EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Award

Last year, this EPA Presidential Award went to the two largest chemical companies in the world, but this year the winner is a new entrant – Genomatica down in La Jolla.

Genomatica reengineers microbes to produce chemicals from non-petroleum feedstocks. Their first chemical, BDO, is not produced in any natural organism, and so they started with a computational model of 40,000 possible chemical conversion pathways to get to BDO from sugar. But rather than directly designing the ideal solution, they design for evolvability. They selectively cripple the organism so that its only path to survival and growth makes more of the desired industrial chemical as a byproduct of its metabolism. By skimming the fastest growers, over and over, they achieved a 20,000x improvement in chemical yield in a few months.

In his book on computer programming, Danny Hillis concludes: “The greatest achievement of our technology may well be the creation of tools that allow us to go beyond engineering – that allow us to create more than we can understand.” (Hillis, The Pattern on the Stone)

And since the primary ingredient of spandex is BDO, soon our bike shorts will be green. Sweet spandex! That, and automotive plastics.