 Let me get into introducing Steve. So Steve is a biotechnology IT and operations guy from Denver. He's an active member in the biohacking community through a project organization called InWorx. It's a Denver-based prototyping lab and community biospace. Steve's a biosensor and wearables expert. And he's invented and successfully prototyped the world's first battery-free biosensor wristband that glows when users become too intoxicated to drive. I mean, that's awesome. American company, Steve leads the IT and biologic department for operational planning efforts for the National Bio and Agri-Defense Facility, which is affectionately called inbaf and in support of the United States Department of Agriculture. He also loves brewing beer in his spare time and helping push to co-author publications further to finding an emerging discipline of cybersecurity in his spare time. So without further ado, Steve. All right. Thanks, everyone, for coming today. Appreciate it. I'm Steve. I'm going to try to keep it to 45 minutes today. I'm currently in line right now at Gordon Ramsey Burger. So if I get a text message, I'll probably dip out. Deliver. OK, good to know. All right. So show of hands real quick. Super interested in seeing this. Who has heard of cyber biosecurity at all? OK. Awesome. That's about what I expected, a little less than 50%. That's awesome. Emerging field, pretty intuitive what it is. It's kind of the merger of cybersecurity and biosecurity. I work professionally in biosecurity. Background, biotechnologists by training. And so as we're talking about kind of the intersection of IT and biosecurity, what are the logical next steps for kind of defining the field of cyber biosecurity? So real quick, just a little bit about me. Probably most interesting to this crowd, specifically in June I wrote and co-authored a couple of peer-reviewed articles on the topic and their open access. So feel free to go read them if you're curious about learning more. I did invent this really, I think it's super neat, transdermal alcohol biosensor that you wear it as a wristband. There are no batteries. There are no electronics. It literally senses transdermal alcohol coming out off the skin. And then when you're above the legal limit to drive, it actually starts glowing. So if you want to check that out, our website is www.ember.bio. And then, yeah, I'm also a big bio nerd. That's me playing around with a bioreactor in grad school. So just to let you know a little bit about me. But let's dive into the topic here. So cyber biosecurity, there's been a couple of papers written in recent months that kind of worked to define the field. And there's kind of a poll quote from one of the seminal papers on it. I recognize now I was trying to be cutesy with doing the HTML for the references. But it looks like I don't know how to use hyperlinks in PowerPoint. And then this is a graphic from one of our papers that we published to kind of help to define some of the vulnerabilities in the field. So diving a little bit deeper, today's talk is about kind of the logical next step. Like, what do you need to be aware of for cyber biosecurity? And the focus of today is to kind of take a look at who is working in the space. It's a really interesting, unique field where you might have IT experts. You might have biologists. You might have people who are better at networking. You might have people who are really good at molecular biology. I kind of feel that the field needs to identify who the kind of players are in the space and kind of get a little bit better at bringing some credibility to the space. And so that's kind of how I feel. But that's an opinion, so I'd be happy to talk more about that, too. So this is the first time I've ever given this presentation. It's very much a work in progress. And so I'm totally open to all hang out in the back or hang out afterwards. If we have time for questions, feel free to give me your feedback. But yeah, the topic of this, I'm working right now on another article that I'll submit for publication. Just a kind of baselining here. How do you define? This is kind of inspired by the idea of a full-stack developer, right? Basically, you've got somebody who knows the front end work, the back end work, app protocol, all the different pieces to design, build, code, and test everything. It's like 10 years ago, this would be four positions out of company, and now it's like one. And everybody's like, I really have to have my full-stack developer in the, especially the web development app world. So the idea of how do you apply that to biosecurity? And how do you apply that in general to biotechnology? What are the kind of mechanisms in place here to further define this emerging field? And this is one thing that I kind of think logically follows. So in essence, a full-stack developer is a unicorn. That's kind of what they talk about. If you can't read it, it says, sorry, Amazon. Google just sent over 450k offer for me to develop another Android messaging platform from scratch. So that's kind of where I fall on that topic as well. All right, so this idea of a new breed of biotechnologists is emerging. You can't just work in biology or in technology to be considered a full-stack biotechnologist. And so you have somebody working under a hood here, and then the classic picture of a hacker there. So this