Ep. 91: Synthetic biology, technology and ethics

This transcription has been AI generated and therefore may have some inaccuracies.

Ep. 91: Synthetic biology, technology and ethics

This month, WTiN talks to Eric Benoist, a technology and data specialist at Natixis – a corporate investment banking company based in Paris, France – about synthetic biology, technology and the ethics intertwined with the two.

WTiN
Hello, and welcome to textile innovation hosted by WTiN. My name is Ruby and I'm the news editor and your podcast host. Each month we're going to be joined by a brand new special guest. So join me and my colleagues as we deep dive into what's new, what's interesting and what unmissable innovations have hit the market recently, we cover everything on the podcast from sustainability to startups and the latest research and developments. And we also quiz the experts in the fields about their new products and ideas across a huge spectrum that is the textiles industry. So no matter what your interest is WTiN have you covered and we can connect you to everything you need to know right here from our central hub in the UK. Today, I'm talking to Eric Benoist, West from Natixis based in France. Eric is a tech and data specialist for the corporate investment banking company. Together, we'll be talking about synthetic biology, funding ethics and the role that technology can play in sustainability. Hi, Eric, how are you?

Eric Benoist
Hello, how are you?

WTiN
I'm good. Thank you. I'm good. Thank you. Firstly, thank you for joining us, I appreciate you taking the time out to speak with me.

Eric Benoist
It's a pleasure.

WTiN
So let's dive right in. So firstly, can you just tell us a bit about yourself and your history within the textiles industry?

Eric Benoist
So I'm a technology research analyst working for French investment bank, Natixis, I'm based in London and specialising in all matters related to technology that can be as wide as nuclear energy or food technology or cloud computing and things like that. I'm not a textile expert, per se. But I've been working time and again on various topics relating to the textile industry and in particular, in you know, all the technologies that can help this industry become a cleaner business. And for those who are listening who aren't aware of the company that you work for Natixis, could you explain what it is you do and what your role of tech and data specialist entails. So Natixis is basically one of the largest banking, retail networks or banking networks in France, it covers actually all the traditional, you know, capital markets, financing asset management, businesses, and within that my role is to basically study and analyse technological trends. The idea here is to help Natixis position itself as a technology expert so that we can better help our clients deal with those questions of technology. And we can advise them better and be more relevant and credible when we talk to these guys about technology in general. So we've launched, for instance, something that we call the tech hub at Natixis, and it's really basically a group of technology specialists who are here to assist all of our clients on these matters. More specifically, we've discussed on the podcast before the textile industry and with it the fashion industry are accused of being among the most polluting and damaging for the environment. The manufacturing processes often include chemicals and large amounts of water and energy. Unfortunately, there is no overnight miracle that can fix these no matter how many regulations are implemented. However, I did read that you argue that precision farming and irrigation and green chemistry and secular initiatives and bio technologies are all things that can contribute to a more sustainable path going forward. I think the key thing is that really there is no silver bullet type of solution here for the industry. I don't think there is one type of solution that's really going to solve all the problems at once. And so yes, we take the view here that it's actually a mix of solution together that are getting to be the right approach for the industry. And you were mentioning precision agriculture. So definitely at the source, you know, for cotton farmers, for example. It's something that can help them that or use resources such as pesticides or water circular initiative, obviously, are very important in countries like the UK or France or where consumption is quite high. And when we have to change behaviours, make sure that as the European Union puts itself we make fast fashion and fashionable as quickly as possible. But But yeah, it's really is a mix of solution is going to have to be implemented with different intensities, depending on you know, where you implement them, and there's definitely no silver bullet here. On the topic of your latest thematic research paper titled weaving a cleaner future synthetic biology for eco responsibility in a textile industry. you delve into the solutions available to fight environmental pollution. What do you think are the most important findings from that paper? No, we actually dealt to one specific technology which is synthetic biology to explain very quickly what this is. Synthetic biology is basically a part of science that redesigns micro organisms to give them more or new abilities. So basically, the idea is to insert long stretches of DNA into by material things like that, and make sure that these bacteria can then you know, produce certain proteins are going to be, you know, very helpful in producing different types of materials such as leathers or fabrics. And by the way, the way what was really, really interesting that synthetic biology is not just something that can be applied to the textile industry, it's something that works as well in other industries, such as agriculture, mining, carbon capture, and all sorts of different environments. And it's a very, very powerful technology that's emerging as we speak, and where we are starting to see a lot of interest from investors. Now, I mentioned textile industry, you know, there's, there's definitely a fibre problem at the schools like, you know, we talked about cotton, for example, being a highly resource intensive part of the supply chain, synthetic biology can help, you know, create fabrics that don't consume as much water for instance, or don't even need any pesticides or things like that. So that's, that can be very interesting as a replacement as well, for synthetic fibres, which are highly carbon intensive. As we know, the second thing is chemicals, you know, in the industry, that won't come as a surprise to many of your listeners. But to other people, it's sometimes quite surprising to see the sheer amount of chemical that goes into the fabrication of a single piece of garment. And the list is extremely long. Synthetic biology can help create certain molecules without the use of petrochemical treatment at the source, for instance, which can be applied in things like dyeing process of those clothes, and garments. And that has a lot of value, in my opinion. So in your research, you interviewed two European companies am silk and PE, you say these companies are at the forefront of revolution in the textile world? How did you discover these companies? Why did you pick them? And what are they doing differently, I came across these two companies a little bit by chance initially was when I'm doing my research, I try to find companies that are active in the sort of field that I'm researching. And these two came up quite quickly in my in my search, and when I started looking, what they were doing, what really struck me was the fact that the technology was actually quite mature and quite scalable, relatively quickly. And I think that's an important point, because a lot of the stuff that you'll see in synthetic biology is often you know, at the concept or the design phase, it's not really gone much beyond the laboratory phase, I would say. And there's a big difference between producing super interesting material in the lab and producing it in huge quantities for commercial applications. While these two companies actually are they're not in the process yet of producing very large quantities, but they are they are in the process of demonstrating that the technology is scalable and completely viable, which is I think, which was really what attracted me to to them in the first place. AMC milk is a company based in Germany, and they do you know, they use synthetic biology to produce a spider silk which is a very interesting material that cannot be farmed naturally, because as you may know, spiders are actually quite territorial and cannibalistic by nature. So they they just found a way to, you know, modify certain bacteria with genetic code. Also European gardens, spiders. What's extraordinary is after sending these spiders, these bacteria sorry, a signal, they start producing the same silk that the spider produced naturally in the fields, except that they can do that in large bio reactors. And they can industrialise the process, which was not possible before. And that is, I think, a fantastic example of what synthetic biology can do. They can really come up with these very natural material in a way which is totally I would say, green, because they're not using any petrochemicals here. They're not using much energy to produce the seal. They're only feeding the bacteria with you know, non food, sugar cane or sugar beet biomass. And that's all they need really find out extremely interesting and fascinating. The other company p li, is based in France, and what they do is using bacteria, which they will then modify again with different genetic code so that they can produce a molecular backbone, which they can then enhance with some added chemicals, I would say, to produce perfectly natural and much more much green dye products and dye stuff. So their products for instance, or using 75 less co2 than the usual standard conventional petrochemicals die stuff again, a very good example of what modified bacteria can do for the industry.

