Microbial cells have been manipulated to produce molecules of interest for thousands of years. Wine, beer and bread are some of the results of an unwitting campaign to engineer microbes with the desirable properties to make ethanol and other useful molecules. A fundamental understanding of molecular biology and the development of recombinant DNA technology extended the ability to engineer microbes to make more complicated molecules such as protein therapeutics. Synthetic biology uses the next generation of tools to rapidly "build" microbes with the ultimate goal of being able to construct a microbe "to spec" for various purposes including clean chemical production and tractable synthesis of complex pharmaceuticals. The availability of new tools for pathway construction and whole organism diagnostics affords the ability to write, run and "de-bug" large synthetic biochemical pathways encoded in gene sets in weeks rather than years. With these tools, an entirely foreign isoprenoid biosynthetic pathway has been constructed in Escherichia coli for the purpose of making large quantities of isoprenoids in microbial fermentations. Isoprenoids are the most numerous and structurally diverse family of natural chemicals and find commercial application as flavors, fragrances, colorants and cleaners as well as pharmaceuticals such as the cure for malaria, artemisinin. Amyris Biotechnologies was launched to apply the principles of synthetic biology to solving global problems. Our first research effort, the microbial production artemisinin, will address the global demand for hundreds of tons of anti-malarial drugs at a fraction of the current cost.