Decoding the World summary

Since its founding in 2014, IndieBio has been a breath of fresh air in San Francisco. Profoundly unlike any other venture capital firm, it has backed wildly disruptive projects. It pioneered lab-grown meat. It worked out how to save the bees. It flooded the rhino horn market with 3D-printed ones in an attempt to stop illegal trade.

Po, whose background was in journalism, was fascinated long before he got involved. Silicon Valley was getting boring, he thought. It was dominated by Facebook executives lamenting the site’s dependency on ads. IndieBio was the cool kid on the block.

While the underlying cause of bee colony collapse is still a mystery, it’s now a mystery with a solution – thanks to the IndieBio-funded company Beeflow.

Beeflow guessed that something had changed in the bees’ diet; for whatever reason, they were no longer getting enough of some natural substance. So Beeflow made a cocktail of plant hormones and amino acids, and they added it to the bees’ honey. It worked – the bees got healthier. The plants they visited did better, too.

People tend to react strongly when they learn about new ideas, especially in fields like genetics.

Po and Arvind call it “Warp-Speed Impulse” – our tendency to immediately envisage a world where current trends are pushed to their worst extremes. 

For Arvind, like millions of others, the fight against cancer is personal. His mother was diagnosed with uterine cancer years ago. She’s had treatments and made good progress, but cancerous cells are still there.

During one round of surgery, Arvind made an unusual request. He asked the doctor to send his mother’s tumor to the lab at IndieBio.

The things bacteria can do are unbelievable. Among the trillions of different species that exist, there are bacteria that can – or can be programmed to – convert almost anything into pretty much anything else.

We’re talking bacteria that make electricity, or metals, or bioplastics. Bacteria that could eat carbon dioxide or turn food waste into hydrogen fuel.

While it’s fascinating to speculate about possibilities, a lot of work at IndieBio is about tackling complex, philosophical questions and making something real happen as a result.

For example, what is the perfect blue?

Some futuristic ideas remain far-off. Artificial intelligence, for one, is nowhere near close to human capabilities. The machines we’re making have no way of acquiring something even a four-year-old already has: common sense.

And how about the soul? Something’s going on inside us that can’t be explained through science. Get the world’s top scientists to poke around inside a human brain. Would they find the soul? No chance. But it’s there. It’s in what we do – and what we choose to do.