WTiN
You say as well in your paper that there have been some rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, data analysis and genome sequencing. Could you talk more about that and how it you think it might change things for the textile industry?

Eric Benoist
I don't know if it will change a lot of things for the textile industry, but certainly synthetic biology, again, it's, it's been a game changer, genome sequencing, of course, has made a lot of progress over the past 20 years, I think if you compare the cost of sequencing the whole human genome 20 years ago, versus today, we're talking about something which was worth several $100,000. At the time, which is now work can be done for less than a dozen euros, right? This is made because of editing the genome of the oldest organisms much less, and therefore it makes all these potential new ideas, you know, immediately viable from the start from purely commercial angle. And then there are things like CRISPR cast nine framework, and this is basically to make it simple. This is a something that can be compared to a pair of molecular scissors, which allows scientists to cut DNA in certain places and paste those sequences into living cells in a very, very accurate and reliable way. Yeah. And without tools like these, it would be almost impossible today, to come up with those industrial applications for the textile industry. And then you mentioned artificial intelligence. Yeah, it's fair to say that it's increasingly being used at every stage of the development of biological systems, for instance, it can help managing or predicting certain levels of gene expression or avoiding certain unwanted mutations when you insert DNA into another organisms. And that's, again, not intelligence is very, very exciting thing for this industry. And it's not so surprising, in my opinion, that maybe a company like Microsoft is actually supporting the whole ecosystem, with their own, you know, Molecular Biology Laboratory, which they open here in the UK, in 2019. They have this laboratory, they also helping the, you know, the ecosystem with specialised software with cloud computing, machine learning algorithms and things like that. So yeah, artificial intelligence, very important for synthetic biology in terms of what artificial intelligence does for the textile industry. I mean, there are many other examples. Of course, one of which I think is particularly interesting is demand analytics and prediction, which can help producers target specific clients at the right time. So instead of producing 100 T shirts and hoping to sell you three of those points in the year when maybe they can just produce three T shirts for you at the right time by analysing demand and using the right algorithm to make those predictions.

