What can past industrial transitions teach engineering biology about climate scale?
Lionel Clarke has spent much of his career working on industrial transitions, from the move away from leaded petrol to early biofuels and the UK’s synthetic biology roadmap. His argument is straightforward. Scientific progress matters, but it is not enough. If engineering biology is to make a serious contribution to climate goals, it will need to work within larger industrial systems and at far greater scale.
When Lionel Clarke talks about engineering biology, he does not begin with a vision of the future. He begins with petrol.
Early in his career, after a decade in academia at Imperial, Cambridge and Grenoble, Clarke chose to leave university research for Shell. He had enjoyed academic life, he says, but wanted to work on problems where he could see the result in the world. One of the first major challenges he was given was to identify and develop a practical transition away from leaded petrol.
Looking back, he sees that episode as more than solving a technical problem. It became an early lesson in how industrial change actually happens.
“You can look at something from a purely scientific perspective, but unless you actually understand and can connect to the way the world operates, then it remains just an idea on the shelf,” he says.
The point, in his telling, is not simply that good science matters. It is that even a sound technical solution will stall if it cannot fit the wider system around it. The move to unleaded fuel required much more than a reformulated product. Refineries had to change. Motor manufacturers had to adapt. Different parts of the industry and regulators had to act together. “Ultimately, you had to look at the system as a whole,” he says.
That experience left a lasting impression. It also shaped the way Clarke now thinks about engineering biology and climate. If new biological tools can produce useful alternatives to fossil-based processes, he argues, they will still face the same basic test. Can they connect to real supply chains, infrastructure, investment and end users, or do they remain promising ideas that never travel far beyond the lab?
His own route into synthetic biology came by way of fuels. After returning to that area of work, and spending years focused on global fuel development in regions including Brazil, Clarke became involved in early efforts to de-fossilise transport fuels. He started a biology-focused programme inside Shell in 2000 and encountered synthetic biology several years later, when Richard Kitney and Paul Freemont introduced the idea to him. At the time, he says, it was “not at all clear” that the science could solve the problems he was having to deal with.
That caution matters because Clarke is not making a simple claim that the field has always been ready and merely needed more support. His account is more measured. In the late 2000s, there was still a gap between what people hoped synthetic biology might do and what it could actually deliver. He was thinking on a 2050 timescale because significant industrial transitions tend to move slowly. Large companies, he points out, often need years for scientific development, more years for pilot plants and then decades of full-scale commercial operation.
That perspective fed into his role in shaping the UK’s early synthetic biology strategy. Looking back at the 2012 roadmap, Clarke speaks warmly about the quality of the discussions and the range of expertise involved. In particular, he points to the role of social scientists, who pressed the group on whether technical capability alone was enough justification for action. “I’m quite sure that the scientists can do the science. It’s everything else,” he says.
That emphasis helped shape a roadmap that was less concerned with drawing up a fixed list of technologies but more with asking how the field should develop, what constraints it would face and how it could be pursued responsibly.
Confidence in the potential of synthetic biology was quickly endorsed. No sooner had the UK Roadmap been published then the science changed. Clarke recalls the arrival of CRISPR-Cas9 as the moment when what had seemed promising, but distant, began to move faster. “Suddenly what we had hoped for emerged more rapidly than we could have dreamed of,” he says. Even so, he does not describe that as the end of the problem. Precision editing helped open the field, but it still took time to build the foundries, the methods and the practical experience that would let those tools be used reliably for a rapidly growing range of applications.
Clarke thinks many of the preliminary assumptions have stood up well over time and in many ways, delivery has exceeded initially cautious expectations. But he is equally clear about what remained unresolved. The UK, he says, built strong research capacity, supported startups and created momentum. What it did not fully solve was the transition from small companies and promising research into large-scale industrial deployment.
“We never really managed to get the link through to big industry beyond medical and healthcare applications,” he says. That gap matters most in sectors such as fuels and products, where the task is not to produce a gram or a promising prototype, but to reach industrial volumes over long periods of time. “How do you grow small companies into bigger companies?” he asks. For Clarke, this remains one of the central questions for engineering biology in the UK.
His argument becomes sharper when he turns to climate. Many of the easier gains in de-fossilisation, he suggests, have come from cleaner electricity production, where coal has been displaced by gas and gas by renewables, such as solar and wind. But that does not resolve the harder issue of replacing fossil carbon embedded in liquid fuels, chemicals and products. In those areas, progress is slower and often much smaller than headline climate narratives imply.
Clarke points to the continued small share of biofuels in total global fuel use, and to the similarly limited role of biochemicals and bioplastics. His conclusion is that the transformative potential of engineering biology may be most needed precisely where the transition is hardest.
Here again, Clarke’s emphasis is less on a single breakthrough than on the combination of tools that might make scale more realistic. He mentions the continuing importance of BioFoundries and the possibility that newer AI methods may help researchers design more robust biological systems and to tackle more complex challenges. “We’re only just beginning to tap into that,” he says. It is a statement of possibility, not certainty.
Still, even if the science improves, Clarke returns again and again to the same industrial question. Who carries an idea from technical promise to commercial reality? Startups have a role, but so do much larger companies with capital, infrastructure and access to established markets. The trouble is that those relationships are rarely straightforward.
Having spent decades inside a large company, Clarke has seen this from the other side. Small firms would often arrive claiming to have found a solution but in the process would wildly over-estimate its commercial value. Sometimes the science was interesting. But large companies, he says, usually need ideas to be much more mature and more de-risked or de-riskable than many founders expect. The initial idea is usually just the starting point, and its development to a commercially viable product at large scale can be substantially more expensive and time consuming than the research phase alone. It is also easy to mistake enthusiasm from research teams for a broader commercial commitment. “You might say, ‘I’ve gone to Company X and they were very keen,’ but you could be deceiving yourself that another part of Company X is very, very wary of your offer,” he says.
There is another complication. The problems that matter most to large industrial players are often bound up with commercial sensitivities and trade secrets. That makes it harder for outsiders to design solutions that fit real needs. It also makes scale-up less transparent than it may appear from outside the sector.
That is why Clarke comes back to a question that is blunt enough to function as both diagnosis and challenge. “Are you competing or collaborating?” he asks. For some companies, the route to success may lie in trying to displace existing products directly. For others, it may lie in finding narrower applications, partnering earlier or building towards larger industrial systems, rather than assuming they can replace them outright. One thing seems certain; looking to 2050 and beyond, climate change will pose both challenges and opportunities that should motivate industries large and small to seek innovative bio-based, non-fossil, solutions.
That question also sits behind the discussion Clarke hopes to have at SynbiTECH later this year. He says he wants a more frank conversation about what large-scale engineering biology would really look like, where it might genuinely matter and where climate claims may outrun practical reality. “This is good for the climate when, in fact, it’s a millionth of what we actually need,” he says, describing the kind of claim he wants to examine more closely.
In the end, Clarke’s argument is less about engineering biology as a field than about the habits needed to make any complex transition work. Academic research, he says, often begins with a technology and asks where it might be applied. Industrial research starts from the end goal. “As an industrialist, you’re actually told this is the problem, you solve it by whatever means, as opposed to, I’ve got a technology, how can I apply it?”
If engineering biology is to matter at climate scale, Clarke suggests, that may be the shift it still needs to make. The field has advanced rapidly. The science is far stronger than it was when he first encountered it. But the harder questions remain. What problem is being solved, who needs to be involved, and can the answer survive contact with the real world?
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