[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
ENGINEERING OUR WAY TO A
SUSTAINABLE BIOECONOMY
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MARCH 12, 2019
__________
Serial No. 116-6
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Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
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COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HON. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas, Chairwoman
ZOE LOFGREN, California FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma,
DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois Ranking Member
SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon MO BROOKS, Alabama
AMI BERA, California, BILL POSEY, Florida
Vice Chair RANDY WEBER, Texas
CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania BRIAN BABIN, Texas
LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas ANDY BIGGS, Arizona
HALEY STEVENS, Michigan ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas
KENDRA HORN, Oklahoma NEAL DUNN, Florida
MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina
BRAD SHERMAN, California MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas
STEVE COHEN, Tennessee TROY BALDERSON, Ohio
JERRY McNERNEY, California PETE OLSON, Texas
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
PAUL TONKO, New York MICHAEL WALTZ, Florida
BILL FOSTER, Illinois JIM BAIRD, Indiana
DON BEYER, Virginia VACANCY
CHARLIE CRIST, Florida VACANCY
SEAN CASTEN, Illinois
KATIE HILL, California
BEN McADAMS, Utah
JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia
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Subcommittee on Research and Technology
HON. HALEY STEVENS, Michigan, Chairwoman
DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois JIM BAIRD, Indiana, Ranking Member
MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas
BRAD SHERMAN, California NEAL DUNN, Florida
PAUL TONKO, New York TROY BALDERSON, Ohio
BEN McADAMS, Utah ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
STEVE COHEN, Tennessee
BILL FOSTER, Illinois
C O N T E N T S
March 12, 2019
Page
Hearing Charter.................................................. 2
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Haley Stevens, Chairwoman,
Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives........... 8
Written Statement............................................ 10
Statement by Representative Jim Baird, Ranking Member,
Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Committee on Science,
Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives........... 12
Written Statement............................................ 13
Statement by Representative Frank D. Lucas, Ranking Member,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 14
Written Statement............................................ 15
Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Chairwoman,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 17
Written Statement............................................ 19
Witnesses:
Dr. Rob Carlson, Managing Director of Bioeconomy Capital
Oral Statement............................................... 21
Written Statement............................................ 24
Dr. Kevin Solomon, Assistant Professor of Agricultural and
Biological Engineering at Purdue University
Oral Statement............................................... 39
Written Statement............................................ 41
Dr. Eric Hegg, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology,
Michigan State University; Michigan State University
Subcontract Lead, Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center
Oral Statement............................................... 47
Written Statement............................................ 49
Dr. Sean Simpson, Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder of
LanzaTech
Oral Statement............................................... 55
Written Statement............................................ 57
Dr. Laurie Zoloth, Margaret E. Burton Professor of Religion and
Ethics, and Senior Advisor to the Provost for Programs in
Social Ethics at the University of Chicago
Oral Statement............................................... 63
Written Statement............................................ 66
Discussion....................................................... 72
Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Dr. Rob Carlson, Managing Director of Bioeconomy Capital......... 90
Dr. Kevin Solomon, Assistant Professor of Agricultural and
Biological Engineering at Purdue University.................... 98
Dr. Eric Hegg, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology,
Michigan State University; Michigan State University
Subcontract Lead, Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center........ 99
Dr. Laurie Zoloth, Margaret E. Burton Professor of Religion and
Ethics, and Senior Advisor to the Provost for Programs in
Social Ethics at the University of Chicago..................... 101
ENGINEERING OUR WAY TO A
SUSTAINABLE BIOECONOMY
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TUESDAY, MARCH 12, 2019
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Research and Technology,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
Washington, D.C.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in
room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Haley
Stevens [Chairwoman of the Subcommittee] presiding.
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Chairwoman Stevens. Good morning and welcome to the
Research and Technology Subcommittee's first hearing of the
116th Congress. A warm welcome to our distinguished group of
witnesses. We have a great panel this morning, and I'm looking
forward to hearing your testimony. As a Michigan native, it's a
great pleasure to welcome Dr. Eric Hegg, who joins us from
Michigan State University. Congrats on Saturday's win, and
thank you for being here with us. I'm sorry I'm not wearing my
green.
As a Member of this Committee, we have the opportunity to
learn about critical, new, and emerging technologies with the
capacity to benefit society in a number of ways, and to
consider how the Federal Government can best support the
responsible development of these technologies. This morning,
the Committee will discuss new and developing biotechnologies
enabled by engineering biology research, and their potential
applications in sustainable agriculture, advanced
manufacturing, and bioenergy.
Engineering biology, a term which is used interchangeably
with synthetic biology, is a multidisciplinary field at the
intersection of biological, physical, chemical, and information
sciences and engineering that allows researchers to re-engineer
and develop new biological systems. While human gene editing is
a hot topic of discussion in the public sphere, most of
engineering biology research being done today, even the human
health research, is on microorganisms and plants. Engineering
biology, in addition to enabling whole new industries, may
yield significant environmental and health benefits because of
its potential to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, improve
food security and agricultural land use, make manufacturing
processes much cleaner, combat antibiotic resistance, and even
clean up legacy toxic waste sites.
Today, we will hear from the experts in academia and
industry about the nature of engineering biology research, the
current size of the commercial market and the potential for
growth, how the U.S. stacks up against our foreign competitors,
and the state of the U.S. biotechnology workforce. We will also
hear from scholars on the ethical and security implications of
engineering biology. It is essential that as we look to grow
the U.S. investment in engineering biology R&D (research and
development), we integrate the oversight framework necessary to
protect the public and the environment, and to guard against
national security risks.
In this Committee, it is easy to get excited about the
potential for new technologies. But we need only to look at the
unintended consequences of past technologies to understand that
we also must take a look at the risks.
Given the tremendous economic potential buttressed with the
potential risks for engineering biology R&D, we seek to
maintain U.S. leadership in this area of research and
technological development. We seek to develop and charter a
national strategy as we currently do not have one, in the
meantime, where other countries, including China, are well
ahead of us in establishing engineering biology as a national
priority and providing the necessary funding and political will
to realize these goals.
In this hearing, we will specifically consider the merits
of the Engineering Biology Research and Development Act
introduced last Congress by the Chairwoman of the Full
Committee, Ms. Johnson. The bill would provide a framework for
a strategic and coordinated Federal program in engineering
biology R&D. It is long overdue that we take this legislation
up in Committee.
I am sure today's hearing will give us some good feedback
on how to improve this legislation so it helps ensure U.S.
leadership in engineering biology R&D. I look forward to the
expert testimony and to the discussion.
And with that, I yield back.
[The prepared statement of Chairwoman Stevens follows:]
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Chairwoman Stevens. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Baird for
an opening statement.
Mr. Baird. Thank you and good morning. And thank you,
Chairwoman Stevens. I appreciate the opportunity to be here and
for holding this hearing. I'm looking forward to working with
you on the Research and Technology Subcommittee as the Ranking
Member. I'm also glad that engineering biology and the
bioeconomy is the subject of our first Subcommittee hearing of
the year. In my Central Indiana district, the emerging
bioeconomy presents an opportunity to expand and enable new
markets in agriculture, energy, and manufacturing. From the
basic research that's conducted at Purdue University to the
development and application of that research by the more than
1,700 biology science businesses in the State, Indiana is on
the forefront of the biotechnology innovation.
Humans have used biotechnology since the dawn of
civilization, manipulating biology to improve plants and
animals through hybridization and other methods. Since my days
in the lab working toward my Ph.D. on monogastric nutrition,
there have been rapid advancements in scientific knowledge and
technology that have given rise to the field of modern
biotechnology making useful products to meet human needs and
human demands.
We have a distinguished panel of witnesses today who will
help us understand the state of science and engineering biology
and advise us on how to maintain U.S. leadership in biology
innovation. I particularly want to thank our witness, Dr. Kevin
Solomon, from Purdue University, my alma mater, for being here
today. I'm very interested to learn more about the cutting-edge
research on engineering biology in the gut microbiome of cattle
and other livestock. I hope that today's hearing will help
inform research and a regulatory framework that continues to
ensure safe and ethical development of biotechnology without
stifling innovation.
Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. I yield back.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Baird follows:]
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Chairwoman Stevens. Thank you, Mr. Baird. He's correct. I,
too, am looking forward to working with him on the Subcommittee
for Research and Technology.
The Chair now recognizes the Ranking Member of the Full
Committee, Mr. Lucas, for an opening statement.
Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Chairwoman Stevens, and Ranking
Member Baird for holding this hearing today and thank you to
our witnesses.
In both the House Agriculture Committee and the Science
Committee, we've held hearings on biotechnology research and
regulation for years. But I can't remember a more exciting or
challenging time for the field than today. New gene editing
techniques like CRISPR (clusters of regularly interspaced short
palindromic repeats) and the advancement of rapid genetic
sequencing are driving innovations in agriculture, medicine,
energy, and manufacturing. Since we first began cultivating
crops and breeding livestock, humans have been trying to
improve plant and animal genetics. Now we're developing the
tools to do it with a precision, speed, and scale our ancestors
could not have imagined.
In the Capitol there is a statue of Dr. Norman Borlaug, the
father of the Green Revolution. Dr. Borlaug developed new crop
strains that saved billions from famine and helped develop the
abundant and affordable food supplies we enjoy today. His work
set the stage for modern biotechnology which took off in 1973
when American scientists developed a technique that allowed the
production of genetically engineered human insulin. It was the
first biotech product approved for sale in the United States in
1982 and has improved the lives of millions of diabetics.
In addition to these improvements in agriculture and
medicine, engineering biology could also transform the energy
sector. Scientists are engineering biology to try to address
energy challenges, such as enhanced oil recovery, environmental
remediation, carbon sequestration, and new materials. Several
of our panelists are working in this area, and I look forward
to hearing more about their work. The U.S. was a key driver of
biological innovation in the 20th century. But there is
increasing global competition. Other countries recognize the
benefits of biotechnology and are striving to capture its
potential through new investments and friendly regulations. We
must keep pace and set a research and regulatory framework that
supports innovation, creates a marketplace for new ideas and
products while setting the safety and ethical standards for the
world to follow.