idea of what does this person look like? But before we even get into that, I kind of want to just chat about enabling factors that to an audience like this, if you're even in this room, I'm sure this is going to be really intuitive to you. But in terms of the enabling factors, increased access to knowledge and techniques combined with decreased cost of tools allow singular individuals to learn the entire pipeline of biotechnology from genome engineering through bioprocessing and manufacturing. So this is pretty interesting in that everybody knows that the cost of technology is decreasing. But what a lot of people don't know is that the cost of biotechnology is also really decreasing. And there's a lot of things that you can do, and there's a lot of overlaps, which is why something like this badass biohacking village can exist in the first place. So a little bit of background here. On this slide, jumping into the actual definition chart, so this is my idea as a how we define a full-stock biotechnologist. And like I said, it's not going to be perfect by any means, but this is kind of where I see the parallels. And so I'll run through each the upstream, downstream, and spanning skills to kind of define who these individuals are. And you can imagine that this kind of information would be beneficial to companies that do hiring. How do you define and legitimize your participants? So you may want somebody who can do genome sequencing, but you may also want them to be an expert in machine learning, for example. And so how do you kind of vet that out? And how do you even define that person? So the idea here is that we can define the concept and legitimize the full-stack biotechnologists through each of these different approaches to defining it. So diving in a little bit, you've got some of what I consider the upstream skills. And the idea is that the biotechnologist, the full-stack biotechnologist, has the skill set to basically make product, a biotechnology product. But the idea is that they're not just limited to that. And so the concept of upstream to me means everything up until that initial prototype is proven, that initial biotechnology product, whatever it is, right up until you've got to jump over to downstream. And I'll go over that in a second. So upstream skill sets, we're kind of all over the place. And this is definitely biology heavy. But this kind of talks about some of the background necessary, in my opinion, to be a legitimate full-stack biotechnologist. You have to have some kind of experience with your prominent DNA, RNA tech. CRISPR is perhaps the most famous, I would say, that has spanned just an unbelievably broad group of users and disciplines and things like that. But at a certain point, you have to know cellular and molecular biology. I think that that's one thing that gets lost a lot of the time is there's a certain moment where, in my opinion, if you're in a lab and you want to actually create something, there's a limiting factor where if you don't know the cellular biology, if you don't know the molecular machinery that you're working with, you're going to run into roadblocks and that's going to prevent you from making your biological products. And then moving up, how do you culture those organisms? Once you've biologically or genetically engineered something, how do you culture it? How do you make sure it grows correctly? And then perhaps a little bit softer, but honestly, I think is really critical. Got my beard caught in the mic. So I really think creativity is an enabling factor. Being aware of what can be done with biology is cool, but it's not cool if you can't apply it. And again, that's very much my opinion. And so the idea of being creative, I think that that's kind of what separates a full-stack biotechnologist as it does a full-stack developer from a bespoke any number of disciplines. And then the concept of scaling up. And I put this on upstream in particular because you may get at some point what could be considered a false positive, where you may do all your organism engineering. It works in cell culture. And then when you try to scale it up and do a flask or something like that, it just doesn't work. And so at that point, when you do achieve that and you're ready to actually start moving into what I call the downstream. So downstream skill sets, and I'm sure many of the people have experience in these realms in this room even, the idea of characterization. And I use that broadly for anything that's basically confirming what you were trying to get was actually what you got. And again, that's to make sure that you can understand how you've created something and then reproducibly create it and characterize it over time. And then filtration and purification, so that, of course, you don't want to have any impurities in the product that you're making, much like bugs in code and biology. You'll literally have bugs in your sample if you don't do that. And we use those terms generally and apologies to the life scientists in the room. We literally call those bugs. So there's another really awesome parallel there. Electronics, honestly, I kind of view this as if you're a general biologist, you might know about pipetting. You might know how to work an SDS page. But if it breaks, what do you do? I know what I would do. I would go figure out how to fix the damn