Synthetic biology is pure hype, innovation occurs incrementally and won’t scale up to a magic fix for pollution

Like any advance, SynBio evokes sincere evangelical zeal in its practitioners, which is good in itself and helps spread SynBio ideas and technology throughout the public and private sectors.16 Informed, data-driven forecasting of what SynBio advances could enable is likewise good and helpful. Diffusing advances and faithfully predicting their impacts fuel hope, a virtue we cannot afford to lose in facing what has been called a global polycrisis.17 Like any crisis, though, this one creates opportunities for merchants of false hope, or hype. Hype flourishes when disoriented, poorly informed populations want to believe in easy solutions to difficult problems; SynBio can be–and sometimes is–pushed in this way as a techno-fix in areas such as atmospheric CO2 drawdown,18 nitrogen pollution in agriculture,19 and green jet fuel production.20 It is not that SynBio cannot contribute to these areas; it can. The problem is one of claims for the scale and timeline of the contribution that do not follow the engineering practice of running the numbers to get rough but robust estimates of how much a SynBio-based project could possibly do and how fast,21 and then sticking to these estimates when advocating and publicizing the project. A habitual disregard of what is involved in scale-up is an Achilles’ heel of the whole field. It is one thing to have a smart genetic construct showing a spectacular phenotype in a Petri dish or small bioreactor for a short period of time but a very different thing to have the same at an industrial or even global scale10 and following rigorous implementation standards. Going from one dimension to the other makes the whole difference between a merely intellectual exercise and a truly transformative development.22 Alas, the conceptual excitement occasioned by SynBio has thus far been more supported than scale-up technologies–unfairly considered a lower-rank endeavor.23 The solution is just to learn from and to follow sound engineering practices and traditions. Not doing so, in the long term, only weakens public trust in bioscience and biotechnology.