 So I'm Winnie, and I will give kind of the state of the union of open biotech and the DIY bio. So DIY bio is do-it-yourself biology. And I will give some examples from Belgium, but also consider if it's how the global landscape has been forming over the last years. I won't go into too much details because there's not so many biotech people here, I imagine, so it will be kind of an overview for those interested. If you're an expert, this might be things that you really know. So my personal journey, it starts about two and a half years ago when my phone was still shooting, so I didn't take very good pictures. And I arrived in a local follow-up with a backpack and a plank, because we had kind of made them warm for the idea of having an open biospace, and they said, well, yes, you can do that here. So that's what we did, and I took my backpack and my plank. And then just me and a few friends and we started gathering stuff to build equipment to do biology in that room. It was basically just a normal room. But we started meeting every week basically, building and collecting things to do bioscience with. You can see here there's already like cider fermenting, as well as gas being burned and everything that you usually do in biology labs. We got all of this vintage lab equipment to cool our beers, whatever you can think of. But it started growing, it started growing. We also took in crazy big machines. We got a lot of donations. It kind of got out of control a little bit. But two and a half years later, we're quite a vibrant community. This is our old lab. It was in a basement, as you see, but it was already quite high tech. Also thanks to the photographer for making it seem cleaner than it actually was. Now we're in a nicer lab. But it's really a community of about 50, 60 people that meets every week and that does biosciences. I can talk more later about specific examples of what kind of science that we are doing. I kind of wanted to stress the importance of biotech here because it's not a very usual suspect in the open community. But I want to give you examples of why it's actually quite important. First, kind of a distinction between open biotech or open biology and DIY bio. DIY bio is more the hacker approach to science where you do stuff with things that you can find in the supermarket and things that are questionable to real scientists, if those words even matter. And open biology is more like how you share the knowledge, more open science related. So they are very heavily overlapped, but there are two distinct things. So, very broadly speaking, a bit of history. Biology has been the only technology that has consistently kept us alive since the beginning. We were growing vegetables, doing agriculture, growing animals. So it's quite fundamental to our survival. And then given all our problems with waste and with sustainability, pretty much the future will need to be biological or we will have a very hard time surviving on this planet. So our past and future is basically biological. Now, today it's quite complicated and quite complex because as you can see, we're here in a container of pretty much future waste. We're breathing in air that's heavily polluted. We're doing things with genes that we don't really know what we're doing. So today is a bit complex and complicated and a lot of that is also manifested in the DIY Bible. And I'm going to go into a little bit of where the complications today lie. So, today, let's say since the 70s, biotech has kind of been coming up in slow cooking mode. The first genes were edited in the 70s. This is a picture of DNA sequencers. A whole floor of these things was used to in 2003 sequence the first human genome letter for letter. CTGA and so on and so on. It was first completed in 2003. It was a billion dollar project. And that was kind of a milestone. It was a collaborative effort. But in 15 years, a lot has changed. The cost of a human genome has dropped at about $1,000 way up from a billion or more than a billion. And this has of course created like a lot of exotic applications and a lot of shifts in what's possible with biotech. An example is gene therapy. It's very fancy technology where you insert genes in a human and they kind of alter your metabolism to correct for genetic disorders that you may have. To cure, to even enhance certain parts of your body. It's not yet there, but it's very close to being. There's gene therapies in trial now. This is another example. This is a beanie made from spider silk. The spider silk that was produced in the yeast cell. So it's synthetic spider silk. It can be a sustainable alternative for fashion, for textile industry. Because it's grown, it's fermented. It's not picked and grown. There's no modern slavery involved. Not yet. Anyway, this is organs on a chip. So this is again something futuristic that we couldn't even think of. Basically, this is a chip that simulates human organs that has little chambers that perform specific functions. And this would replace the need, for example, for human trials or at least partly for human trials or for animal trials, for example, for medicine. So there's all these crazy things going on with biotech that are very relevant to many industries. Of course, since we're in Belgium, beer is biotech to make sure that you do taste the same every time there's a lot of biotech involved. And this is all very cool, but actually like we've always been biohackers with biotech. Like I said about the agriculture, we've been doing it since 9,000 years before Christ. We've been growing things and we've been modifying them. Now with biotech we're just doing it more efficiently. And more efficiently, well, along the mainstream concept of it. But doing it more efficiently required more resource and incentive research. And that also made it proprietary. So growing a vegetable is not patented, but now growing that vegetable all better, that's patented. So it's been commodified and now we can sell it. And biotech is basically the selling of what's pretty much already there. I don't need to go too much in detail for it. I have an example with me like ginger. It's a blood thinner, but pharma doesn't really want to sell ginger. They want to sell pills that cinder blood because it's more expensive. It's a lot more interesting financially, so they do that and those pills, they are proprietary. Whereas ginger actually also works. I'm probably preaching to the choir here. So it makes sense to open it up. What do you need to open biotech up? Firstly, a community that contributes to the ecosystem. This was recent. In September there was a meet-up in Boston, Nevada. I think 300 biohackers there met doing open biotech. So the community is there. It's still growing, but there's a community there. This is global. This was from South America, Africa, North America, Europe, Asia. You name it. But here in Belgium we also have a community. This is our new lab. Well, my phone is better. My photography skills are not. These are people working at a meet-up of ours on open source biomaterials. This is our online community, the Biofab forum. There you can find open source manuals to make biodegradable building materials. So it's kind of coming. We've grown also from a community of 10 people to about 60 now. It goes slowly, but also other labs