Deploy

I didn’t think about it as starting my own company as much as a real belief and passion for getting the product and the experience out there, available to everyone. At the Media Lab, where the norm is to learn by doing and to do by making, the next reasonable step was to create a prototype of the kind of kit I had in mind: a small, self-contained minilab for bioengineering.

There’s another thing Joi Ito talks about that stuck with me during this creative phase: his motto for the Media Lab, “Deploy or Die.” I, along with my colleagues and mentors, worked so hard on getting the prototype to a “deployable” stage, it just made sense to build a company from it. I realized there was a growing need to provide people with the means to learn about synthetic biology by experiencing it and experimenting with it firsthand. Amino really grew from that desire to see the world embrace synthetic biology like they did with Arduino hacking over the last few years, and how Tamagotchis taught us to love and care for digital lives in the 90s.

Amino is a small bioengineering platform that will enable anyone to learn how DNA can be used to program living systems in order to create things. It has all the hardware to help you in a simple 1–2–3 process put your DNA program into a bacteria and then grow and take care of that bacteria.

Right now, Amino is optimized for use with a friendly type of bacteria used in labs for research. This bacteria strain is rated BSL1 by the Center for Disease Control, which means it is non-pathogenic and doesn’t require special containment equipment.

Amino aims to take away some of the fear and complexity from basic interactions with synthetic biology and bioengineering. It allows users to experience synthetic biology and learn about an important and complex topic in an intuitive, hands-on way. Amino provides users with different wetware kits (DNA, cells, reagents) to transform, grow, and culture their own synthetic organisms — colored, glowing, smelling, tasting — for which we are collaborating with wetware company Synbiota.