
SAN FRANCISCO — They print DNA, design proteins, and sell pipetting robots — all the traditionally forgotten back-end technology supporting the drug developers that command the spotlight.
But these days, a once-sleepy industry has been reinvented as the booming field of synthetic biology.
That transformation was on full display this week here at the industry’s big annual conference, SynBioBeta, which drew industrial stalwarts like Dupont and Procter & Gamble, as well as tech titans like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.