I look forward to working with Chairwoman Johnson to
advance legislation that will promote a national research
strategy around engineering biology to ensure the U.S. remains
the global leader in biotechnology. I hope this hearing will
help inform us about our work on legislation and our work in
the future.
And with that, I yield back, Madam Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Lucas follows:]
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Chairwoman Stevens. Thank you. At this time I would like to
introduce our witnesses. Our first witness, Dr. Rob Carlson, is
the Managing Director of Bioeconomy Capital, a venture capital
firm that invests in industrial biotechnology. He is the author
of Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business
of Engineering Life. Dr. Carlson holds a bachelor's degree in
physics from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in
physics from Princeton.
Our next witness is Dr. Kevin Solomon. Dr. Solomon is an
Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering
at Purdue University. His work focuses on the development of
sustainable microbials, a process to supply the energy,
materials, and medicines of tomorrow. He holds a bachelor's
degree in chemical engineering and bioengineering from McMaster
University in Canada and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from
MIT.
Our third witness, Dr. Eric Hegg, is a Professor of
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University
and is also the Michigan State University Subcontract Lead at
the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, a Department of
Energy-funded research center working to develop sustainable
biofuels and bioproducts. Dr. Hegg holds a bachelor's degree
from Kalamazoo College and a Ph.D. from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
After Dr. Hegg is Dr. Sean Simpson. Dr. Simpson is the
Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder of LanzaTech, a
biotechnology company that converts waste carbon from
industrial processes into commodity chemicals and biofuels. Dr.
Simpson received his master's in science from Nottingham
University and his Ph.D. from the University of York in the
United Kingdom.
Our final witness is Dr. Laurie Zoloth. Dr. Zoloth is the
Margaret E. Burton Professor of Religion and Ethics as well as
a Senior Advisor to the Provost for Programs in Social Ethics
at the University of Chicago. Dr. Zoloth was previously the
President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.
She holds a bachelor's degree in women's studies from the
University of California-Berkeley and received a master's in
Jewish studies and a doctorate in social ethics from the
Graduate Theological Union.
Well, the Chair at this time would like to recognize our
Chairwoman, Ms. Johnson.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. I apologize for being late.
Let me give a quick statement. First, let me welcome all of our
witnesses and thank the Chairwoman and Ranking Member for
holding this hearing.
Today we will hear about engineering biology research--you
can tell I'm out of breath--and its applications in energy,
agriculture, manufacturing, the environment, and human health.
We've invited academic researchers, a small company, as
well as experts on ethics and security implications of
engineering biology to help us understand how we can maintain
U.S. leadership in engineering biology and achieve a
sustainable bioeconomy. Engineering biology research allows
researchers to safely re-engineer existing biological systems
and to learn from and mimic existing biological systems to
perform novel tasks and develop novel materials and products.
Technologies enabled by engineering biology are exciting and
have the potential to solve some of society's greatest
challenges, including providing food for a growing population,
reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, and dramatically
transforming manufacturing. They also have numerous
implications for human health as well as for the environment.
Because of the great promise of this research and its
applications, I introduced the Engineering Biology Research and
Development Act in 2015. By then, several other countries had
already prioritized engineering biology and developed national
strategies for their investments. And I was concerned that the
U.S. risks losing our leadership in an industry that we
historically dominated.
Here we are 4 years later, and instead of pulling together
the expert stakeholders to develop such a strategy, this
current Administration is prompting massive cuts to our science
budgets once again. There's no question that we would cede our
leadership in engineering biology as well as in many other
areas of science and technology if the President's proposed
cuts to this Nation's R&D enterprise were to be enacted into
law.
I intend for this Committee to set us on a more hopeful
path for what and I hope we can work on a bipartisan basis to
ensure that the whole Congress does likewise.
The Engineering Biology Research and Development Act would
establish a framework for greater interagency coordination of
Federal investments in engineering biology and lead to a
national strategy for these investments.
The bill would also focus on expanding public-private
partnerships, and on education and training for the next
generation of engineering biology researchers. Importantly, the
bill would ensure that we address any potential ethical, legal,
environmental, and societal issues associated with engineering
biology. It will also ensure that public engagement and
outreach are an integral part of this research initiative.
The Committee was not given the opportunity to consider and
move this bipartisan piece of legislation since 2015. However,
it is on our agenda this year, and I look forward to working
with our colleagues on both sides of the aisle so we consider
amendments informed by experts and including on today's panel.
A sustainable bioeconomy is central to the future of U.S.
competitiveness and the well-being of our population. And
engineering our way to a sustainable bioeconomy begins with a
national strategy and careful attention to societal
implications.
I once again thank all of our witnesses for being here, and
I look forward to the discussion. And I yield back. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Chairwoman Johnson follows:]
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Chairwoman Stevens. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, of our
Full Committee. If there are any Members who wish to submit
additional opening statements, your statements will be added to
the record at this point.
As our witnesses should know, you each have 5 minutes for
your spoken testimony. Your written testimony will be included
in the record for the hearing. When you all have completed your
spoken testimony, we will begin with questions. Each Member
will have 5 minutes to question the panel.
We will start with Dr. Carlson.
TESTIMONY OF DR. ROB CARLSON,
MANAGING DIRECTOR OF BIOECONOMY CAPITAL
Dr. Carlson. Well, thank you first for having me here. I
appreciate the opportunity to address the Committee and share
what I've learned over the years about the size of the
bioeconomy and how it's changing.
My name is Rob Carlson, and I am the Managing Director at
Bioeconomy Capital in Seattle. We also have offices in San
Francisco. I'm also a Principal at a consulting firm called
Biodesic, which focuses on engineering strategy and security.
And I've just recently rejoined the faculty in an affiliate
position with the Paul Allen School of Computer Science and
Engineering at the University of Washington. But I'm here on
behalf of myself and Bioeconomy Capital today. And I was asked
to share a few slides about what I've discovered about the size
of the bioeconomy. And it's not small.
About 2007 or so I was in Hong Kong on a consulting trip
discussing biofuels and biomaterials, talking to big banks
about investment. And it occurred to me that maybe I should
know how big it was. What was this thing I was talking about?
What was the bioeconomy? And so I was taking a break in the
middle of a thunderstorm in my hotel in Hong Kong, looking out
over the bay. And with a metaphorical and literal flash of
lightning, I realized nobody knew how big it was. I Googled the
size of it, and there was no data. And there ensued about 10
years' worth of effort to try to put some numbers on this. And
I finally published those in 2016 in Nature Biotech. And these
numbers are updated as of this week to 2017.
[Slide]
There's no U.S. Government recordkeeping, statistical
recordkeeping of this information. This is all sort of by hook
and by crook. Wherever I can find data, I put it together and
include it in the publications and then in the accounting that
you see before you.
So biologics are about $137 billion of revenue in the
United States. Those are drugs that are mostly proteins but
also now increasingly some other compounds. Genetically
modified crops and seeds were in 2017 about $104 billion. That
goes up and down of course because crop prices go up and down.
The penetration of genetically modified crops in each of the
markets that they're in is nearly 100 percent, between 90 and
100. It varies a little bit every year.
The big number that surprised me when I first started doing
this, and continues to surprise, is the industrial biotech
sector which people don't usually discuss. That's enzymes and
materials. And overall, I think it's worth noting here that the
worldwide semiconductor revenues in 2016 were $370 billion. So
all of this biotech just in the United States is bigger than
the global semiconductor industry.
The breakdown of those industrial biotech numbers are
interesting to me. The biochemicals portion of that is about
$92 billion. That's business-to-business. So the consumer-level
impact is certainly more than $100 billion. Biofuels in the
U.S. contribute only about $4 billion.
So this is kind of an unheralded section of the economy
that we don't really understand. This is now almost certainly
in the U.S. Government supply chain, certainly in the Defense
Department supply chain. And there's no way to track it.
There's no way to know how big it is. There's no way to know
who's making what or how many people are employed in this
industry other than what private companies choose to share
about that. And I think this is a serious oversight in the way
we're understanding our economy, not that we should be managing
it aggressively but we should certainly be understanding it.
Those revenues have grown quite significantly over the
years. You can see the breakdown here.
[Slide]
The bars are data that I've been able to graph from various
sources over the years, and the industrial data, I should say,
is provided by Agilent the last few years. They're the only
company that's publicly acknowledging a wide marketing study.
But it's a marketing study. It's not based on government
statistics and the way that you would draw on the NAICS, the
North American Industrial Classification System, which is how
we understand the rest of our economy. And then the growth
rates there are shown. All of this is of course in my
testimony. And I won't spend a lot of time on it here, but I'm
happy to answer questions about it as we go forward.
Once you have that data, then you can start comparing the
growth in biotech to the rest of the economy. And it is non-
trivial. All right?
[Slide]
So now we're up at about 2 percent of GDP from
biotechnology. This is from engineered biological systems.
That's bigger than mining. It's bigger than several
construction industries. It's bigger than some manufacturing
subsectors in the United States. And it's quite intriguing
there on that top line to see how much of U.S. GDP growth was
contributed by biotechnology in the recent recession. It's a
more stable industry than many. And again, I wish we understood
this better.
And finally, I'll just close on some observations that
originally were drawn from a Biodefense Net Assessment that I
wrote several years ago trying to understand who was doing what
in the world. And as we've heard from the opening statements,
many countries are investing very heavily. China in particular
is leading out with serious investment and also potentially
with--I think I have one more slide. No. We can discuss China
in the questions.
I'd just close here by saying the definition of bioeconomy
and what we include in our definition clearly is going to be
different from other countries. Last spring at the Global
Bioeconomy Summit the final communique said here's what we
think the bioeconomy is. But really, you can define it however
you like. And that's not super-useful for comparing across
countries. And we should, I think, have a definition that's
consistent over time, and then we can use that also to judge
other countries. So at the moment, we can't know whether we're
winning or losing because we're not measuring anything. But
it's clear that other countries are investing very heavily and
are making some progress.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Carlson follows:]
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Chairwoman Stevens. The Chair now recognizes Dr. Solomon.