WTiN
Four years ago, you proposed a short research no on the future of fashion and textiles in which you discuss the impact of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, automation and blockchain sustainability was a key topic then and was already in discussion around microplastics and the ocean and excessive energy consumption. One of the things suggested was alternative biomaterials. However, you also noted that progress has been stifled in that time, despite growing in awareness, what changes have you seen in that time? If, if any?

Eric Benoist
I think the awareness has definitely changed. It's very rare nowadays that you speak to anyone in the textile industry, and they tell you that green and environmental issues under the rollin this, this used to be the case, maybe five, six years ago, now everybody is very much focused on what they can do to change change things at that level. I think also, there's the increasing realisation that, you know, sustainability doesn't have to be come at the expense of profit, that you can be sustainable and profitable. It's not just going to be extract costs on your income statement. I think that is quite interesting, as well. There's this realisation that actually in terms of communications, in terms of brand awareness, all these issues are extremely important. Now, I mean, I don't want to sound too pessimistic either, but it's true. That's when we wrote that first piece for four and a half years ago, basically talked about the very same topics that we've just mentioned, you know, it was already have problems with we are already problems with microplastics feeding into the oceans, we already had problems with fast fashion, we already had problems with waste management, and, you know, all these clothes that are piling up in landfills and are being incinerated instead of being recycled. And you know, from that angle, it's true, like can be frustrating to see how slow things are actually changing and how little concrete you know, and meaningful actions have actually been taken some parts of the world and some part of the industry I'm a financial analyst, obviously, I look at these kind of things, maybe a lot more than others, but you can have the best ideas in the world. You can have the best idea in the world if you don't have the funding for ideas, you're not gonna get anywhere, you know, going back to synthetic Biology, I think what is really interesting that it requires very long term funding, you can't basically hope to make a quick buck and be, you know, invest a few millions in there and become a billionaire, after six months, it is something you need to be committed to, to find ways to, you know, make sure that investor can commit for the long term. That means sometimes more than, you know, 810 years, which many of the guys in the private funding industry have a problem with, because they're hoping to become billionaires very quickly, I wanted to maybe touch upon is the question of ethics, which is really true in synthetic biology. You know, every time somebody touches genetically modified organisms, you end up with the adoption problems on the on the consumer side, right, people are not always a bit scared of using these kinds of materials, because there's a perception that they can be unhealthy or dangerous for human health, etc, etc, I think in this case, these things are not justified, because the end product that you're going to use is actually the same molecule, the same thing that you'll find in nature in nature, what has been modified, is the actual organism that produces it. But the end product, again, is perfectly natural, and has got nothing to do with modified genetics. And I think that's important to educate consumers on this point, so that, you know, they can really embrace these kind of developments and adopt the products otherwise, I think they will always sort of be scared a little bit, touching these kind of things. And it could mean that companies like AMC, or PE or find it more difficult to grow and and, you know, help the textile industry,

WTiN
I just want to end on a broader note, as we interview people from all sectors on the podcast. And we always seem to get a very varied answer for this next question. I'm kind of looking forward to hearing what your thoughts are the United Nations have set in place Sustainable Development Goals, to reach by 2030 to essentially promote and protect the Earth environment and climate, do you think we're going to reach these goals? Or what are your overarching thoughts on this?

Eric Benoist
Do I think we're gonna reach these goals? I mean, I think we're already pretty late in reaching these goals, in particular, the 2030 goals, my view on this is that we can't hope too much that behavioural changes are gonna happen quickly. You know, I think, if you look at fast fashion, it's pretty clear that it's still extremely strong, changing those behaviours is going to basically be a very, very long term project that will have to involve the whole of society. And unless these changes are forced, in some kind of authoritarian way, I don't really see how this is going to happen in the next seven years. But what I do believe in is, is that technology has a role to play here is not going to sort and solve all the problems, but it can certainly buy us a bit more time. That's that's really, why I keep pushing things like synthetic biology and other aspects of the technological spectrum. Because I really think that this can happen now. And that the solutions are available. All we need actually to make them happen most of the time is funding and commitment from the investors in the in the in the medium term.

WTiN
So where is your paper available, if people want to take a look for themselves?

Eric Benoist
The paper is available on the Research website that exists that can easy to find a link. Otherwise, the best solution is to just contact me directly by email, we'll be happy to send you copies. And even have a chat about these topics, which I'm very passionate about.

WTiN
Wonderful. And that concludes the episode. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. This has been incredibly interesting. Thank you.

Eric Benoist
Thank you very much.

WTiN
If you have any questions for WTiN, then you can reach out over Twitter, find us at WTiN_comment or you can contact me directly at WTiN and if you fancy sponsoring an episode of the podcast, please email sales@wtin.com. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next month.