Ginkgo Bioworks CEO Jason Kelly joins Inside the ICE House to explain how Ginkgo is building the infrastructure to make biology programmable at scale — automating the lab work that has long bottlenecked scientific progress and offering experimentation as a cloud-based service to pharma, agriculture, and academic researchers. Kelly also details how a landmark collaboration with OpenAI demonstrated that AI can now autonomously design and iterate on biological experiments, pointing toward a future where the $120 billion spent annually on manual research gets dramatically more productive.

AI x Bio Series: Ginkgo Bioworks CEO Jason Kelly on Engineering Life's Next Operating System

Inside the ICE House

Welcome into the Inside the ICE House podcast, our second annual AI Biotech series. Today's guest is Jason Kelly. He is the CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks. Jason, thanks so much for joining us inside the ICE House. Happy to have you here. Yeah, happy to be here, Lance. So at its core, when you and your co-founders decided to start Ginkgo Bioworks, and I should mention we're obviously talking here on the day of the AI Bio Summit at the NYSE. When you started, when you were thinking of starting Ginkgo Bioworks, what problems were you all trying to solve?

What is the ultimate vision that you're still working towards this day? Yeah, so I started Ginkgo out of MIT. I did my PhD in bioengineering at MIT. My co-founders did too. We met there. There was five of us. I don't know if you have had a chance to work in a lab at all in your life, Lance. I have not. I was a journalism guy. Okay, well, you're lucky. It turns out you want a PhD at MIT in bioengineering. It is five years of standing at a lab bench, very carefully moving clear liquids around,

trying desperately not to make a mistake setting up your experiments. Well, your precision must be just like phenomenal. No, it's horrible, in fact. You must have very steady hands. Yeah. You know, they say that, though. Yeah, actually, some people in the lab are known to have, quote, good hands. Okay. All right? That's like a thing. Were you one of those people? Absolutely not. No, okay. Yeah.

AI x Bio Series: Ginkgo Bioworks CEO Jason Kelly on Engineering Life's Next Operating System

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

AI x Bio Series: Ginkgo Bioworks CEO Jason Kelly on Engineering Life's Next Operating System

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.