Kelly and many other biotech entrepreneurs I’ve spoken to take their lessons from the backlash to Monsanto. Monsanto’s mistake, in their telling, was focusing on genetic modifications that benefited farmers applying pesticides and herbicides but which seemed confusing to the average mom or dad at the grocery store. That made it easy for activists to tap into people’s fear of big corporations doing nefarious things. But what if you only made GMOs that were fun, cool, and socially conscious—like vegetarian burgers or cow-free leather or spider-silk ties? “It's a very different conversation about genetic engineering when it's a tie,” says Kelly.

That trend makes one of Ginkgo’s biggest deals yet, announced in September, a particularly intriguing one. Ginkgo has partnered with Bayer to launch a new company focused on genetically engineering microbes to make nitrogen fertilizer. The pitch has an explicit environmental angle: Making nitrogen fertilizer currently requires vast amounts of fossil fuels. Bayer is also, of course, the large German conglomerate that is in the middle of merging with Monsanto.

Can people love even these GMOs?

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When it comes to science, the Ginkgo team’s credentials are unimpeachable. Kelly earned his Ph.D. at MIT focusing on synthetic biology, a field that sees DNA as a readable, writable code for life, one that can be manipulated in a lab. Three of his Ginkgo cofounders were classmates at MIT: Reshma Shetty, Barry Canton, and Austin Che. The other founder was Tom Knight, a former MIT professor best known as the godfather of synthetic biology.

From the start in 2009, Ginkgo’s team knew they wanted to make it easier to tinker with the DNA in yeast and bacteria. The basic technology has been around for decades—the first human insulin made with genetic engineering came on the market in 1982—but getting it to work is still kind of a crapshoot. Biology is complicated. The Ginkgo team envisioned a world where they could “print” hundreds of variation of a gene, splice them inside microbes, and start to learn what works best.

What they had not quite figured out was what to do with those tools. Ginkgo bounced around for a while, picking up a grant here from DOE to engineer E. coli for biofuels and a grant there from DARPA to work on antibiotic resistance. Then, they started talking to companies that wanted more reliable sources of fragrances like rose oil. “Honestly, I didn’t know the fragrance industry existed in grad school,” says Kelly. He’d heard of the perfume industry, of course, but what he didn’t know was that behind it are a network of largely anonymous companies that create the basic fragrances later blended into perfumes.

It was good fit though. For one, fragrances like rose oil command a much higher price than, say, a commodity like fuels. And Ginkgo didn’t have to compete with a fragrance company’s internal biotech team because nobody in that industry had any experience genetically modifying yeast.