thing. And I'm sure many of you would, too. And that's kind of the idea of you're not just limited to biology. You're also the technology professional. And you're basically just a curious person who doesn't really matter what the problem is. You can solve it. And then further, rapid prototyping and marketing. And not to gloss over those, but the concept of if you're working on a project, sometimes you have to know and iterate in many different ways. And sometimes you have to know when to stop and pivot. I know I did that a ton with the alcohol sensor wristband. And so the idea of being able to fail fast came from technology. But a lot of people are applying it to biology. And I'll just throw some names out there. There's people who haven't heard them. If you haven't looked into Ginkgo BioWorks, for example, there's actually a couple people here from Ginkgo. They work in the synthetic biology space. And I was just chatting with a gentleman. His name is Misha. This concept of the people here in this room, you're probably, if you're not already, are going to move into the synthetic biology space. It's very, very rapidly merging. And so the idea of rapid prototyping with them being the first billion dollar synthetic biology company, to them failing fast is just as important as it is to any other kind of technology company, too. And then marketing, right? How do you spread the word? I view that as an important downstream skill so that people can understand what you've done. It's cool if you make something cool. But if you spread the word out there, I know that Dr. Loffer, for those of you that know him, with the EpiPencil, that was a huge, really interesting approach to basically democratizing medicine and spread the word. And pros or cons, it doesn't matter. He got the word out there about his project. And honestly, that's really badass and inspiring. And that's coming from somebody who works professionally in biosecurity. So finally, spanning skills. This idea of front end, back end, downstream, upstream, it doesn't really matter. Spanning-wise, these skill sets will come in handy. And so if you're somebody who understands any of these examples or any of these descriptions of these skills, you could be considered a full-stack biotechnologist. And so the idea is that you have to have some kind of programming skills. Computational biology is kind of the historical field. So is bioinformatics. But honestly, every biologist is now at this point, at least in some of the universities, being taught programming and development right off the bat, because it turns out that you can't make, at this point, like if you're not using computers to help design your experiments and things like that, you're kind of missing out. And you're not getting the research grants that you need to. And so programming and development, it works on both sides too. That's the other thing, is whether you have a unique biomarker for upstream. If you want to make some kind of new medicine, you need to have the programming skills to run through all those libraries to make sure that your drug can even work on that particular marker, for example. And I'm using drug as a generic product. And then downstream too, how do you optimize along the way? It's cool if you can make something once, but if it costs $10,000 to make one product, you want to optimize that process. And the only thing that's going to help with that is knowledge of statistics and machine learning and all that too. So it works on both ends of the spectrum. Design, I'm a big believer that design, and a lot of people are aware of this, I'm sure there's many in this room, that design both upstream and downstream is kind of eating everything, that's like the famous quote, but it really is true. If you know who you're designing for, if you know who your customer base is, if you know who your patient is, whatever it is, if you start at the end user first, who you're making it for, you're gonna come out with a better product no matter what. And that works both upstream too, right? If you design your experiment and that costs $10,000 to do, that may be a design problem. That might not be a problem with the technology or even the cost. And so design, I think, is a critical aspect in kind of using the notion of user experience, who you're making it for, even industrial design, right? Like nobody cares about an alcohol-sensing wristband if it doesn't look cool, and that was a part of my inspiration. There's a lot of other kinds of technologies out there, but this was very much designed, and it looks really cool. So not to beat a dead horse, but that's just kind of a critical factor, I think, of the full-stack biotechnologist. And then again, I already kind of dabbled into the deep in machine learning, but these are some of the technologies that you might know. And then this one, I think, it kind of caught me by surprise, but I was thinking about it. You gotta know how to manage projects. That's like, you wouldn't expect that to be like a skill set that may or may not be listed on here. But basically, if you understand the process of designing and taking a product to market from beginning to end, all these things will be useful in your wheelhouse, whether you're scaling up a company or even running your own experimental metal design. I would be happy to have conversations with