I agree wholeheartedly. It's become one of my goto resources for learning about the history of various topics from science to literature. The episode on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is fantastic.
On this topic, you may want to check out How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now by James Kugel. It provides a historical overview of how the implicit and explicit interpretations of the old testament narratives have changed with respect to scholarship. Great read.
One can imagine a tremendous number of useful applications something like EVE would enable. Working in a top notch cancer research lab, I can think of several instances where an exceptionally talented lab biologist needs some computational work done but doesn't have the slightest idea of how to get started. Hopefully, EVE will bring down some of those barriers and change this. This is exciting.
What is required to start synthetic biology company from 0 depends on what problem you are trying to solve commercially. If you do not have a problem in particular, then you need to evaluate the current research and commercial synthetic biology space, approximate the gaps in services and identify a problem you would like to address. Once you have a better idea of the problem, then you will have an idea of where to start. What did you have in mind ?