Transcript of evidence given to the House of Lords Science and
Technology Select Committee on Engineering Biology.
Witnesses: Professor Tom Ellis, Professor of Synthetic Genome
Engineering, Imperial College London; Dr Lucia Marucci, Associate
Professor in Systems and Synthetic Biology, University of
Bristol.
Extract
: Do you think that there
is a case for an intervention strategy that incentivises these
companies in some way to make that transition by investing in
those facilities at scale?
Professor Tom Ellis: I definitely think so. If it is made
clear to those companies that their way of doing things,
particularly the emissions and carbon that come from it, is
something that needs to be phased out,
and if alternatives are provided to
them for what the nation thinks is the best way for
them to change how they are producing chemicals and materials,
they can be part of this journey with us.
Dr Lucia Marucci: Often these big companies might not have
the right equipment and they might also not have the right
expertise. They often partner with us on grants. I am part of a
programme grant-funded recently by the EPSRC that is about using
control engineering in engineering biology. It is an eng bio
grant led by Oxford. Among our partners, we have Shell and Croda.
They are supporting PhD students who will be working on
engineering consortia of microbes for bioremediation. When it
comes to supporting spin-out companies—
Lord Drayson: I am sorry to interrupt you, but I am not
really talking about the spin-out end at this point; I am talking
about the scale-up challenge.
Full transcript
