Innovations Like These Will Help Solve the Climate Crisis: Introduction to “Synthetic Biology and Greenhouse Gases”

Hardly a day goes by without another piece praising the potential for gene editing to help solve climate change. Nevertheless, the possible contributions of biology and biotechnology have been conspicuously underplayed in most of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change analyses (IPCC Sixth Assessment Report). This is, perhaps, at least partly because it is no small thing to carry an idea from inception to delivery, to navigate the valley of death (between discovery and commercialization), and deliver a functioning solution to a specific problem (Skillicorn 2022). But this may be starting to change.

In February 2020, an eclectic group of scholars published an important paper examining the range of possible contributions from synthetic biology to climate change solutions (DeLisi et al. 2020). Shortly afterward, the world’s leading science policy think tank, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, published a report discussing possible gene-edited solutions to climate change challenges (Giddings et al. 2020). Together, these papers paint a hopeful landscape rich with opportunities for solutions to many of the challenges of climate change. Taken together, they beg the obvious question: Which should be pursued first, and how can they best be galvanized? A subset of the authors of these two papers coalesced around this challenge. This volume is one result.

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▪ L. Val Giddings, “Innovations Like These Will Help Solve the Climate Crisis,” in Synthetic Biology and Greenhouse Gases, edited by Daniel Drell, et al. (Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2024), 1–6.