anybody after this about number of times I've talked to scientists in the laboratory, and I'm like, why aren't you doing project management? Why aren't you implementing something like a Kanban board, for example? Because it really does help organize what is traditionally haphazard in even university laboratories, to be honest. And then the idea too, of understanding a bill of materials, how much does it actually cost? How much labor went into actually designing it? And then ultimately, planning a business too, and that's where the marketing and strategic component comes in as well. So to kind of summarize who qualifies as a full-stack biotechnologist, and this is kind of how I define it. And I'll just read it. The full-stack biotechnologist is a singular individual that can demonstrably design and reproducibly develop a biological product using a range of biological and technological techniques and tools, such as those listed in the full-stack biologist definition chart. And then the developed biological product consistently passes appropriate characterization and testing to scale up levels, whatever those levels are, culminating in the distribution of knowledge or the product via open access or private and commercial mechanisms. So that's kind of how I define it. The idea of that, what's unique about this is that it's one person. It's not a team of people. It's somebody who can pick up anything and learn it, whether it's biology or IT related. So kind of with that in mind, it's not really that far of a stretch to say, these are gonna be the unicorns of the biotechnology industry. And by 2030, I really believe that will be true. And 750K from synthetic biology, Elon Musk company, that'd be pretty nice. And if this sounds like science fiction, it isn't. It is not science fiction. This is happening right now. And I mentioned the synthetic biology industry. People are working on genetic engineering. I think the coolest form of technology is biotechnology. And I think that bears kind of looking into. So to kind of summarize this from the definition chart, this is just kind of how I've broadly categorized this. And I'll be happy to make all these slides open or I'll give you guys my email, whatever you want to, if you wanna take a stab at even adjusting these, I don't mind. But this is kind of how I think about it. So let's talk about it, right? Like cyber biosecurity is kind of the topic of this presentation, but the idea of who are these individuals who are working in cyber biosecurity, for so long, and I feel like I can say this comfortably because I work professionally in the space. Everything has been fear-mongered, right? Like biosecurity in general has kind of come down on even like this space right here. And it's not fair, it's ignorant and it's a little bit ridiculous. And you can quote me on that. I fully believe that a full-stack biotechnologist is not any more than a threat, of a threat than a network engineer would have been in like the 90s, right? Anybody can do anything with their skill sets, but the idea of having knowledge in and of itself, you can apply it to anything. And that's kind of the really cool premise of DEFCON is you have people over there in the CTF room, you actually have the security teams from top 10 medical device companies in the world talking with people who are actually trying to break their devices. And that's such a unique component of this environment. And also a reason why I don't think that the fear-mongering is honestly warranted when it comes to quote biohacking. But in terms of in the future, if we can try to move toward the idea of, okay, look, there's a lot of really badass, legitimate projects that happen in these community labs, in these DIY bio labs, I'm a part of them. I really think that the community can make a push toward making it more accessible and taking the idea of the full-stack developer and applying it to biotechnology. To me, that is a way that you can improve the conversation as a whole to make it more inviting for everyone to participate. And I'm actively working on that. So the idea that these individuals, they're real, I consider myself one of them, probably most of you are one of them, and we're multiplying, right? Their skill sets are growing, they're highly valuable. If you know how to run an Illumina high-seq gene sequencer, you can probably leave any job and go make ADK. But if you know how to actually use it and help scientists troubleshoot and design their experiments, I see this, you become just unbelievably valuable and you become something of a scientist in your own regard, too. And that's really interesting to me, this idea that an individual has the opportunity to learn so many of these skill sets. One thing to consider, and this is just a safety consideration, biosafety is really important in biology. There are some people who like to use their oven, toaster oven, to heat up to appropriate degrees, certain reactions and things like that. You can do that, I don't recommend it. But you know what, that's a useful tool and it's honestly a creative application of something that wasn't meant for biology. So just buy a second toaster oven and keep it in a second room. But I use that kind of tongue and cheek, but the idea of biosafety is really important and there are those of us who like, I love this community, I love