From the windows of Ginkgo Bioworks' Boston offices you can peer down into a grimy vestige of the city's past. Across the street, workers in yellow-slicker overalls scrub, scrape, and repair the decks of worn-out warships and ocean tankers parked in a drydock. During World War II, 50,000 people worked the docks and the eight-story waterside warehouse that Ginkgo now calls home. Inside the synthetic biology company's glass-walled foundries, humans are now less obvious, with algorithms designing industrial organisms and robot armies building them in humming, hypnotic synchronicity. "Biology's ability to make atomically precise products is far superior to the best manufacturing systems humans have ever built," says Ginkgo CEO Jason Kelly.

Last month, synthetic biologists at Ginkgo Bioworks raised their glasses--filled with genetically modified beer--to cele brate the launch of a new automated lab. By applying engineering principles to biology, and with the help of some nifty robotic equipment, Ginkgo has created a factory for churning out exotic life-forms, the likes of which have never before been seen on this planet. The home brew they were drinking was an example of the potential applications of synthetic biology, a new field that builds on recent progress in genetic assembly methods. Scientists can now manufacture snippets of synthetic DNA and slip them into organisms, giving those critters strange capabilities. For example, the brewer's yeast used to make the beer for the launch party had genes from an orange tree added to its own DNA.