Ginkgo Bioworks

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Group.png Ginkgo Bioworks  
(Biotechnology, Big pharma) WebsiteRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
Ginko.jpg
Formation2009
HeadquartersBoston, Massachusetts, USA
Interestssynthetic biology, Bayer, Hunter Biden
Membership• Tom Knight
• Jason Kelly
• Reshma Shetty
• Barry Canton
• Austin Che
• Christina Agapakis
• Ryan Morhard
"Designs, engineers, develops, tests and licenses organisms" with CIA funding - but with doubtful actual technical capacities and Theranos-like business model.

Ginkgo Bioworks is a biotech company which according to itself is "engineering biology" for a variety of (scary-sounding) purposes, but with doubtful actual technical capacities. It has received funding from Bill Gates, the Pentagon and the CIA, and collaborates with DARPA, and regularly receives fat government contracts.[1]

A 2022 investigation dismissed both its technical capacities and business model, describing it as:

a snake oil salesman and some hedge funds partner up to pimp the latest "synthetic biology" scam -- as phantom revenue, a hocus-pocus business model, rampant related-party games, and a decade of colossal failure[2]

In 2022, Ginkgo bought Metabiota, thus helping get rid of a name with a tainted image, due to Metabiota's association with Jeffrey Epstein, while continuing its activities.

Funding

It launched with support from Open Philanthropy[3] and invested in by Bill Gates.[4]

Activities

After raising almost $3 billion, Ginkgo Bioworks has built the world’s largest DNA factory claiming to alter the code behind life and replace traditional manufacturing with biology - What could go wrong?

According to itself, Ginkgo Bioworks "designs, engineers, develops, tests and licenses organisms". The company refers to their work as "biology by design"[5], stating that they "program cells to make everything from food to materials to therapeutics."

Ginkgo Bioworks work in a sector of biotechnology called synthetic biology (synbio), which is the intersection of biology and technology. The ultimate promise is to replace factories with biological foundries that can produce everything we need directly (with a little genetic tweaking) from nature.[6]

The company collaborates with DARPA[7][8], and in November 2020 the U.S. government granted Ginkgo a $1.1 billion loan for "COVID-19 testing and the production of raw materials for therapies that may help address future pandemics".[9]

In 2022, Bayer established a strategic partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks, to "to develop and advance agricultural microbial solutions across crops and geographies".[10]

In 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and Ginkgo Bioworks convened a meeting in Washington, DC, to "plan government action to strengthen the biotechnology industry".[11] President Joe Biden made the group's demands law by executive order in September 2022.[12] On the same day, the president appointed Dr.Renee Wegrzyn, Ginkgo's Vice President of Business Development, to the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.[13]

From 2020 Ginko received contracts for Covid "testing" for schools, congregate settings, and at ports of entry.[14] In May 2021, Ginkgo announced a collaboration with Quest Diagnostics to provide Covid "testing" services for every K–12 student in the United States, every week.[15] The company's stock price tanked when "testing" was wound down by 2023.[16]

In 2023, the company was "analyzing" sewage from planes in several countries as an alleged "early-warning system against another pandemic". The surveillance system was created in cooperation with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and medical testing company XWELL.[17]

Purchase of Metabiota

Gingko bought the company Metabiota in 2022. According to Alexis Baden-Mayer[18], the merger may have been "a way to retire an infamous name" while continuing its activities, as Metabiota's advisor was Jeffrey Epstein[19]. Its funders[20] came from tech billionaires, the Pentagon[21] and the CIA[22]. Its lobbying firm[23] was Hunter Biden's Rosemont Seneca. Its projects were bungling[24] the 2014 Ebola response[25], setting up bird-flu biolabs in Ukraine[26], and collecting bat coronaviruses in China[27] for Ralph Baric[28] with EcoHealth Alliance[29] and the Wuhan Institute of Virology[30][18].

When Ginkgo bought Metabiota it retired its founder Nathan Wolfe, a scientist friend of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell who was a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader[31]. Nita Madhav, who Wolfe hired at Metabiota in 2015[32] and became its CEO in 2019, continued at Ginko, where she runs Ginkgo Biosecurity, which is basically just Metabiota with a new name.

Metabiota was activie in the Ukraine where it set established bird-flu-researching biolabs with Black & Veatch and working on a government-funded "Ukraine Science Project" with gas company Burisma.[33]

Ginkgo Bioworks is World Economic Forum partner.[34]

Nothing special about Ginkgo Bioworks' technical capacities

In 2022, it was the subject of a scathing investigation by Scorpion Capital LLC[35]. The Scorpion report quoted a former Ginkgo employee who claimed that Ginkgo regularly overcharged and defrauded the government and witnessed this happening to the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: "I just got the sense it happened all the time. I saw them actually make it. I saw the spreadsheet." Arguing that Ginkgo stock was worthless, the Scorpion report dismissed Ginkgo' technical capacities[2]:

