LatchBio

San Francisco, California, United States

The convergence of laboratory automation, high-throughput assays, and machine learning is moving the medium of biological discovery to silicon. Bench top experimentation will be the machine code of the biological programmer, simple instructions that are executed by robotics just as bytes are fed through a compiler. However, if the goal of creating arbitrary synthetic life is to be realized, we need to upgrade our tooling. We will need robust software that operates at the abstraction level of the organism. We will need a programming language that speaks fluently with DNA, RNA, and amino acids as native primitives. We have attempted to adapt the tooling of classical computing towards the biological domain without teaching the computer about biology. We wonder why we haven't cured cancer or reproduced Jurassic Park, meanwhile our DNA sits in computer memory as static bytecode.