TESTIMONY OF DR. KEVIN SOLOMON,
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF AGRICULTURAL AND
BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING, PURDUE UNIVERSITY
Dr. Solomon. Chairwoman Stevens, Ranking Member Baird, and
Members of the Committee, good morning. My name is Kevin
Solomon, and I am an Assistant Professor of Agricultural and
Biological Engineering at Purdue University. Thank you for
inviting me to speak to you today about my work at the
intersection of engineering, synthetic biology, and the
microbiome.
My lab develops microbial systems that have diverse
applications for agriculture, bioenergy, and biomanufacturing.
Our work is currently supported by the National Science
Foundation, and we rely on user facilities provided by the
Department of Energy's Office of Science.
One specific example I would like to share from my work
that showcases a potential of engineering biology has to deal
with our work studying in the microbiomes, the gut microbiomes
of cattle and other livestock. These tiny microbes that live
within these animals, they are critical for digestion and
providing nutrition to the host animal. However, their ability
to degrade its plant material to provide this nutrition also
has an ability to revolutionize bioenergy production.
At the same time, these microbes, they produce antibiotic-
like compounds that we believe may be harnessed into new
medicines in the future. And my lab is very much interested in
understanding, controlling, and imitating these microbes
because they have a potential to naturally enhance food
production in cattle and other livestock, to overcome a key
hurdle in bioenergy, and potentially provide us with new tools
to combat antibiotic resistance.
So based on this example, we can see that engineering
biology research can simultaneously affect multiple domains and
multiple mission areas within the Federal Government. And so
the coordinated Federal Research Program for Engineering
Biology as envisioned by the Engineering Biology and Research
and Development Act of 2019 will enable the U.S. to continue
its leadership in engineering biology.
In my written testimony I elaborate more on the state of
research and training in this area and outline how the bill may
advance these areas. However, I'd like to provide a brief
overview of four key goals that I think the bill should
address.
First, the bill should provide a forum for interagency
collaboration and information sharing as well as multi-agency
funding mechanisms that enable game-changing technologies. The
current funding mission is very mission-driven and relies on
the ability of scientists to correctly match agency needs to
their science, regardless of innovation. A coordinated
framework can help remove these artificial institutional
barriers to innovation and help us better recognize and support
innovating and cross-cutting ideas that will be key to
maintaining the preeminence of American technology. And
hopefully, these mechanisms should consider these ideas for
funding from all relevant agencies.
Second, we should provide sustained research funding to
critical research programs in engineering biology at mission
agencies. So many Federal agencies currently benefit from
engineering biology, and agencies such as the Department of
Energy, NASA, they have selected topics of interest that they
rotate in a 4-year cycle. However, these topics, because
they're not coordinated currently, they may overlap in a given
year which leads to lapses in funding in subsequent years. And
what that does is that those gaps in funding, they discourage
and slow the development of emerging leaders with innovative
ideas and that can cause the U.S. to fall behind, to follow,
rather than lead, in these critical areas. And so a coordinated
framework can help provide a more sustained commitment to
research.
Third, we should ensure a variety of funding mechanisms to
ensure a broad ecosystem of researchers along with focused
multi-disciplinary centers. Major center opportunities are an
important component of the engineering biology ecosystem, as
they act as nexuses for student training, interdisciplinary
research, and commercialization of technology. As a graduate of
one of these, I am an advocate for them. However, it's also
important that individual researchers have the opportunity to
contribute to ensure a broad and healthy ecosystem of research.
And finally, we should also increase U.S. capacity and the
number of people with skills in engineering biology by
providing direct support for experiential training programs.
Currently, student research is essential to preparing the
emerging engineering biology workforce and train the
researchers of the future. For example, within this community,
we have developed and we have embraced the International
Genetically Engineered Machines Competition, or IGEM, which has
trained more than 40,000 students from across the globe. And
these students are high school students, undergraduate, and
also graduate students. Their combined efforts have led to a
number of startups, some of them in excess of a valuation of $1
billion. These student-led teams that engage in authentic
research to solve societal problems; develop critical skills in
leadership, communication, and entrepreneurship; and they learn
key values such as biosecurity, safety, and ethics. Funding
mechanisms for teams that participate in these programs would
be very helpful to sustain these efforts.
In closing, a coordinated initiative in engineering biology
will greatly enhance American competitiveness and innovation.
And I just want to thank you again, the Committee here, for
your work on this important issue and for supporting our
community. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Solomon follows:]
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Chairwoman Stevens. Thank you. The Chair now recognizes Dr.
Hegg.
TESTIMONY OF DR. ERIC HEGG,
PROFESSOR OF BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY,
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY, AND
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY SUBCONTRACT LEAD,
GREAT LAKES BIOENERGY RESEARCH CENTER
Dr. Hegg. It is my honor to testify today on the
opportunities of new and emergent technologies associated with
engineering biology. I am representing myself, and the views I
express are my own.
By way of background, I am a biochemistry professor at
Michigan State University (MSU). And in this role, I've
experienced the critical collaborative partnerships that exist
between the Federal Government and universities. At MSU, DOE
(Department of Energy) and NSF (National Science Foundation)
funding make up approximately 50 percent of the total Federal
research budget. These funds support vital cutting-edge
research, train future scientific leaders, and develop new
economic sectors.
My research focuses on understanding how nature uses metals
to perform difficult transformations. Obtaining a deeper
understanding of nature's strategies may enable us to produce
better catalytic systems for industrial processes. In each of
my research projects, there are clear potential applications in
bioenergy, environmental research, or human health.
It is imperative to remember that in basic research,
discoveries made in one field can provide profound and
unexpected benefits in other areas. It is therefore nearly
impossible to overestimate or predict its full impact on the
economy or quality of life.
In addition to my personal research, I also serve as the
MSU Subcontract lead for the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research
Center (GLBRC) which is administered by the University of
Wisconsin. The GLBRC's mission is to perform the basic research
needed to enable an economically viable and environmentally
sustainable biofuel industry.
Success in this area has the potential to boost future U.S.
energy security, lower greenhouse gas emissions, and create
jobs in rural America. To accomplish this mission, the GLBRC
performs a broad range of research including engineering-
improved bioenergy crops, engineering microbes to convert
biomass into biofuels, and optimizing field-to-product
integration that is crucial to the biofuels industry.
Essentially all GLBRC research focuses on potential
applications, and a large fraction of our research relates to
engineering biology whereby we harness the power of nature to
improve plants and microbes.
GLBRC research and technology has led to over 100 licenses
and options, highlighting industrial relevance of this work and
its impact on the economy.
When performing this research, ethical considerations are
always critical to our decisionmaking process. For example, to
avoid competing with food production, we focus on dedicated
bioenergy crops grown on lands not currently used for farming.
Similarly, we give significant consideration to the plants and
microbes we engineer, especially those that might get deployed
or released into the environment.
Key questions we consider include the possibility of
engineered plants and microbes out-competing native species and
the likelihood and potential ramifications of genes
inadvertently being transferred to other organisms.
Teaching on outreach is a critical mission at land grant
institutions such as MSU. This includes ensuring its students
and the community are educated about the important ethical
considerations of our research. When discussing genetic
engineering in the classroom or to the public, my goal is to
provide information to enable people to make informed decisions
about the risks versus the benefits.
Interest in the biological sciences at MSU has grown
steadily, and students are eager to gain real-world
experiences. Their interest in hands-on research can be seen in
the large number of applications to summer undergraduate
research programs. Competition for these programs is intense,
and typically there are far more qualified applicants than
there is funding. Additional Federal funding would
significantly strengthen these programs. Meaningful research
experiences teach critical thinking, encourage creativity, and
provide vital skills, thereby significantly impacting the size
and quality of the future workforce.
The proposed Engineering Biology Act would enhance the
country's competitive advantage by increasing support for
research and education and accelerating commercialization.
Engineering biology is likely to grow in global economic
importance, and increased interagency coordination can help
ensure U.S. leadership. The coordination proposed in this bill
will be especially powerful as this Subcommittee works closely
with other authorizing committees and agencies that fund
engineering biology research, including the NIH (National
Institutes of Health), DOD (Department of Defense), and USDA
(United States Department of Agriculture). It is imperative,
however, that any new initiatives be supported with a
commensurate level of new funding. In times of tight physical
budgets, it is essential that both investigator-initiated and
center-level efforts be encouraged.
Thank you for this opportunity to testify, and I would be
happy to answer any questions you may have.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Hegg follows:]
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Chairwoman Stevens. Thank you. The Chair now recognizes Dr.
Simpson.
TESTIMONY OF DR. SEAN SIMPSON,
CHIEF SCIENTIFIC OFFICER AND CO-FOUNDER, LANZATECH
Dr. Simpson. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, Members of the
Committee. My name is Sean Simpson. I am the Chief Scientific
Officer and Founder of a startup biotech company called
LanzaTech. We have developed and now commercialized a process
that allows the conversion of wastes and residues into both
biofuels and chemicals. Our process allows emissions from
industry, wastes from society, and waste from agriculture to
all equally be used in the production of fuels that reduce
greenhouse gas emissions and increase local energy security.
The process is biologically based. We have developed
organisms that use gases: Carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and carbon
dioxide as the source of carbonate energy for fuel and chemical
synthesis. This allows us to place a conversion facility at a
steel mill and convert the wastes inevitably produced as a
function of steel manufacture into a low-carbon fuel that
displaces gasoline.
We have commercialized our process and now operate a
facility in China where a waste stream from a steel mill is
used to produce over 46,000 tons annually of fuel ethanol that
enters the local market as a fuel additive. We currently have a
number of commercial prospects. We are commercializing our
process here in the U.S., in California, using agricultural
waste; in Europe, using again a steel mill waste; in India,
using a waste stream from an oil refinery; in South Africa,
using waste from ferroalloy production; and in Japan, using
municipal solid waste. In each case our biology converts these
waste streams into fuel and chemicals that are used in everyday
life.
Through the use of engineered biology, we are able to not
only produce fuels but also an array of important commodity
chemicals. By converting these waste streams in high volumes
into commodity chemicals, we're able not only to add much
greater value to the resources we can process but also achieve
carbon capture and sequestration in everyday materials. Imagine
a world where carbon can be captured and fixed into everyday
plastics, rubbers, and other materials. That is the opportunity
offered by engineered biology.