Synthetic biology is a meaningless term and may as well be a synonym for publicly-traded scam. Allow us to offer a more precise definition: using widespread 50-year old genetic engineering tools to tweak yeast cells to excrete mostly low-value industrial inputs like flavors, fragrances, and drug ingredients. This is the essence of the mysterious foundry – Ginkgo is nothing more than a commodity strain engineering CRO [contract research organization], and a crappy one at that according to its own related-party 'customers.' Before stock promoters claimed the term 'synthetic biology,' it was and is still known as microbial or strain engineering. Humans have tweaked yeast for thousands of years for bread, beer, and other fermented products. The first synthetic biology book is from 1912.[2]


 

Known member

1 of the 7 of the members already have pages here:

MemberDescription
Ryan MorhardWorks for Ginkgo Bioworks "building a platform to enable customers to program cells as easily as we can program computers"
Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.


References

  1. ↑ https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/gingko-snares-18m-darpa-contract-therapy-protein-manufacture-research
  2. ↑ a b c https://scorpioncapital.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/reports/DNA1.pdf
  3. ↑ https://blog.igem.org/blog/2019/9/19/what-is-igem-part-4
  4. ↑ https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/11/bill-gates-backed-ginkgo-bioworks-going-public-in-15-billion-spac-.html
  5. ↑ https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/
  6. ↑ https://www.nanalyze.com/2020/10/ginkgo-bioworks-industrial-synbio/
  7. ↑ https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ginkgo-bioworks-and-transcriptic-selected-by-darpa-to-leverage-robotic-cloud-lab-and-foundry-automation-to-accelerate-biological-design-with-9-5-m-award-300628716.html
  8. ↑ https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ginkgo-bioworks-azitra-florida-international-university-and-latham-biopharm-group-awarded-15m-by-darpa-to-develop-skin-microbiome-based-mosquito-repellent-301195161.html
  9. ↑ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-loan-ginkgo/u-s-loans-1-1-billion-to-ginkgo-bioworks-for-pandemic-effort-idUSKBN2851TA
  10. ↑ https://www.bayer.com/media/en-us/bayer-and-ginkgo-bioworks-close-deal-creating-agricultural-biologicals-powerhouse/
  11. ↑ https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/190716-usbioeconomy.pdf
  12. ↑ https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/2022/09/15/new-executive-order-to-bolster-biotech-ginkgo-ceo-at-white-house-ginkgo-vp-to-lead-arpa-h/
  13. ↑ https://arpa-h.gov/about/people/renee-wegrzyn
  14. ↑ https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/ginkgo-bioworks-ceo-on-covid-19-testing-if-we-try-we-can-win.html
  15. ↑ https://www.genengnews.com/topics/coronavirus/covid-19-testing-for-every-student-every-week-is-goal-of-quest-ginkgo-collaboration/
  16. ↑ https://www.genomeweb.com/business-news/ginkgo-bioworks-q1-revenues-drop-52-percent-covid-19-testing-winds-down
  17. ↑ https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/08/08/business/ginkgo-bioworks-pandemic-early-warning-system/
  18. ↑ a b https://scamerica.substack.com/p/scamdemic-bird-flu-vaccines-for-33
  19. ↑ https://x.com/hash_tigre/status/1397367714469978112
  20. ↑ https://expose-news.com/2022/03/20/biolabs-who-are-metabiotas-investors/
  21. ↑ https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/metabiota-gains-government-momentum-with-black-veatch-sub-contracts-for-defense-threat-reduction-programs-1027442834
  22. ↑ https://theintercept.com/2022/09/28/cia-extinction-woolly-mammoth-dna/
  23. ↑ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/amp/Hunter-Biden-helped-secure-millions-funding-military-biotech-research-program-Ukraine.html
  24. ↑ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/american-company-metabiota-problems-during-ebola-outbreak/
  25. ↑ https://open.substack.com/pub/husseini/p/did-west-africas-ebola-outbreak-of
  26. ↑ https://organicconsumers.org/weaponizing-bird-flu/
  27. ↑ https://organicconsumers.org/googles-eric-schmidt-funding-wuhan-lab-covid-origins-cover/
  28. ↑ https://organicconsumers.org/dr-coronavirus-hunter-ralph-baric-preparing-us-pandemic-or-putting-us-peril-one/
  29. ↑ https://organicconsumers.org/peter-show-me-money-daszak-pulls-big-bucks-through-ecohealth-alliance-risky-virus-research/
  30. ↑ https://organicconsumers.org/shi-zhengli-weaponizing-coronaviruses-pentagon-funding-chinese-military-lab/
  31. ↑ https://expose-news.com/2022/03/20/biolabs-who-are-metabiotas-investors/
  32. ↑ https://www.wired.com/story/nathan-wolfe-global-economic-fallout-pandemic-insurance/
  33. ↑ https://organicconsumers.org/is-bird-flu-being-weaponized/
  34. ↑ https://www.weforum.org/organizations/ginkgo-bioworks/
  35. ↑ https://scorpioncapital.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/reports/DNA1.pdf
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