Here’s something exciting: Biologists studying the marine rag worm were chasing the question of why its tiny fangs contained such a high concentration of zinc. At first they thought it was the little critter’s way of dumping excess zinc, but nature was way ahead of them: Turns out that zinc plus a few special proteins resulted in outrageously strong, light material – way stronger and lighter than carbon fiber composites, it turns out. Doesn’t take much imagination to see the transgenic angle: create your genetically modified e. coli to ooze super-light aircraft protein material. Wonder how good the guys at Boeing would be at tending a fermenter?

Reading The Billionaire’s Vinegar got us thinking that biotech should shortly be relegating wine counterfeiting — any kind of agricultural fraud, really — to the scrap-heap of history. You shell out $3,000 for a bottle of precious Mourvedre? Darned straight you want proof. Companies like Applied DNA Solutions are working on the particulars right now.

This is a pretty amazing idea: Donate CPU cycles on your Playstation 3 for Stanford University’s Folding@Home project. How’s that for a compelling argument for buying Sony’s hyper-addictive gaming station? Check out the YouTube video for all the details. Though we’d rather see an interactive protein folding module for Wii.

Probably the single most useful page we’ve ever seen for a quick understanding of the potentialities of Biotechnology. We love it. Seed Magazine is an awesome publication. Quote: “The Key Question of Synthetic Biology: Can we learn to program DNA and living organisms as well as or better than we currently program computers?”

Our Google Alert on the words “proprietary organism” turns up new stuff every week. This week it picked up a story about a collaboration between the Department of Energy and Dupont. Dupont, with partner Genencor, have cooked up a new transgenic bug to efficiently convert agricultural waste (corn husks, sugar cane bagasse) into ethanol. Wouldn’t it be nice if the government’s ethanol program didn’t cut into the food supply? We’re rooting for the little transgenic critters. They’re our kind of Frankenstein.

Hysterical Devo-meets-Country-and-Western home-grown YouTube video entitled, “Transgenic“. We’re not sure if it’s satire or Anthem, pro-GMO or con-biotech. We are sure that it’s french, and almost entirely incoherent, no matter what your politics. Check your mind at the door and get your groove on.

Check out the Palm PCR gadget from Korea’s Ahram Biosystems. We saw this at Bio2008 and we couldn’t keep our hands off of it. Flip it open, juice the micropores with your glass pipette, and press play. This is the kind of Blade Runner-esque personal biotechnology that gets us all excited. Comes in three nifty colors! Wow! We want one!

We’re so confused. First, they say that GMOs don’t really work. Then, they say that GMOs are a vast improvement, but it’s all a plot a plot to corner the food supply and extort large sums of money from a starving planet. Despite our cognitive dissonance, Aminopop is always able to draw two straight lines through whatever the bio-hysterics have on offer: 1) Corporations Bad. 2) The future looks like a B-Movie science fiction screenplay.

We spent the day at Bio2008. The turnout seemed pretty good, and the conference was spectacularly well organized. Special Aminopop shout-out to Erin Reese for arranging a press pass.

What comes to mind, while we’re still catching our breath: Biotech industry people are healthier, better dressed and better groomed than people in infotech — we haven’t seen that many ties and perfect creases at a trade show since 1985. The gargantuan exhibition hall was jammed with booths. But, unlike an infotech trade show, a whole lot of them — maybe even a majority — weren’t fronting for individual biotech companies… but instead for various consortia (government sponsored and commercial associations), biotech industry-stimulating efforts of various nations (“Biotechnology in Sweden!” “The Malaysian Miracle!” etc.), and … law firms. A ton of them. All of them wanting to help you protect your valuable intellectual property. Probably a good sign; to paraphrase Stewart Brand, if you want to find out where the action is in a culture, follow the lawyers. Based on the showing of litigants at Bio2008, there’s evidently a ton of cultural action in Biotech.

The one major disappointment was the almost singular focus on pharma. Despite the conference’s slogan of “Heal, Fuel, Feed The Planet”, there was little feeding or fueling in evidence. Amazingly, the Wednesday Ernst&Young supersession (okay, so we left after 90 minutes, so sue us if we missed something) didn’t contain a single reference to agriculture or biofuels. This is a little weird, and very un-Aminopop to boot; we’re pretty certain the first world-changing Biotech killer app isn’t going to be a drug. Yet, to outward appearances at Bio2008, Biotech seems to be all about antibodies and small-molecule drugs. Oh, and litigation.

There were plenty of exceptions, though. We did turn up a whole lot of fun stuff, which we’ll write up over the next few days — hands-on fun stuff like nanotech fluorescence tags, a desktop microfluidics rig, and a korean hand-held PCR unit that looks like a klunky iPod. We also collected a pile of fun booth-bait tchochkes we’ll roll out in separate post.

All in all, though, the show left us yearning for that Juan Enriques-brand vision, enthusiasm and irreverent prognostication we find so charming and, well… fun. Maybe next year. Right now, Biotech people seem to be buttoned up a little tightly because of capitalization cycles and gloomy equity markets. We think they need another good 2001-style bubble to bring them out of their shells a bit.

More later.