In our case, we've very excited by the prospects of this
field and have invested heavily in the opportunity to leverage
engineered biology technologies in order to not only improve
the profitability but also the efficiency of our process. We're
also enormously excited by the recognition given to engineered
biology in the Act. One thing we would encourage, however, is
that the Committee recognizes that not all resources that can
be processed by biology come from a biological origin. We
represent a process whereby we can take waste streams produced
by industry that maybe start their life as coal but are used in
industry to produce, say, steel that are emitted as a waste
that can then be converted by biology into a sustainable fuel
or a sustainable chemical. Thereby, we are able to achieve a
degree of circular economic growth not only here in America but
throughout the world through technologies developed here
domestically by biological scientists.
With that, I'd like to thank the Committee and look forward
to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Simpson follows:]
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Chairwoman Stevens. Thank you. The Chair now recognizes Dr.
Zoloth.
TESTIMONY OF DR. LAURIE ZOLOTH,
MARGARET E. BURTON PROFESSOR OF RELIGION AND
ETHICS, AND SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE PROVOST FOR
PROGRAMS IN SOCIAL ETHICS, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Dr. Zoloth. Chairman Stevens, Ranking Member Baird, and
Members of the Subcommittee, my name is Laurie Zoloth. I'm
professor of religion and ethics and senior advisor to the
provost in social ethics at the University of Chicago. And I
want to thank the Committee for asking me to testify about the
ethical issues that arise in the research and the development
of engineering biology and for inviting a scholar of religion
and moral philosophy to your deliberations about science. Now,
I'm going to describe the ethical challenges that will surely
be a part of this research, but I want to say at the beginning
of my testimony that I am very supportive of this basic
science, intrigued by the stunning possibilities it will offer,
and very grateful that your Committee is seriously considering
what I believe is a very strong bill.
When researchers, however, talk about genetics, Americans
begin to worry about probable ethical problems. The first are
the usual questions that genetic alteration of any sort in the
natural world raises. We have begun to think of our DNA as
fundamental to our identity. It is in our DNA, is a common
phrase to describe the values we think are a part of our being
as Americans. So, any changing of this DNA code raises issues
of what can be changed, who should decide, and who has control
over the power to make such changes.
Now, you can point out, as many of you did, that humans
have been breeding plants and animals for millennia and that
engineering biology is not, in principle, different. But still,
we like to think of nature as fixed, as perfectly in balance
and even normative or morally good. And we worry about the
threat of the sanctity of the natural world in this way or the
essential dignity inherent to intact beings to whom we owe
respect.
Safety concerns are also important. Are the projects safe
when used as intended? How dangerous are they when used in
unintended ways and how likely is that to occur? How likely are
mistakes? If harm occurs, is it reversible? And genuine concern
is raised around the issue of informed consent. When biological
engineering projects are intended to affect whole populations
or whole geographies, will the benefits and burdens be
distributed equally within the population? And if not, will the
benefits accrue disproportionately to those already
disadvantaged and burdens to those already disadvantaged. And
to the extent that those new technologies create burdens for
some, will it be accompanied by offsetting policies, whether
economic or social, that ameliorate those effects?
What distinguishes these technologies that affect the
genetic structure of beings is how it alters the very
biological technologies that affect our relationship to
humanity itself and to nature itself. And Americans are
committed to the idea of equality regardless of the situation
of one's birth. And while we know that genetic lottery can
always be unfair, we don't want it to be fixed. We worry about
imbedding the choices we make today across generations. And
linked to this concern are basic ethical questions of justice,
justice and the choice of research goals, in the way that test
as hypothesis, and finally the distribution of the social goods
that emerge from the research.
But a new sort of problem emerges when researchers talk
about making entirely new de novo creations or making synthetic
chemical versions of DNA or creating entirely new living
entities, in essence, using a string of chemicals to make new
life.
This is in principle different from altering already-
existing organisms. Here we confront issues of mastery,
control, and of course profound and unknowable uncertainty. And
here as well, we're going to disagree on issues that can be
fairly called ontological and theological.
Ought we to tremble when we cross such a threshold of human
knowledge? Of course we should. Are we going to worry that
we're going too far and too fast? Of course. But we have ways
to ameliorate these questions.
Ethics asks the question, what is the right act and what
makes it so? It's not a question that emerges from science
itself. But in the past, ethicists have been asked to think
about science projects. When the NIH proposed the mapping of
the human genome, it gave 5 percent of its budget to work on
the ethical, legal, and social implications of the Human Genome
Project. And the ELSI (Ethical, Legal and Social Implications)
Human Genome Project showed that scholars of humanities and law
are very eager to think about science. What is needed now are
incentives for scientists to understand humanities, law, and
policy questions. Young scientists will choose the virtues that
guide them very early in their careers and need to be sure that
they see being honest and humble and just is part of what it
means to be a good scientist. And this means they must study
historical debates about ethics and learn the complexities of
competing moral appeals. We also need to educate bioethicists,
I might add, before they opine on the ethical questions that
such science raises.
We need to regulate this research, and we need to figure
out how to do that. All such research will have enormous
impacts on the human future, and that's why we need the
engineering biology we've heard today, for our future has
serious challenges, a change in climate, a rising need for
energy, and a growing, hungry population. And thus we need both
new technologies and new social policies to regulate them.
We know our world is very closely connected in complex webs
with the smallest form of life. And engineering microorganisms,
new vectors for disease, all moving at the microscopic level,
and all these can be critical to human survival.
Now, the National Academies have been able to structure
some interesting new guidelines, but at stake is how they are
enforced and the regulation. And consideration of whether and
how engineering biology can proceed ethically cannot only be a
discussion among academics or science experts because these big
engineering projects are intended in many cases for widespread
and self-sustained use. Community consent processes have to be
regulated as well. Ideally, mandated citizen stakeholder
engagement should be part of every project that's publicly
funded. And these engagement sessions should start at the
beginning of the projects and should involve a wider reach than
has previously been imagined, including members of trade
unions, parent/teacher associations, rural communities, and
religious and cultural groups.
I suggest that other countries have developed public
discussions about this phase of their science and more
structured leadership about ethics as well. Being a leader in
engineering biology is a tremendous responsibility. It will
mean leadership in ethical, social, legal, and environmental
research as well as in science research. It'll mean creating a
deep and sustained relationship with the larger international
research community that already is frankly ahead of us.
In my testimony, I've recommended a few things, a new Ph.D.
program in ethical decisionmaking, sources or moral appeals,
the history of ethics and science needs to be funded along with
programs for the science itself so the next generation of
scholars in ethics can be trained.
Two, jointly administered Ph.D. and M.A. cohorts will train
scientists in the humanities and social science and humanities
scholars in science.
Three, funding for environmental impact studies in every
project that propose any public use.
Four, public meetings to think carefully about projects
that are more successful if we can expand our ideas about
democracy and inclusion. Our American capacity for democratic
decisionmaking can be an important part of our scientific
leadership plan, but funding for widespread education and
inclusion must reach far beyond the academy.
And finally, norms and regulations created by such forces
as the National Academies must be supported by administrative
regulations that Congress establishes, along with consideration
to the creation of a national oversight committee, both in the
early stages of research and beyond.
The economy, the environment, and the human world in which
we live is shaped by biology, our history, our needs, our
limitations, even our imagination. At stake is how we as a
society will be able to respond to this new challenge, and when
we respond, how we can do so with both courage and thoughtful
humility. Other countries have already matured efforts both in
engineering biology and in the public discussions about their
use. Your efforts will be central to our American response.
Thank you for this bill, and for having the wisdom to
support and the courage to lead.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Zoloth follows:]
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Chairwoman Stevens. Thank you. Thank you to our expert
panel and our witnesses who've joined us today. This is one of
the privileges of this job, which is to bring forward your
voices and your testimony.
At this point, we will begin our first round of questions.
And the Chair recognizes herself for 5 minutes. In that vein,
allow me to say that your expert testimony means a lot to our
Committee and our work. As somebody who has a master's in
philosophy and spent a lot of time in bioethics, it is
certainly a delight to have a philosopher in the room helping
manage some of the bigger questions and implications as it
pertains to biotechnology.
Dr. Hegg, according to Dr. Carlson's testimony,
biotechnology already makes up at least 2 percent of the total
U.S. GDP, and it is expected to surge in the coming years. And
we recognize what we need to do with the NAICS codes, by the
way.
Areas that have greatly benefited in terms of job creation
areas, meaning our regions across the United States, tend to be
on the coast, San Francisco Bay Area and Boston. And not
surprisingly, much of the academic research also tends to be
concentrated in these areas along with engineering biology
student populations that become part of the bioeconomy
workforce. However, the needs and opportunities and brain power
are significant across our Nation. What role, Dr. Hegg, can the
Federal Government play in facilitating the growth and
expansion of research centers and industry to other areas
across our country including the Midwest?
Dr. Hegg. Well, I think that as I noted in the testimony
that one of the most important roles the Federal Government can
play is to continue to support basic research at multiple
levels. I specifically talked about the undergraduate level and
the importance of this hands-on research that students can
obtain and the real-world knowledge that that can impart and
how that can then be transferred to not only a thriving
workforce but also one that has the skills necessary to compete
in today's global economy.
At the same time, I think that increased level of support
for basic research can also greatly impact graduate students,
graduate studies. These are the people that go on and
ultimately start their own companies, perform their own
research, and lead to the technologies which are the beginning
of new economic sectors.
So in short, I would say simply continuing to support basic
research and especially understanding the role that the
undergraduate as well as the graduate students play.
Chairwoman Stevens. Thank you. And Dr. Solomon sort of
mentioned this as well in his remarks, but I'd love to hear
from you, Dr. Hegg, on how well-suited is our training
infrastructure is in the United States to prepare the workforce
for a sustainable bioeconomy?
Dr. Hegg. I think that our infrastructure is actually
pretty good. I think we have the infrastructure that we need. I
think we have a faculty, people who want to teach and who can
do what we need to do.
