What's going to be the iPhone of Biotech?

The future of consumer biology

One of the things that really annoys me about biotech is that most all companies have goals that are generally pretty boring. If companies are trying to work on bleeding edge tech it's in the most inane possible way. This is not to mention how much the shadow cast by pharma envelops almost everything anyone does because what's biology without drugs, am I right?

No, not right. Walking around the world we see things that exist naturally that if they did not exist would be sold for fortunes. Imagine if somebody made a strawberry in a world without strawberries. Shut-up and take my money. Corn has been bred for around 10,000 years and it basically runs the world and that’s without genetic engineering tech. With genetic engineering tech we get non-browning apples and pink pineapples. What is this cool thing you speak of?

There really is no consumer market for biotech because nobody is creating one. This is not to say there hasn't been an effort in recent years. Companies like Amyris and Geltor and a few others have started to use engineered or synthetically produced biologics in cosmetics. I'm actually a huge fan. I think that there's so many opportunities for cosmetics to be disrupted with shit that actually works because I think everybody's tired of putting retinol on their face and not seeing anything happen. But that's it. There really is nothing else.

So what's going to be the iPhone of biotech? Unlike these bio manufacturing companies that lose hundreds of millions of dollars a quarter it's not going to be something produced by microbes in the vat. And while lab grown meat seems kind of interesting. The logistics behind tackling such a thing have been constantly pointed out as insurmountable. To be honest, I thought about this iPhone of biotech a lot, a real lot and I don't know the answer but I also think no one is trying to really make it.

So who is the iPhone and what does it do? It's not a tumor.

The iPhone to me was probably the largest continuous mass adopted consumer product in modern times. It wasn't because it was the first smartphone. There were others before it, I even owned some of them. It wasn't just a design, there were prettier toys out there. Nor was marketing the only reason, though that has always been one of Apple's strong points. I think it was a combination of these things but even more. From pushing the very first personal computer, Apple understood that the best markets are the ones you create and they have done this over and over again. Find something that people want that maybe doesn’t exist or isn’t mainstream and execute it well.

What is that in biotech?

Everyone wants drugs from biotech but it’s really hard to make a true consumer product for that. Even drugs like ozempic that everyone and their lesbian aunt can get ahold of these days has revenue weaker than a second generation Four Loko, around $13B a year for ozempic and around $200B a year for the iPhone. Even the best selling pharma drugs ever top out around $20B per year. While I would gladly take $20B revenue on a single product that’s not the point. It’s not close to an iPhone.

It could be genetically engineered pets. The market size for pets and pet services is near $500B. And let’s be honest there really haven’t been many new pets. Axolotl’s maybe? They didn’t really have any marketing force behind them though. I think a dragon would have a good shot at competing with the iPhone. Pets are much more exciting than plants and the Glowing plant project and subsequent smelly moss redux didn’t really create that much consumer interest, though that didn’t stop Y Combinator from sinking money into it.

Bioreactors to grow your own meat? Genetic engineering toolkits for plants that lets you engineer different colors in the leaves? I don't know.

When I think about biology my mind consistently goes back to the things we like the best about it, the living, the moving, the breathing. The most impressive thing about biology is how unimpressed we are with it. Society lights up when a chatbot can answer our questions correct 50% of the time but we treat our scientists like our trans people, we question whether they even have a place in society. Don't get me started on how image generators have probably created hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for companies and yet are built off the back of artists like Vincent van Gogh who sold two paintings in their lifetime.

See, biology has always been amazing and as we enter the biological revolution the problem is it's so hard to get people's attention because the digital world has monetized our brains so forceful the only thing people can pay attention to is angry insignificant events that have no effect on our daily lives.

That's what the iPhone of biology just might be. Something that can fight and bring our attention back to this real world. I really hope that's a miniature dragon though.