first gene from one species to another in 1973. Genentech launched the first biotech
therapeutic, human insulin for diabetics, and then vertically integrated to become a pharmaceutical company. Today, more than a third of new therapeutic drugs are made from biotechnology.
The tools for DNA writing have greatly expanded since 1976CRISPR allows targeted DNA edits, DNA printing allows long pieces of DNA to
be written from scratchand every day, the cost and scale of our ability to write DNA improves. The cost of reading DNA has fallen more than a million-fold since the completion of the Human Genome Project twenty years ago. The era of
Moores Law is coming to a close, but biologys exponentials are just beginning.
At Ginkgo we are unifying these tools
into a horizontal platform for programming cells across organisms. We make this platform available to customers who want to program cells for applications in food, medicine, cosmetics, agriculture, materials, or any other market. We believe that
biology can impact all industries that produce physical goods, because biology makes stuff, and it evolves to solve new problems. Today the world faces many problems, and we hope that biology can help us meet those challenges.
Earlier this week we announced that well be going public via a business combination with Soaring Eagle Acquisition Corp. Were
thrilled to be partnering with the Soaring Eagle team and Dr. Arie Belldegrun, who is going to provide real strategic leadership to Ginkgo, particularly as we expand more deeply into therapeutics applications, including cell and gene therapies.
We are excited that so many people are beginning to see the potential of biology and are working with us to help bring our vision for cell programming to life.
One of the fun parts about going public is picking a ticker. We thought about a lot of options, from the traditional ($GKGO), to the sounds great at
first, but wait
($CELL), to the provocative ($GMO). One of our favorite options ($TREX) was, sadly, taken. But one option stood out from the pack, allowing us to pay tribute to the real visionaries in our field: Rosalind Franklin and
Herbert Boyer, and embrace the heart of what we do. This ticker has a long history and once belonged to Genentech, who introduced the first biotech therapeutic: human insulin. We are honored and humbled to be able to continue the legacy of
Genentech, who held the NYSE:DNA ticker until their acquisition by Roche. While Soaring Eagle (Nasdaq:SRNG) will still be trading as a proxy for Ginkgo for the next few months until the transaction closes, upon the closing of the business
combination, Ginkgo will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker DNA.