What perhaps is lacking sometimes is the funds to support
their efforts. And for a relatively modest investment, we can
have a huge influence on the students, both undergraduate and
the graduate level. We heard about IGEM, which is a really
important program and has continued to grow. And I now believe
it has teams from over 80 countries. That is just one example
of students who want to get into this field and who want to
solve real-world problems.
So I think we have the infrastructure. We just need to make
sure that we continue to support it so that it can live up to
its potential.
Chairwoman Stevens. Thank you. I have one last question but
I also have something that I wanted to say which is as someone
who spent their career in manufacturing innovation, focused on
the skills gap, you know, certainly very inspired by the
programs and the work that you all are leading from, you know,
an early stage and some of the continuity that we need to see
and workforce training.
I think if there's, you know--the last question I might
have would be just around some deep thinking around any gaps
that we might have in educational programming or development?
Anything we might be missing in terms of workforce training,
particularly if there are jobs going unfilled. We're all quite
familiar with the demand and oftentimes the dogfight for
technology talent. And it's multi-disciplinary, which poses
some challenges. So if you have anything else to add on that,
I'd certainly--we'd love to hear that.
Dr. Hegg. I honestly cannot think of any obvious gaps that
we have. I think certainly at the large research institutions
that I've been involved in, we're very broad and importantly,
the technologies and the research that we're doing often
impacts multiple areas. And you can see that for instance in
some of the crops that we're working on. They can be important
not only as bioenergy crops but also important for forage crops
as well.
And so you can see these multi-use research opportunities,
and I think we do a pretty good job. Thank you.
Chairwoman Stevens. Great. Thank you. I now recognize Mr.
Baird for 5 minutes.
Mr. Baird. Thank you, Chairwoman. And again, I appreciate
this. My difficulty's going to be trying not to delve too deep
in some of the conversations that we've had but I'll try to
avoid that.
Dr. Solomon, you mentioned several potential applications
for your research in the gut microbiome of cattle and other
livestock. Could you elaborate on that? Because I'd like to,
the next step after you discuss the process, then I want to
know what kind of challenges you foresee in translating your
research into products and solutions.
Dr. Solomon. So just to recap, I work with microbes that we
can find in cattle, sheep, and other ruminants and hindgut
fermenters. What they do is they break down the ingested plant
material and help other microbes digest that in a way that
allows them to provide nutrition to the host animal.
They also produce a number of compounds that essentially
control which microbes are present, and what they do and the
specific identities of those microbes and how many of them
there are lead to have an impact on how healthy an animal will
be. And so my research tries to understand this and tries to
understand how to control this.
Specific challenges that I see is that as we've discussed
right now, the implications of that research, at least from
that dimension are very clearly agricultural. However, the way
that our funding system is set up, for example, different
agencies, they tend to prioritize technologies at different
levels of readiness. And so fundamental basic science such as
this can be difficult to fund in this environment.
And so trying to have a more coordinated framework that has
an eye toward these more long-term outcomes I think would be
very beneficial.
Mr. Baird. Thank you. Second question would relate to gene
editing and the gene editing technology. This is for you, too,
Dr. Solomon. I'm sorry about that but anyway. And it relates to
cross-breeding and hybridization techniques that we've used for
years in agriculture. So how does that relate to what we're
doing with this gene editing technology in your view?
Dr. Solomon. So what I think gene editing allows us to do
is that it allows us to do these things more effectively and
more rapidly than we've ever been able to do before. I think in
the past, biological research has enabled us to do these things
in a controlled fashion. However, at the end of the day, you
get what you get. With the techniques that we have available to
us, we can actually custom print DNA sequences, and we can
actually do this with such precision that these advances can
happen in a matter of weeks, months, as opposed to years which
is what has happened in the past.
Mr. Baird. So we're running close on time. So the one last
question, if I may----
Chairwoman Stevens. Certainly.
Mr. Baird. I might have each one of you respond briefly to
the idea that the United States and Europe does have some
differences in terms of their interpretation of regulations and
policies relating to biotechnology. Could you just quickly give
us a feel for that, how that might impact some of the products
that we could produce from these processes?
Dr. Carlson. Well, just to start, it will have an impact,
and certainly some of the companies that we have invested in
are seeing a more challenging regulatory environment in Europe
than in the United States. And that's of course because the
precautionary principle is built into the European Union's
fundamental structure. And they have to be cautious. They have
to move very slowly. And that will impact our ability to sell
to them, but also it will slow them down. You know, there are
companies leaving Europe simply because they can't get anything
done and have no hope of selling what they make there.
Mr. Baird. Thank you. Dr. Solomon?
Dr. Solomon. I mean, I'm not sure I have much else to add
beyond what Dr. Carlson said, other than--I think in this new
and exciting space, I think that we have not agreed on what
definitions are. And so for example, if we take GMO
(genetically modified organism), what would be GMO and safe in
the U.S. might not be GMO and safe in Europe and vice versa.
And I think until we harmonize and agree on those definitions,
there's always going to be some friction as to what can and
cannot be sold.
Mr. Baird. Dr. Hegg?
Dr. Hegg. I think one of the most important things that we
can do to help alleviate this problem across the globe is to
continue to provide the information that people need to make
informed decisions. And I think that's where higher education
can be critical. And so I think we need to continue to do it
here in this country and I think it also probably needs to be
done for instance in Europe as well. I think many of the
decisions that are being made are sometimes made by people who
are ill-informed about the subject matter at hand. So I think
education will be critical across the globe.
Dr. Simpson. While there are clear differences in terms of
opinion and legislation regarding genetically modified
organisms between Europe and the U.S., the area that actually
impacts us as a company commercializing biotechnologies, is for
example regulations around what constitutes a renewable or low-
carbon fuel. For example, in the U.S. the renewable fuel
standard dictates what a biofuel may be produced from. It
basically says that it has to be made from a plant material. In
Europe, rather than dictating what a fuel should be made from,
legislation now seeks to define what the outcome of the
production of the fuel should reflect, i.e., a degree of carbon
reduction or carbon emission reduction.
And so now in the U.S., legislation in this field is
somewhat dictatorial in terms of defining what resources can be
used, and in that sense, in my view, is somewhat anti-
innovation because it takes away the power of innovators to
develop new ideas with new resources to achieve the outcome
that I think legislators had in their mind. Whereas in Europe,
the legislation is somewhat more technology-agnostic and so is
leaving the field more open for innovators to develop new ways
to harness available, lost-cost resources for the production of
renewable or low-carbon fuels. Thank you.
Dr. Zoloth. There are two reasons why it's a different
climate in Europe. One of them is the precautionary principle
that grew out of German romanticism and German idealism that
says don't do anything unless you can prove that it won't make
the world worse. And Americans don't like that principle.
American philosophers are pragmatists, and we think that the
way that things are now is also bad. And so making an
improvement is just a matter of going forward, in either a
world with improvement or a world without. So we use a risk-
benefit analysis, a very different kind of philosophy.
But additionally, Europe is tremendously affected by the
Shoah, the Holocaust, where the German scientists, who were in
the lead especially in the chemical industry, saw their,
despite their technological prowess, they were ethically
bankrupt. And of course, that tragedy means people are very
cautious, especially in the E.U. in general and German as
leaders in particular.
Now, the U.K. in looking at this sees the E.U. environment
as so potentially restrictive that the House of Lords had a
committee hearing very much like the one you're having here
today, that worried about this same question. How can the
British scientists move forward when they're very close to a
restrictive atmosphere in Europe? And the same conversation
happens in the U.K. as it does in the United States relative to
the much more restrictive environment in the E.U. And that's
played out in terms of the use of GMOs, GMO crops, which have
been banned in many cases in the E.U. and their trading
partners but not in the United States.
So that comes at a very different history, and I think that
history is something we can build on.
Mr. Baird. Thank you. I yield back.
Chairwoman Stevens. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Foster for
5 minutes.
Mr. Foster. Thank you, Ms. Chairman, for having this
hearing. There appear to be two major threads in bioengineered
products. One of them is low-valued fuels which will rely
importantly on things like a carbon tax, price on carbon
emissions. The second one is unique, high-valued products. As
an example of this, I think of Dr. Carlson's testimony. You
were talking about a modified PMMA (polymethyl methacrylate)
with better properties than normal Plexiglas that might
uniquely be able to be produced through biochemical means.
And so my questions there is I guess first to Dr. Simpson.
Assuming you have an optimal price on carbon emissions rather
than one targeting specific crops, what is the range of the
price on carbon to which the state-of-the-art in biotechnology
would allow you to be commercially viable with a simple carbon
price alone? How close are you right now?
Dr. Simpson. So right now, we are operating commercially in
an environment where there is no price on carbon. So we produce
fuel ethanol in China. There is no price on carbon in China,
and we're able to operate entirely viably. The plant that we
constructed has a 3-year payback period. So this allows us--
because of the inputs we're able to leverage are themselves
very low cost. Our advantage because they are low cost, they
are non-commodity, and they're found in a single location.
They're not food, and they're essentially industry waste with
no other value other than to be burned as power. We're able to
produce----
Mr. Foster. Oh, so they're not for example just pure carbon
dioxide? They have a significant energy content in carbon
monoxide or hydrogen or similar.
Dr. Simpson. Exactly.
Mr. Foster. OK. So that those are not going to be available
on as wide a scale as carbon dioxide would be, for example?
Dr. Simpson. Carbon dioxide is certainly available in
extraordinarily high volumes. But carbon dioxide can also be
leveraged in the context of technologies like electrolysis
which would allow you to produce hydrogen from, for example,
sustainable power to leverage carbon dioxide. However, I would
say that the resources that can be converted into carbon
monoxide and hydrogen are broad and widely available.
Mr. Foster. Do you have an estimate of what fraction of
carbon emissions could be--if you could capture 100 percent of
energetically viable carbon emissions----
Dr. Simpson. Certainly. So if we----
Mr. Foster [continuing]. What fraction is that?
Dr. Simpson. If we were able to capture, for example, all
the emissions from the steel industry, all the emissions from
refineries and convert all available agricultural residues, we
estimate that we could produce over 700 billion gallons of fuel
annually.
