There's a lot of justified concern over whether #fermentation capacity can ever meet the promises of biotech at #scale. It's a real challenge, and one likely to present massive roadblocks to promising new companies, even with immediate action. 🧵 So much of #biotech is about proving that a microbe or genetic alteration can achieve X result in the lab, followed by the promise of what's possible "if you just scale this up…". Naturally, that last bit is where the true value proposition (and difficulty) lies.

So I saw a bit of disagreement last week over the idea of whether #biology is #programmable in any meaningful sense. As someone who works with biology in an industrial context, I wanted to unpack the idea just a little more. 🧵 For some, the claim that 'biology is programmable' is childishly obvious. Others say it's a bad metaphor or that if we don’t have total #predictability that it doesn’t count as programming. I tend to think both are right.