In­scrip­ta push­es fund­ing to $260 mil­lion as they launch genome edit­ing plat­form

In­scrip­ta pre­sen­ta­tions can be­gin with the ad­vent of agri­cul­ture. Or even fur­ther back: The emer­gence of man.

“We’ve come a long way, start­ing with nat­ur­al se­lec­tion,” In­scrip­ta mi­cro­bial di­rec­tor Nan­di­ni Kr­ish­na­murthy told a ses­sion this year at Syn­Bio­Be­ta, the new an­nu­al con­fer­ence for the syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy field.

Be­hind her was a slide that’s re­curred in com­pa­ny pre­sen­ta­tions, show­ing from left to right across the bot­tom the clas­sic evo­lu­tion-of-man chart (the ‘hu­mor­ous’ kind that ends on an over­weight so­da-drinker), a pic­ture show­ing the de­vel­op­ment of corn from thin strand to bul­bous Iowan, and then a squig­gly pro­tein close-up of “di­rect­ed evo­lu­tion.” Be­low that runs an ar­row and a tick­er of how long each takes, from 10^9 years to 1.

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