Mr. Foster. And what----
Dr. Simpson. To put that into context, the current global
production of fuel ethanol sits around 26 billion gallons. So
this would allow us to displace something like 33 to 35 percent
of global transport fuels using emissions or wastes from
industry, society, and agriculture.
Mr. Foster. And so I guess Dr. Carlson, can you say a
little bit about the outlook for specialty chemicals that are
uniquely provided by biochemical means?
Dr. Carlson. I can. It's spectacular. One thing that I
didn't point out during the first part of my testimony is that
roughly $100 billion in biochemicals are already out there in
the market. That's somewhere between 1/7 and maybe a quarter of
the total chemical sales in the United States. So already
biochemicals are a massive contributor to the chemicals
industry, and we just don't know it because we don't measure
it.
I'd really like to have a better understanding of what that
number is because those are chemicals that are as best I can
tell just already out-competing petrochemicals on price and
performance. And then as we learn to better engineer
materials--whether that's concatenating unique unichemical
operations that enzymes can perform naturally to make new
chemicals or as our company is doing now to design enzymes that
have never existed before that create chemical operations that
have never existed before to manufacture compounds in biology
that have never existed before but that have been sought for
quite some time--the world is going to start to look very
different.
So the set of chemicals that we can make right now using
synthetic chemistry is actually quite small compared to what
we'd like to make, and the universe opens up as we learn to
make those using biology.
Mr. Foster. Yes. And I guess one of the things that's
opening that up is the whole CRISPR-Cas9, you know, revolution.
I guess I'd like a shout-out to the--tomorrow we're going to
have Jennifer Doudna, the inventor or the co-inventor of the
CRISPR-Cas9 system here in Congress for an R&D caucus briefing
to staff members. So any staff members interested, it's I think
at 10:30 tomorrow, along with the Biophysical Society having
that.
And if I could just close quickly, the whole issue with
human genetic engineering is something that has been--I think
we had our best-ever attended hearing of the Science Committee
when we brought up--we had Jennifer here to talk about human
genetic engineering. I think it was ironic that the National
Academy study, the second one, was the venue at which the
Chinese announced that they had genetically engineered a child.
So this has gone from sort of fringe speculation to something
that exists that we have to deal with.
So I guess, if I could ask you one question, is there any
alternative to very intrusive international regulation to
prevent the abuse of things like human genetic engineering or,
you know, bioweapons?
Dr. Zoloth. Genetic engineering for reproductive purposes
and bioweapons are two different kinds of discussions. But I
can just say that nearly everybody else on the planet, except
for one rogue scientist in China, was abiding by a very
carefully constructed moratorium crafted by the National
Academies of three countries. And that moratorium was honored
but not fully understood, clearly by this man. And so we have
yet to see those babies. So it's unclear how real the story is.
But let's just say it is. He was promptly disciplined by and
carefully disciplined by the scientific community of China and
the ethical community of China.
So it did show that if you violate the moratorium, there
would be significant repercussions. And people who gave him
advice are also being reviewed very, very carefully and strong
sanctions will be taken I think in those cases and certainly
strong academic approbation will be directed to the people who
gave him that terrible advice or didn't disclose what he was
doing.
Is there anything to prevent this? Reproductive uses of
CRISPR technology always needs a woman to agree to become
pregnant to give birth to a child at tremendous risk. There's
no way to do that safely. There's no way to construct a phase
one clinical trial with safety. And so ethicists have long
opposed this so safety standards could be demonstrated much
more carefully. And that's a long way off.
For biotechnology for weaponry is a much more sobering
discussion. I know Dr. Carlson has spent a lot of time thinking
about that. We want scientists to be good not only technically,
but morally. My job as an ethicist is to train them to know
that you ought never do harm with your science and that every
gesture of science is a profound moral gesture as well as an
interesting scientific gesture. And it's my hope, my fond,
optimistic hope, that if you train someone to be moral and
ethical and responsible and responsible to his or her
colleagues as well, they would never think about using their
technologies for nefarious purposes. But these are powerful
technologies, and they're self-sustaining. And careful
consideration has to be put in place in addition to ethics
training for the regulation of those technologies.
Mr. Foster. Yes. And unfortunately, I think one of the
lessons I take away from computer viruses is that everything
bad that can be done has been done with computer malware. And
the fact that there's a very small footprint for these
laboratories now and shrinking footprint is a cause for
concern. You know, I urge all of my colleagues to have the
classified briefing on the technology.
And I am past my time so if--all right.
Chairwoman Stevens. You can do a second.
Mr. Foster. OK. So we're having a second round?
Chairwoman Stevens. Yes.
Mr. Foster. Great. Wonderful. Yield back.
Chairwoman Stevens. Yes, we'll go. We'll do it. The Chair
now recognizes Mr. Gonzalez for 5 minutes.
Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you
everybody for being here today. I'll get to you, Dr. Carlson. I
have a similar line of question. I saw your hand up.
So just thank you everybody for being here. The topic
discussed today is of great importance to Northeast Ohio. I
share Madam Chair's sentiment that we need more science and
technology development in the Midwest where I'm proudly from.
Research in the polymer sciences has allowed the University of
Akron to become a world-renowned institution in this field.
From the invention of cheap spectrometers to measure the amount
of nutrients responsible for algae growth in local water
systems like Lake Erie to development of materials to preserve
proteins in medicine, these are just two examples of the
incredible research and development that the University is
conducting but very important.
So when I think of these technologies, I kind of think of
three things or three questions essentially. One, are we
leading? Two, how quickly can we commercialize? And then three,
how are we on security and maintaining standards across the
world?
First, Dr. Simpson, before we get into the bioweaponry,
carbon capture. Can you talk briefly about sort of what percent
of carbon you are able to capture and repurpose? And then how
your technology has developed over time, so kind of when I
started it looked like this and now we are able to do the why
if that makes sense.
Dr. Simpson. So when we started our company in 2005, at
that time our technology literally existed in a test tube. And
over the intervening years we've developed not only the biology
but the engineering allowing gas fermentation and now offer as
a commercial package, a full industrial process allowing the
conversion of carbon monoxide, carbon monoxide-hydrogen, and
carbon monoxide-hydrogen-carbon dioxide gas streams into fuels
and chemicals. What does this mean physically? It's a facility
that literally is like putting a brewery on the back end of--
for example a steel mill comprising multiple reactors that
stand around 100 feet high and several feet in diameter in
which gases are converted microbially to, in the first
instance, fuel ethanol, but subsequently we'll be able to
produce chemicals in those same facilities.
In terms of percentage of carbon, it really depends on the
input gas. The more hydrogen we have in our gas, the more
carbon in that gas stream we fix. For example, we are now
constructing a facility that converts a waste stream produced
by an oil refinery in India. In that process, 50 percent of the
carbon in the product comes from CO2. At a steel
mill, there is no hydrogen. Our process simply converts carbon
monoxide into fuels and chemicals. And in that case, we convert
carbon monoxide.
Mr. Gonzalez. Got it. And then you mention carbon doesn't
have a price in China. And quickly, if we did price carbon,
what would that do to your business model?
Dr. Simpson. That would greatly accelerate our business
model, I'll say that. I mean, just to be clear, one cannot
raise money on legislation that doesn't exist.
Mr. Gonzalez. Right.
Dr. Simpson. So as a company, we are commercializing a
process to build commercial, commercially viable plants today
in the current legislative environment, and we are without
reliance on a carbon tax. A carbon tax would be a wonderful
thing for this entire industry, but we cannot raise money on
that and we are not commercializing our process on the basis of
its existence.
Mr. Gonzalez. Got it. And then switching to Dr. Carlson, so
it looked like you had your hand up on the bioweaponry. I just
want to turn you loose. So what were you going to say? Go for
it.
Dr. Carlson. Well, I was going to observe that science is a
human enterprise full of humans, and humans are going to do
everything they have in science that they've done throughout
history. And they're going to make bad decisions. They're going
to misuse the technology.
My read on what happened in China is that the approbation
was not uniform. There was some celebration by parts of the
government before other parts of the government shouted them
down. And I think what I want to observe there is that whatever
standards we think we hold ourselves to are not the same
standards, not the same decisionmaking processes that other
countries have. And they're going to go off on their own
because they can.
Mr. Gonzalez. Yes. Thank you. I tend to agree. When it
comes to these sorts of technologies, I share that sentiment.
Sure, there were some who later on maybe said, hey, we
shouldn't have done this. Frankly, I don't believe that's
something we can trust and put our faith in going forward. So I
yield back. Thank you.
Chairwoman Stevens. It's clear the Science Committee is the
best-kept secret in Congress.
Mr. Gonzalez. It's true.
Chairwoman Stevens. And with that, the Chair would like to
recognize Mr. Tonko for 5 minutes.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Chairwoman Stevens and Ranking Member
Baird, for hosting this discussion. I think it's so very
important. Congratulations to you, Chairwoman Stevens, on
assuming this leadership of a Subcommittee that bears great
relevance to the strength and future of this country. And to
the panel, what a great group of individuals who are sharing
great intellect. So thank you for joining us today.
Bioscience and biotechnology are exciting fields that offer
the promise of life-changing applications across many fields.
The Federal Government is uniquely positioned to lead the way
in investing in high-impact research and partnering with
universities and industry to innovate. These fields are moving
forward in exciting ways in my district. For example, the NSF
funded a research experience for undergraduates at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, RPI to most of us. That allowed RPI to
engage a diverse cohort of students in bioengineering and
biomanufacturing research projects with an intellectual focus
on engineering, biological systems, and biomanufacturing
related to biomedical, chemical, and/or biological engineering.
This integrated training experience guided undergraduate
students recruited from underrepresented groups from non-
research-intensive schools through a research project while
also helping them understand how they could pursue an
engineering career. I'm also proud to have RPI part of the
National Institute for Innovation in manufacturing
biopharmaceuticals, a public/private partnership to advance
U.S. leadership in biopharmaceuticals. This partnership, led by
the University of Delaware, is advancing U.S. leadership in the
biopharmaceutical industry fostering economic development,
improving medical treatments, and ensuring a qualified
workforce by collaborating with educational institutions to
develop new training programs matched to specific biopharma
skill needs.