the biohacking space, I like our community lab. I'll be the biggest champion of biosafety considerations as well, too, because you don't wanna get sick. And then we'll move into this on the next slide, but the idea of, I think these individuals are gonna be hired and sought after much in the way that the full-stack developer is. So some of my predictions here, basically the full-stack biotechnologists will become first the unicorn of the synthetic biology industry and then existing biotechnology industries will follow within five to 10 years. You know, I think the ones that get it right now are the kind of synthetic biology companies. It's very valuable to have the skill set in, let's use IoT for example, and you can go to any biotechnology company that exists today, but they're not gonna let you jump over to another team and go work on sequencing. And that's kind of the point that I'm trying to make is that these synthetic biology companies, they do right now, they're doing it, I see that. People who are the head of operations are also down designing their own bioreactors, for example. And then I think that portfolios, like with any design discipline, I think portfolios are gonna be a critical aspect for differentiating yourself. Remember, part of that is like the consistency and reproducibility of your skill set and documenting that process along the way. That all in one package and one neat portfolio that can show almost everything from the chart just by making something like that. So that's kind of my opinion for both companies that are hiring, but also for individuals who wanna be considered a full stack biotechnologist much like a full stack developer, you would have a portfolio of work. So here's an idea, I don't know, who's got the GitLab for biotechnology or I've seen some biotech stuff on Stack Overflow. Make it specifically for biotechnology and go make billions of dollars and hire me. And then certifications, I think that that's actually gonna be a critical component of this and this is something that the academic, what's like a good word for that, the academic ivory tower we'll call it. They don't like the idea of certifications but it'll come around. In my opinion, I think that just like IT, you don't have to go to college, you don't have to study at a university to be good at biology, but you also wanna do it safely. You wanna do it in a way that's not gonna be a risk as you're developing products and things like that. So these are some of the kind of goofy ones that I came up with potentially. So it'll be interesting to see kind of what comes out but I fully believe that biology won't have to be something that you have to do in a lab specifically out of university but having these skill sets and being able to prove them I think is a critical factor for that. So I'm a little bit early, I haven't got my text for dinner yet but here's my contact info and I don't know if we have an opportunity for questions or anything like that. Sure, go ahead. In the 1970s, somebody discovered that some computer programmers were like 400 times more productive than others and they called them super programmers. But then IBM took that in and created something they called the chief programmer team organization and read up on it because it said these people should just be doing that one thing and they should have support, they should have a code librarian, they should have a language editor. Does that concept work here or does it all have to be in one part? To me the idea of full stack is they are that unicorn that they are an individual which is why those salaries were, they are what they are and they're getting paid like a lot but there's not many of them, right? Like how many unicorns have you seen in your lifetime? I haven't. The idea, I'm not opposed to that but I don't also think that that might be different than what let's say a top 10 biotech is doing right now they might have a team leader, they might have a quality control group underneath them kind of overseeing the process but that's expensive, that's labor intensive and that's where I think the synthetic biology company is really gonna capitalize on that is if you can have two people doing the job of 10, do that and I'm seeing that right now in the industry as well. Yeah, so you're exactly right. The question was, do you think that the concept of a portfolio would be limiting to what you can put in it? The parallel all draw and this is really weird, Merrick is actually a architecture and engineering firm by history and so honestly, I think the way that they apply their portfolio development in engineering or like custom mechanical engineering designs things like that, architecture designs, there's a give and take otherwise the industry can't proliferate. For example, like you can give out what you've done without giving out how you did it and then when you interview, right? I think I heard something like SpaceX has 10 rounds of interviews or something insane like that. It's gonna come out if you legitimately did your project or not but the portfolio is kind of that gateway to get into the door for showcasing some of those skill sets. All right, getting a wrap up, so I'm gonna hang out outside if you guys do wanna come chat with me, feel free and then feel free to contact me at any point but I appreciate your time today. Thanks.