VALUE: After Hours (S07 E24): What Ribosomes Can Teach Us About the Future of Manufacturing

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Jim and Abigail Zimmerman discussed What Ribosomes Can Teach Us About the Future of Manufacturing. Here’s an excerpt from the episode:

All right. So, as we’ve detailed on the travel episode that Toby and I did about Japan and China from earlier this year, I think we both were quite impressed with what we saw in China and the pace of innovation, the appetite and the ability to build things and like just generally get things done there was quite impressive.

I came away thinking that, boy, the rest of the world maybe has no chance to really compete with this Chinese manufacturing juggernaut. And related to that, I was down in San Diego a few weeks ago and I met with the founder of this pretty successful children’s clothing brand. He’s been in the garment industry for 30 plus years. So, he’s spent a lot of time in China for sourcing. He only confirmed that he thought China was really far ahead of the rest of the world. He told me like he didn’t think the US could be competitive in clothing for at least two generations. And that’s if we started today, if there was any appetite to start today, which I don’t know if there even is.

So, my views on China’s manufacturing dominance, I feel like are getting pretty firmly cemented in place, which I actually don’t like. So, I borrowed a page from Darwin, and I went looking to find facts that would kill my newly cherished beliefs before they worm their way in so deeply that I was losing open mindedness about the subject.

So, I asked myself, how does Mother Nature tackle manufacturing? which leads us today’s topic of ribosomes. And inside of you right now, there are trillions of ribosomes humming along invisibly in every cell of your body. They’re these unsung molecular machines that are responsible for translating your genetic code into the proteins that make you you. So, your skin, your organs, your enzymes, your hormones, all lovingly handcrafted by these tiny little micro machines that build stuff for you. It’s fascinating how this kind of precision mirrors human manufacturing too, where details matter just as much, whether at the cellular level or in everyday essentials like rubber gaskets Australia relies on across countless industries.

So, their central function is to take that genetic information which is carried by mRNA into proteins, and they create this structural and functional roles within your body. And so, they’re not organelles that are enclosed by membranes like the nucleus or the mitochondria, for instance. They float around freely in the cytoplasm or they’re attached to the endoplasmic reticulum.

I apologize if you’re getting Bio 101 flashbacks here, but there’s each one– Let’s explore a little bit more of what they look like. They’re about 20 to 30 nanometers in diameter. And so, for perspective on that, that’s roughly 1,10,000 the size of a typical human cell. And a human hair, for instance, is 80-100,000 nanometers wide. So, tens of thousands of these ribosomes could fit across the width of a single human hair.

How do they work? They bind to a strand of MRNA which has been transcribed from DNA in the nucleus. It scans and it’s looking for this thing called a starting codon. That’s basically these three nucleotide bases which are signaling like, “Hey, start here.” They’re basically looking for this chemical on switch to start building. When they find that, then they start reading sequence by sequence along these codons. Each codon has a matching transcription RNA that has a corresponding amino acid. So, these amino acids are linked together by these peptide bonds, and they form a polypeptide chain.

So, basically, it’s like building one little block at a time, like a machine reading a tape. And then, it gets to the end of that and called a stop codon and then it will then basically, “Okay, this one’s done. Break it off,” and now you have a protein. That’s how you get created. Your body’s making 10 million proteins a second. So, just marvel at that for a second. Imagine anything being produced 10 million per second. It’s just an amazing feat.

So, let’s see if we can stitch some of this together and try to land the plane. Our entire industrial age of smokestacks and mega factories, container ships gliding across the oceans, was built on this concept of centralization and control, uniformity of process, increasing scale that drives down costs. China is I think the ultimate manifestation of this production at scale right now. When we’ve erected these enormous infrastructures that are optimized for throughput, and you make it in Shenzhen and then you ship it to Long beach and then you put it on a train and that’s how it gets to you if you’re in the US

But Mother nature has taken a completely different route for her manufacturing of ribosomes. If they’re these tiny, distributed independent factories all over the entire structure and there’s millions of little actors that are interpreting code and making what’s needed, where it’s needed, when it’s needed, and they respond to the cellular environment, the energy levels, stressors, nutrient availability, they’re adjusting their output dynamically at all times. It’s very decentralized and it’s very fault tolerant. Like, one piece breaking doesn’t destroy the whole chain.

That works okay. The 20th century ran on centralization with these massive factories and top-down planning, global supply chains. And that works when things were slow, customization was rare, the customer just wanted a black Model T or that’s what they told they could have. But events like the earthquake in Japan, COVID, restrictions on microchips and technology, all these things make supply chains potentially fragile. It turns out that centralization, while is efficient, is also quite brittle to change.

So, the counterargument to this Chinese dominance is a concept that we might call like ribosomal microfactories. You take a digital blueprint, it gets interpreted by a robotic arms and 3D printers and CNC machines, and they’re all working autonomously and locally and in parallel like biology– A single failure in Cleveland is not going to derail the part that you need in Seattle. These local nodes can adapt to the stresses and localize preferences much easier.

So, whether it’s climate disruptions or geopolitical tensions, shifting demand curves, everybody wanting their own unique, whatever, the world has a lot of fault lines in it. It’s likely we need systems that can bend a little bit more without breaking. I think that same kind of ribosomal approach could apply to energy as well with these small self-contained nuclear reactors that are powering every local neighborhood, or food supplies that are grown much closer to the end user, instead of shipping fruit from South America to the US in the wintertime. Or, 3D printing houses.

I think there’s all kinds of places where this trend of hyperlocalization might play out. And who knows? Maybe the future still belongs to China with these massive factories. But I at least wanted to explore some other paths that the world might unfold before I got too committed to any one worldview.

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VALUE: After Hours (S07 E24): What Ribosomes Can Teach Us About the Future of Manufacturing

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