The Federal Government should continue these critical
investments that strengthen our future workforce while also
funding important research in these fields. We must not let the
U.S. fall behind in our commitment to lead in scientific
exploration and technology development or risk taking a back
seat to nations which do make such innovation a top priority.
So to any and all on the panel, one synthetic biology
breakthrough that got a lot of attention 2 years ago is
synthetic spider silk, which researchers at the University of
Cambridge created to mimic the strength, stretchiness, and
energy-absorbing capacity of real spider silk. The same year a
California-based startup called Bolt Threads debuted its own
bioengineered spider silk men's tie. They now sell an entire
clothing line. They started, by the way, with SBIR (Small
Business Innovation Research) funding from the National Science
Foundation.
What's the most unexpected or most weird application of
engineering biology that any of you has encountered?
Dr. Carlson. Well, there are many of them, actually. And I
could, you know, go on for hours. I don't think you want me to
do that here but----
Mr. Tonko. Yes, just a sampling, if you could quickly.
Dr. Carlson. I'd like to just shout out to the Microsoft
digital DNA information storage project that I am fortunate to
work on as a consultant. So rather than storing information on
magnetic tapes or CDs or in flash drives, that will soon become
impractical given the amount of information that we're
generating on a daily basis and need to store, whether it's
photographs or government records or, you know, your Facebook
profile, whatever that may be. And we need something else. And
it turns out that biology has provided us with a beautiful and
perfect storage media, that is, DNA. We can now read and write
DNA. When they asked me to join this project, because I had
been around for a while and Iknow some things about reading and
writing DNA, and the economics and the pace of that, I thought
itwas a bit of lark. I thought, sure. It's a nice consulting
gig and you know, I'll learn some things. I can hang out with
some smart students. A couple of years later, it's going
incredibly well. It's moving very rapidly, and I'm convinced
that we not only will do this, we must do it. We will be
changing our entire data storage industry over to look
something like biology because it works. And you know, an
entire data center storing a good fraction of the internet can
be the size of a sugar cube of DNA. And that is opening my mind
to all kinds of new applications because we can also now
compute directly on that DNA using other molecules which has
been a goal, sort of a science fiction story for a long time.
But it's now a reality in that group. And I'm having trouble,
you know, even just conceiving of the limits of that once we
get it going.
Mr. Tonko. Madam Chairwoman, can I just ask that the other
four just give us an example, please? I'm out of time, but I
would love to hear from them, please.
Dr. Solomon. OK. So an example that I think is really
fascinating, as of now I'm not aware if it's actually been
commercialized yet, but there's been some talk about using
plants as sentinels in public spaces. And so for example, we're
increasingly faced by a number of threats, both biological and
explosive. However, plants have an ability to naturally breathe
and respire. And so they can sample--they beautify public
spaces. They can sample the air, and they can sample these
particles. And in some cases, they can actually tell us if a
threat is possible.
I think it's amazing to imagine that you could walk in the
airport and rather than going through the very elaborate TSA
screening that you go through right now, you just walk by a
tree. It makes the space look beautiful, and if there's
something wrong, it will alert you.
That's one of the more wacky things that I think I've come
across.
Dr. Hegg. I don't know if I would--it's certainly not wacky
but it certainly impresses me a lot and that is trees, again,
keeping on that theme. These are trees where lignin, which is a
structural polymer of the tree, has been engineered to break
down very easily when under certain conditions. And so it still
holds its structure and the tree is still happy and healthy.
Except when we put it under certain conditions, then this
complex polymer can break down easily into its components which
can then be--not only then does that release the sugars and
allow us to make fuels but also the lining itself can be used
to make various polymers or fuels as well. And this has
applications not only in obviously the biofuels but also in the
pulp and paper industry.
Dr. Simpson. One area that I've always been fascinated by
is the ability of biology to accumulate the things that it
requires for life as it goes through environments and how we
can use that to recover and recycle material. So there are now
companies that use the ability of microbes to adhere or absorb
specific high-value elements, like platinum or gold or others
to actually recover the precious metals from electronic waste.
So going forward, when one discards a phone, those printed
circuit boards will be ground up and the precious metals
contained therein will be recovered by microbes that have the
specific ability to I guess attract those metals so that we can
recover them and recycle them and reuse them.
Dr. Zoloth. So one serious and one amusing example. So the
serious one is that the most rapidly growing disease is dengue
fever. And malaria, for instance, that we had been able to
address malaria and change the death rate from 1 million a year
to 1/2 million a year has stalled. And the reason these
diseases are hard to fight is because we're using 19th century
tools, right? So there's nothing--bed nets are failing a little
bit. The vaccines were hard to do. But genetically engineering
mosquitos so that the population changes holds enormous
potential for very intractable diseases. These are called gene
drives. And I'm very interested in them because they have
tremendous, interesting ethical issues. But also they could
really transform how these intractable diseases can be
addressed.
And why this is important for Americans is because the
climate's changing. In a city like Los Angeles, my hometown,
Los Angeles, or all of Florida has a lot of mosquitoes and has
anopheles mosquitoes which do carry malaria, right? So malaria
used to be one of the leading causes of death in this country,
and we managed to eliminate it with 19th century tools, 18th
century tools. Now we're going to need 21st century tools, and
these genetically engineered mosquitoes represent that kind of
impulse.
And the funny example is about cotton. You know how bread
mold makes a gray, furry sort of mat on your--but if you could
transform the yeast as the French have done and put in a little
genetic cassette that makes the fibers cotton instead of furry
gray stuff, you can make sheets of cotton. Cotton's a very
difficult crop to grow. It's a big plant, small, little tufts,
and it uses 50 percent of all the water used in agriculture.
But if you could make cotton in sheets by yeast instead of in
plants, you could save enormous amounts of water. It would be
better for the environment. And they make very pretty clothes,
I must say.
Mr. Tonko. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. I guess what
appears silly or far-fetched at times can bear great relevance.
With that, I yield back.
Chairwoman Stevens. Absolutely. Thank you. The Chair would
now like to recognize Mr. Marshall for 5 minutes.
Mr. Marshall. Thank you so much, Chairwoman. You know, as a
biochemistry major from the Big 12 basketball champion, Kansas
State University, this biotechnology is always quite intriguing
to me. And perhaps nothing has been more impacted than the
ethanol and biofuels industry. So it's certainly something I've
kept a close eye on.
I'm amazed what we can do today. We can grow a bushel of
corn with 40 percent less land and 50 percent less water than
we used to. And I'm impressed the impact that ethanol has made
on the United States. We've decreased greenhouse emissions by
about 43 percent. We have the potential to decrease it by 76
percent. Cellulosic fuel has the potential to decrease
greenhouse gas emissions by 100 percent. I've been told that
it's the equivalent of removing 124 million cars from the road.
So I'm pretty proud of what the ethanol and the biofuels
industry has done.
But despite this, there seems to be barriers for ethanol
coming to the market. And I'm just wondering if anybody on the
panel can speak to that? Dr. Solomon, you have any comments on
why we have access problems for the biofuels?
Dr. Solomon. So I can only speak to the technical
challenges. I think one of the barriers for cellulosic biofuels
is just the cost of breaking down raw plant material into
sugars that we can then ferment into ethanol. And I think as
the price of oil has dropped, that has become even less
competitive than has been in the past, which is why you're
seeing a slow-down in uptake. And that is part of what my
research tries to address. I mean, the same microbes that
provide nutrition to animals, they are also the same type of
organisms that actually break down these materials. And they
provide the enzymes to do so.
And so for my part, what we're looking at is trying to
understand how these unique microbes that we have, how they do
it better than the current existing technologies do. And we're
developing approaches to actually manipulate them. So rather
than complex bioprocessing, where we have a cost associated
with breaking down lignin cellulose and then the cost with
upgrading it, can we get some efficiency by combining those two
steps in a single organism? Can we engineer the one organism--
--
Mr. Marshall. Sure.
Dr. Solomon [continuing]. To go directly from grass to fuel
rather than having to essentially take out the middle man?
Mr. Marshall. Dr. Carlson, any thoughts on some of the
barriers to market?
Dr. Carlson. Well, I think there are several. One is
ethanol is a complicated molecule to dump into an engine. And
so even though lots of engines today are supposedly flex fuel
and can handle ethanol, it's the wrong kind of solvent is the
right way to say that, I guess. And if you look at Brazil's
experience, you know, they are people who like to drive 100
percent ethanol cars and people who like to drive 100 percent
gas cars. But it's hard to mix those two very effectively on a
day-to-day basis. So that's nothing to do with ethanol
manufacture. It has everything to do with the way cars work. So
that's one thought.
And then another, again, back to the oil price, is that
there are certainly months now, if you look at the month-to-
month fluctuations in the cost of corn and the cost of ethanol,
the price of oil where it costs more to buy the corn to make
ethanol than you can sell the ethanol for, which is a problem
we can't solve by making better ethanol from corn just because
corn costs so much. But I would observe that what I hope
happens in the future is we shift from making ethanol to
higher-value compounds. So we use something like 30 percent of
our corn crop in the United States for industrial use, one way
or another. A lot of that's ethanol which sells for give or
take a buck a gallon, a buck a liter maybe, somewhere in that
range. Wouldn't it be nice if we had technology that could
upgrade that to something that's sold for $10 a liter or $100 a
liter? So that's getting more toward that $100 billion in
biochemicals that those are higher-end chemicals rather than
competing at the low end of the barrel, as ethanol does with
fuel. So my recommendation would be, you know, as part of the
bill to really think about how to facilitate the use of crops
that right now are commodities. We're great at growing those in
the States as you say. But rather than aim the product at, you
know, something that's a commodity, low end of the barrel, aim
it at something that's much more useful for higher-value
products.
Mr. Marshall. OK. I've got 20 seconds left. I guess I'll
yield back the end of my time. Thank you.
Chairwoman Stevens. Thank you. We're now going to move into
a second round of questions. So the Chair is going to recognize
herself again. And the question is for Dr. Carlson and Dr.
