Today we launch Biotic to advance the foundations for engineering biology in the open.
Adamala, Endy, Jedryszek, and Raggio
The same molecular machines run inside a bacterium, a redwood tree, and you, copied, inherited, and reused across billions of years and the whole of life. Biology’s foundations have always been held in common. The foundations for engineering biology should be held in common, too.
This matters now because biology is becoming engineering. Biology is becoming engineering. The tools, standards, and infrastructure that turn the processes of biology into a general-purpose technology are being made real right now. Anything bioengineers can learn to write in DNA will become growable, when and where needed.
Today we launch Biotic. We are a public-benefit organization and our purpose is plain. The foundations for engineering biology should be built in the open and belong to everyone. The benefits of biology should reach all eight billion of us.
One cell
A team led by Kate Adamala has built something new. She calls it “SpudCell.”
SpudCell is a synthetic cell with a fully defined genome of ninety thousand base pairs. The function of every essential gene is known, which has never been true of a synthetic cell before. SpudCell feeds and grows. SpudCell copies its genome and divides. Each of these steps is written into its own DNA. One protein drives feeding and division. When a faster-growing version appears, its daughters spread through the population. This is selection, running in a system that was built, not born, assembled from defined parts rather than carved down from something already alive.
No one had shown this before. The pieces, yes: a membrane here, a replication system there. The whole cycle, in one defined chemical system, no.
Let us also be plain about what SpudCell is not. SpudCell cannot yet make its own ribosomes, or its own lipids, or its own energy. SpudCell must feed, the way every cultured cell is fed. The faster version was placed there by hand; it did not undergo a spontaneous mutation. These are a signpost for work to do. The Wright Flyer flew for only twelve seconds.
SpudCell exists in part because of openness and sharing. For example, SpudCell’s protein-building machinery descends from DNA modules shared almost a decade ago on Addgene, for anyone to use. We are releasing SpudCell the same way it was built — openly, in full, from today — rather than holding it behind the slow machinery of publication. A foundation laid in the open helped make SpudCell possible. We mean to widen it.
Nature’s first operating system
Biology is nature’s first operating system. We have long been learning how to read and now reprogram it.
This matters because natural living systems build with atomic precision, at planetary scale, powered by the sun. Life makes every material in every living thing. We have always used this machinery: for food, for medicine, for materials. But we have used it crudely, by borrowing what biology already did and tweaking it by trial and error, with many of life’s mechanisms still mysterious.
An engineerable biology changes the terms. It opens a path of invention whose end we cannot entirely see. Anything we can learn to encode we will be able to grow.
A protocol in someone else’s freezer
The biotic future will not arrive on its own.
The science of biology still works much the way it has for decades. One lab produces a striking result another lab cannot reproduce. Lab after lab re-characterizes the same molecules. Teams build and rebuild the same parts (the systems that make proteins, that build membranes, that manage energy), each version a little different, none of them able to fit together. A graduate student can spend years rebuilding a protocol that already exists, working, in someone else’s freezer.
Biotechnology lacks sufficient shared layers. There is no common set of characterized parts, standard methods, reference systems, or tools that would let one group’s advance compound into everyone’s.
No existing institution is built to make these layers. Universities reward individual discovery. Companies build what they can own. Funders back applications. None of them builds the slow, shared foundations that take years to mature and belong to all.
The machinery of life must be common
And yet these foundations will be built. Biology has become too important to leave them unbuilt. In Shenzhen, a state-backed effort spanning more than a hundred labs has published a ten-year roadmap toward the same destination, organized around a centralized platform and an AI-driven biofoundry. Elsewhere, in private labs, the same foundations could be built to be owned. The destination is no longer hypothetical. Who will build it, and in what spirit?
The foundations that underlie general-purpose technologies tend to get built once. The shape they take, and the rules they carry, set who benefits, and on what terms, for a long time after. We have watched this before. Unix begat Linux. Structural biology and genomics opened. A generation of discoveries, innovations, and benefits grew from there. Other fields, like artificial intelligence, made early promises of openness, then closed once the foundations turned valuable, and we are still paying for it: in research that has slowed, and in capability and power concentrated in few hands.
We feel strongly that the power arising from the foundations unlocking biology as a general-purpose technology should not be concentrated, held by one company, or steered by one state. There is a third way to build it: open, neutral, and multilateral.
Open is not the same as ungoverned; foundations built in the open still have to be stewarded. But they should be stewarded by many hands, and answerable to more than one interest. The foundations of biotechnology should not be privately held, and should not be any one nation’s. They must be and remain common, like life itself.
The Liberty Cell
SpudCell is a starting line. It is proof that a destination exists and can be reached. But an extraordinary amount of work awaits, and we do not imagine doing it alone.
The next step is a cell that makes its own parts and sustains itself. This requires the patient construction of foundational tools: consolidated genomes, scalable systems for protein and energy production, standardized methods for cellular construction, and the engineering of molecular machinery including the ribosome, perhaps the most important machine in all of biology.
But many open challenges wait beyond the technical.
Some are the hard work of governance and policy, creating the conditions under which biological engineering matures in the open, for broad benefit, responsibly.
Some are a set of open scientific problems to be built on these foundations where new contributions could shape the trajectory of entire fields.
We are launching to invite the people doing this work, and the people who could, to build the foundations with us.
We have spent four billion years inside the basin of the life we inherited. Building biology from the ground up is how we begin to climb out: carefully, in the open, together.
The dream is worth saying plainly. A future in which ten billion people live well, in partnership with the rest of life on Earth, fed, healed, and supplied in ways that only biology enables. This is what Biotic’s foundations are for.
Out of one, many
The motto of the United States reads e pluribus unum: out of many, one. Our purpose echoes it: ex uno plures. Out of one, many. Out of one cell, many cells. Out of one shared foundation, many possibilities, many benefits, many hands. It begins with a single cell we understand well enough to build.
We are not unveiling a finished thing. We are opening a beginning, and an invitation. If you work on synthetic cell engineering, or on the chemistry, physics, computation, medicine, policy, or governance around it, then we want to hear from you. Biotic launches with partners across seven countries, and room for many more.
Come build with us.