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The case for biotech on Mars

Nature Biotechnology volume 38, pages 401–407 (2020)Cite this article

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The stepwise application of biotechnology will be instrumental to addressing four key challenges of Martian settlement.

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Fig. 1: Incremental integration of biotechnology into Mars mission designs.

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Acknowledgements

Viriditas was a workshop organized in October 2018 at Ginkgo Bioworks by S.N.N., M.Y.W. and others to nucleate the development of a biotechnology roadmap for Mars missions. All article authors attended the event, and the conceptual framework that emerged from it was the basis for this article. The authors thank the co-organizers, sponsors, presenters and other attendees for their contribution to these ideas. The authors also thank J. Cumbers, C. Agapakis, C. Da Cunha, A. Robinson-Mosher and R. Howe for editing and guidance. S.N.N. thanks the Harvard Climate Change Solutions Fund for support. C.E.M. thanks WorldQuant, NASA (NNX14AH50G, NNX17AB26G) and TRISH (NNX16AO69A:0107, NNX16AO69A:0061).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Shannon N. Nangle, Pamela A. Silver & Marika Ziesack

  2. Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Boston, MA, USA

    Shannon N. Nangle, Pamela A. Silver, David B. Thompson & Marika Ziesack

  3. Ginkgo Bioworks, Boston, MA, USA

    Mikhail Y. Wolfson, Lucas Hartsough, Massimo Merighi, Vinitra Nathan & Mark Simon

  4. Office of Cooperative Research, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Natalie J. Ma

  5. Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA

    Christopher E. Mason

  6. WorldQuant Initiative for Quantitative Prediction, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA

    Christopher E. Mason

  7. Department of Materials, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Jacob Swett

  8. Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    David B. Thompson

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Contributions

S.N.N., M.Y.W., N.M., V.N. and M.Z. wrote the manuscript, and L.H., C.E.M., M.M., P.A.S., M.S., J.S. and D.B.T provided edits. All authors contributed to its conception.

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Correspondence to Shannon N. Nangle or Christopher E. Mason.

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Competing interests

M.Y.W., L.H., M.M. and M.S. are employees of Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based company that makes and sells engineered organisms.

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Nangle, S.N., Wolfson, M.Y., Hartsough, L. et al. The case for biotech on Mars. Nat Biotechnol 38, 401–407 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-020-0485-4

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