Simpson. To sustain job creation and U.S. leadership in the
bioeconomy and our innovative biotechnologies, we must look to
protect against forced technology transfer, industrial
espionage, and theft. And as Dr. Carlson and others have noted,
a number of other nations have launched sustained and effective
efforts to build their own bioeconomies and biotechnology
transfer activities.
In the meantime, tensions have flared between the U.S. and
China in particular regarding trade policies and intellectual
property protections. The U.S. has benefited historically from
scientific collaboration, even with some of our adversaries.
And there remains legitimate concerns that an overly
protectionist approach might also hinder innovation.
So what should the U.S. Government look to do to strike the
right balance between protecting the fruits of our innovation
while also supporting the growth of industry?
Dr. Carlson. Well, I'd like to answer that question two
ways. The first is to look back to a report on how the internet
developed and how the funding for the internet developed called
Funding a Revolution. That was a National Research Council
study many years ago. And it broke down where the money came
from to build products that wound up in the world. And there
were roughly three buckets' worth of funding. One is research,
one is development, and we'll call the other one productizing.
And research, fundamental research, is about 1 percent of the
contribution of the final cost or the final total investment.
The development showing that it can become a product is about
10 percent. The other 90 percent is the hard work of basically
putting it in a box and turning it into something that somebody
wants to buy and use.
I'm a great fan of looking back in history to understand
the future of biotechnology. And that 1/10/90 rule seems to
hold true for many of the industries that have developed in the
U.S. The U.S. Government provided not just a large chunk of
that 10 percent in development, it provides almost all of the 1
percent. So that also is largely true for biotechnologies. The
U.S. Government taxpayers are funding a huge amount of the
basic research that eventually results in products, even if
companies are funding a lot of the development down the road.
And so I think we should pay a lot more attention to what
happens to the products of those research, when they become
starvers, when they become big companies, in effect. If you
look at the way China, for example, has dealt with its own
research agenda, it doesn't spend that much on basic research.
Instead, it appears to be a farming mat task-out to the United
States.
So there's a great deal of acquisition or had been.
Thankfully this is now coming to a sudden halt. A great deal of
acquisition by Chinese companies, many of which appear to have
close relationships with the Chinese government to acquire U.S.
taxpayer-funded technology and deliver it to the biotech
industry in China. And so the CIFIUS trial period, I mean, I
don't know exactly how to talk about that at the moment. But
those new regulations are having an impact. We are seeing that
even in our own companies. They're having some more trouble
finding capital that was evidently flowing freely from China.
And even though that is impacting me personally and impacting
them personally, I'm totally fine with that. It should be
harder for foreign companies to come in, foreign governments to
come in and acquire that technology.
Chairwoman Stevens. Dr. Simpson, did you want to jump in
here?
Dr. Simpson. Yes. So I mean, I think for commercial
companies, inherently protecting intellectual property
developed domestically is part of our lifeblood. So internally,
we invested enormous amount of effort and energy into not only
solidifying our patent portfolio but protecting technology as
trade secrets, ensuring that all information that we develop is
harnessed behind firewalls, et cetera, et cetera. So data
protection, invention protection, intellectual property
protection is an inherent part of our business.
But we're also seeking to commercialize technologies
internationally. And I think it is appropriate that
technologies advanced here domestically, the domestic companies
have the opportunity to commercialize that throughout the world
and therefore generate revenues that flow back to the United
States. And not hindering that commercialization is something
that I think that the panel should consider very strongly
because in order to maintain leadership, the opportunity for a
local innovations to commercialize elsewhere, is something that
should be encouraged because that encourages further investment
in this technological area.
Chairwoman Stevens. Great. Thank you. And the Chair would
now like to recognize Mr. Foster for 5 minutes.
Mr. Foster. Thank you. I'd like to bring up the interesting
subject of artificial meat, which is another interesting
horserace that's happening. I remember after I had been
defeated in the Tea Party wave about a decade ago, I was trying
to figure out what to do with my life next and was fascinated
by a set of papers coming out of I think the Netherlands on
cell-based artificial meat which seemed like the promising
thing, you know, avenue at that time. But I was struck, last
weekend I stopped at a White Castle and treated myself to an
Impossible slider, which is a 100 percent plant-based
artificial hamburger, and to my mind to my taste buds a quite
credible substitute.
And so I was wondering, there's also a recent article I
think in Science magazine questioning the carbon footprint of
cell-based meat, that it might actually not be a big win
compared to just harvesting a crop and stuffing it through an
animal and eating the animal. And in that case, the plant-based
approach might be much better from a carbon footprint point of
view. I was wondering if any of you have, you know, comments on
how you view that horserace.
Dr. Simpson. I mean, I think the first thing to say is I
think it is a fascinating development because for many of the
people who would inherently be interested in consuming, for
example, and Impossible burger, they may also be interested in
organic food. They may also be interested in non-genetically
engineered food. And the Impossible burger represents a highly
inorganic, highly genetically engineered meat substitute. So
from this perspective, and as a scientist, it represents an
incredible way of educating the public as to what is possible
but what one needs to think about when consuming the possible
or impossible.
Dr. Zoloth. I just want to say one thing about the
Impossible burger is that it was developed by an HHMI (Howard
Hughes Medical Institute) scientist, one of America's leading
scientists from Stanford University, who gave up tenure and
HHMI funding because he was devoted to trying to solve climate
change in any way he could, as Professor Patrick Brown. And
this development, he's committed to doing this, making sure
it's not just a hippy alternative but it's in White Castle and
it's widely available. And that is a transformative technology,
of course, America leading the way in this. This use of the
most innovative and interesting science to deconstruct the
hamburger, it really shows the power of this kind of technology
and the way it should be supported.
Mr. Foster. Yes.
Dr. Zoloth. And it's very good, too. It's tasty.
Dr. Carlson. I do have one observation here which is that
it's very early. So whatever the assertions are today about the
economics, about the environment cost of production, they will
change. And the window that I have into this is not via meat,
necessarily, but it's human cell culture for therapy. So one of
our companies is manufacturing stem cell therapies, and they
have driven the cost down by orders of magnitude just in the
last few years. There's another couple of orders of magnitude
to go, and they are reducing the footprint of the materials
they use, the environmental footprint of the materials they use
as well as the cost.
So I have a strong suspicion that whatever the analysis
suggests today about the environmental and/or economic cost of
meatless meat, it's going to change so much that, you know,
it's going to be fine in effect.
Mr. Foster. All right. And another sort of big-picture
question. Do we have enough farmland? You know, if all your
dreams come true, are we going to have, for the number of
people--just assume that we keep the population constant in the
United States and look at the rate at which we consume
transportation, fuels, all the other. When you get all the
efficiencies working here, are we going to find ourselves
having surplus farmland and turn large fractions of the country
back into national parks or what's your view of how all this
will end up, you know, 100 years from now?
Dr. Carlson. Over the long term, yes, we could return
substantial fractions I think of the land now under cultivation
to other use, to natural, you know--I mean there's this old
phrase, the gardenification of nature. It turns out that
significant fractions of this country were not so natural, even
when European settlers arrived. They were altered significantly
by the native population.
So back to that observation that we use about 30 percent of
our corn crop for industrial use already, in that sense, we
produce more than enough food in this country to use those raw
materials for other purposes. And I think it's also important
to recognize there are other technical trends coming that
impact that. So I keep a close eye on electric cars and solar
and wind and basically how the electricity grid is changing.
And well before 100 years from now, we're going to have
shifted transportation use to nearly 100 percent electric
vehicles. And that means that, you know, if you plan on selling
ethanol as a fuel, that market isn't actually going to be
around very much longer. It would be surprising to me if that
were a 10-year market even. So we're going to wind up using
those crops to make chemicals much sooner than maybe everyone
is anticipating. I mean, Exxon for example is investing now
very heavily in petrochemicals. I'm not sure that's a wise
choice of their investment.
Dr. Simpson. I think one thing I would mention is that
electric vehicles will affect the market for ethanol, there are
fuel markets in which we cannot electrify. I for one am not
getting on an electrically powered plane any time in the next
50 years. That is almost certainly not going to happen anytime
soon.
And so one has to develop low-carbon fuel solutions for
sectors where battery technologies simply won't provide the
solutions required. I mean, within our company, we've developed
the technology to convert ethanol actually into jet fuel,
ethanol into diesel. And so using a molecule that we can
produce en masse from agriculture and from waste streams and
ultimately from CO2 as a platform for the production
of high-density air transport, sea transport, and road
transport fuels as well as a platform for a variety of
commodity chemicals makes absolute sense from both an
industrial security, energy security, and national security
perspective.
Dr. Carlson. I just want to throw my 2 cents in there, too.
I didn't mean to say that we won't have any liquid fuels or
that, you know, there won't be any use for that kind of
technology. But I think the world is going to change remarkably
over the next 10 years. And if you look at China just in the
last 6 months, internal combustion automobile sales have been
crashing and electric vehicle sales have been going through the
roof. And it's going to really alter the way we, very soon I
think, think about the way we use our petroleum resources and
our biological resources.
Mr. Foster. Thank you. I guess I made the mistake a couple
years back of going to one of these websites where you
calculate your personal carbon footprint and found as a Member
of Congress it was completely dominated by the fact that I fly
back to Illinois each weekend to say hello to those who elected
me.
Anyway, I want to thank the panel. This has been really
good. And the Chair for having this hearing.
Chairwoman Stevens. Before we bring the hearing to a close,
we obviously want to thank our witnesses, our expert witnesses,
for testifying before the Committee here today. We find
ourselves in the Research and Technology Subcommittee at a
tipping point where there is no vision, the people will perish
and where we find ourselves dipping into the future. And so the
remarks of my colleague, Mr. Tonko, about the importance and
honor of being a part of this Committee are quite significant.
And we remain very pleased to have such strong, Midwestern
leadership at the table and with us here today, particularly
given the important role that industry, government, academia,
philosophy play in having these dialogs and as we look to put
forward the Engineering Biology Research and Development Act.
No doubt today was significant. So our record will remain open
for 2 weeks for additional statements from Members and for any
additional questions that the Committee may ask. The witnesses
are excused and the hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:45 a.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
Appendix I
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