Future Fuel

Biotech whiz kid Dave Berry is trying to invent artificial petroleum.

by Phil McKenna
November/December 2007, Page 37

We wanted something that looked like, smelled like, and acted like petroleum, with the renewable benefits of biofuels.

At 29, biotech whiz kid Dave Berry has 22 patents pending on everything from modified sugars and medical diagnostics to hydrogen production. But his current project might be his most ambitious yet: Berry is trying to invent artificial petroleum.

A Harvard-trained M.D. with an MIT doctorate in biological engineering, Berry was still a graduate student when he pioneered a tumor-targeting cancer treatment and devised a new therapy for stroke patients to promote functional recovery. Then, as the youngest partner in Cambridge, Mass.–based venture capital firm Flagship Ventures, he helped form LS9, a company that aims to employ genetic engineering to create synthetic petroleum.

Back in 2005, “everyone was going crazy over ethanol,” says Berry, whose youth and slight frame evoke the starving student more than the well-paid executive. But ethanol has its drawbacks, including the substantial energy consumption required to produce it, the fact that it generates less energy than an equivalent amount of gasoline, and the reality that much of our oil infrastructure (gas pumps and cars, for example) won’t run on pure ethanol. “We decided to see if we couldn’t come up with a more efficient product,” Berry says. “We wanted something that looked like, smelled like, and acted like petroleum, with the renewable benefits of biofuels.”

The start-up team at LS9, which includes HMS geneticist George Church, proposed a breakthrough idea: to feed sugar to microbes that would then produce hydrocarbons as a waste product. Since no such microbes exist in nature, LS9 scientists had to create them, drawing on synthetic biology to engineer new genes. “This wasn’t even on people’s radar,” says Church. “Before LS9, everyone was willing to change billions of dollars of infrastructure worldwide rather than buckle down and teach E. coli”—the bacteria into which LS9 inserts its new genes—“how to make hydrocarbons.”

LS9 made national headlines in July when it announced that after only 13 months of lab work, it had produced its first synthetic petroleum. But plenty of obstacles remain: LS9’s San Carlos, Calif., lab has only produced a few beakers full of synthetic crude and diesel fuel, and the company has yet to test the fuel in a vehicle. “Every week, we are tweaking and manipulating the genes in two-liter test batches to increase the yield,” says company president Robert Walsh.

Meanwhile, other biotech firms have sprung up, mostly in California, with the intention of engineering hydrocarbon-producing microbes. Faced with the new competition, LS9 plans to break ground on a pilot scale production plant and commercialize the petroleum within the next few years. For Berry, the fast pace of the private sector only validates his decision to leave academia. “If I was in academics, I’d still be hiring graduate students and getting grant money in place,” he explains. He’d rather be working on the next big idea.

Related Content:

• 
  Al Gore
• 
  George W. Bush
• 
  Al Gore
• 
  Can Gas Go Green?
• 
  #1 - Al Gore: Man on a Mission
• 
  Best Foot Forward
• 
  Facebook Fights Back
• 
  Rewriting Harvard
• 
  Stem Cells in Paris

Keywords:

• Environment,
• Science and Technology,
• Business

Mentioned:

• 
  David Berry : HMS Class of 2006
• 
  George Church : GSAS Class of 1984