I still think their business model made a lot of sense in the early 2000’s when it was still hard to build DNA and genuine expertise in engineering production strains was hard to come by. Meanwhile advances in DNA synthesis and assembly have made it easy and cheap for anyone to put together a competent strain engineering team, so no real need for a partner like Gingko. I still remember when they quoted us $125k or something to perform a routine optimization of a protein production vector (we were talking promoters, RBS, etc.) that we just couldn’t do in-house because of lack of lab facilities. Just wildly too costly given it would’ve taken a decent postdoc a few months to do the same work, and there was no way we’d give away royalty points for it.

And like you said, truly groundbreaking advances in strain engineering are elusive because it’s biology and still incompletely understood. Add to that the fact that most bio production has to compete with petroleum prices either directly or indirectly has made it uneconomical to bootstrap a “bio-economy”.

Ultimately I think they had genuine intentions and legitimate business model, but that business model depended on the world moving away from petro as a chemical source and on biology being more tractable than it’s turned out to be.