are popping up all over Europe. There's a lot of people meeting up every week to do open source biotech stuff. Now, the second thing is basic tools. So when you have people you kind of want to have them use something to make something productive. This is a picture of open source lab equipment. The kind of thing that you would find in a biology lab. Centrifuges, PCR machines, which are copy machines for DNA. Things like that. Basically biotech is a lot of liquids, pouring liquids together. It's not very spectacular. But it's needed. This is a very classical picture of the cost of the genome. So you see, it goes back to when the first human genome was sequenced. And the cost of sequencing DNA. So reading DNA has really dropped tremendously beyond prediction. So this basically is made possible by the drop in cost of many of the things that you use to do biotech. So financially speaking it's become consumer grade possible to do biotech in your garage really easily. If you have a decent job you can really much do it. Also because there's a lot of waste in the industry. The biotech industry is a billion dollar industry. So there's a lot of fallout that you can recuperate. So there are the basic tools. So that's great. Now, a big remark. There's a lot of IT people here. And it's always like programming lives, intelligibility. And pictures like these where you're like, we're coding A's and T's and G's and they're just producing proteins and everything. That's not really the case. It's really hard. Because once you have your code it still needs to be in a bacteria or in a yeast. And that's really the hard part. Biotech in theory is quite easy to give or take with biotech in wet work. It's really hard. That being said, open biotech is also really hard because as opposed to, for example, software, there's a lot of obstacles. So you have your DNA code which can be proprietary. You can own a piece of DNA as long as it's not natural if you made it yourself. But then you need to get it in your bacteria because the DNA needs to be in the bacteria to tell it what to produce. Every mechanism from pasting the little pieces of DNA together, that is patented. Then the mechanism for spinning it around in a bottle is patented. And then every mechanism for getting it in your bacteria is also patented. And then growing that bacteria itself can also be proprietary. And then you see where I'm going. Every step of the process is really much proprietary. So it's different than software or different than harder, for example, where there's a lot of steps where people are interfering and making it proprietary. So it becomes very, very hard to do something that's completely open source. The basic tools are not all there yet because we need so many of them. Some examples, though, of projects that are tackling this, that are investing in this shared open infrastructure for biotech is the 10K Genes project. They will ship you free genes. So actually you can order genes online, like genes with a gene of genes. And you can see, you can order it online and they will synthesize it. So they will build it letter for letter and ship it to you in a tube, given that you also publish it in an open database online. So then there's this giant repository of genes that people can use. So that's one of them. Now, something I didn't mention, again, another hard part of biotech is that the theoretical part, the knowledge about it is one thing. But then the biological manifestation of that knowledge, which is the gene in your little tube or the organism in your little tube, they're also protected. They're protected by MTAs, which are material transfer agreements, which say that every piece of biological material needs to have a paper trail to where it was created or where it was entered in the system. If I have a bacteria, I can't just give it to you. There needs to be a paper trail. And these paper trails of the MTAs are very restrictive, because, of course, it's usually in the context of companies or research institutes. And it's restrictive to also only be logistically possible to transfer it to the same institution. So as a consumer, you can't really do it, because viable, these MTAs are just not there. So it's very hard. So there's tied to the 10K genes project. There's an open MTA which makes it easier to ship biological material, which is a huge factor, because otherwise, everything before that is just theory. You need papers to ship biological material across the world. So yeah, open MTA, thank you. Genes, these are kind of the basic infrastructure for the boring part of open biotech. And then lastly... When you say it's the same to genes, how does it look like? How a gene looks like. It's small, it's big, it's small. You can't see it, it's just, it's like, it's really boring. It's just a tube, and there's like a few nanoliters of liquid in your tube, and there's your DNA. You can't see it, it's a transparent liquid. You need to put it on a fluorometer to know how much DNA is in there, because the meter sends waves through it, and then considering the absorbance of the rays, the absorbance, and then you know the concentration. So everything in biotech, most things in biotech are like indirect, because you can't really see it, you can't see bacteria, you can't see genes. It's just tubes, you're basically all day, what you're doing is with the climate, you're taking microliters of something, you're putting them there, and you're doing that all day, and you get a wrist that's like broken. You don't see anything. So that's biotech, it's like... That's it, it's all kind of genes. It can be anything. I think they may have a restriction on genes that can be used for these DIY gene therapies, which I will talk about later. So, yeah, I think there's some restrictions, but I know the guy who ships in and he says, we can't really sell all of it. There's nobody asking for them, so please, take our genes. So, yeah, there's a lot of documentation online, I can get you the information on that. So, yeah, when you have the community and the tools, you want to do something productive with it, because me in my garage alone, I can't do that much, because also, all these steps, it's quite hard. There's failure at every step, synthesizing the DNA, putting it in the bacteria, growing it, then making the protein from the bacteria. Every step is risky. So, you want a lot of people to work on this. So, these are some pictures actually from our labs. We are working with just regular people who want to learn about biology, we're working with children, we're teaching teachers, we're also working with people with disabilities, because we kind of want to open it up to everyone. And the diverse backgrounds of people makes it richer, which is the opposite of what biotech usually is done, like far, far away in white labs where nobody can enter in. Yeah, things that happen there are questionable if you don't consult with people. So, people have been organizing in these biohacker spaces, there's a bit over 100 globally, we are one of them in Ghent in Belgium, there's not really a lot going on otherwise. I'm going to give some examples of projects. So, this is a project from San Francisco, from Oakland, real vegan cheese, so the goal is pretty much that. Make vegan cheese with, I think it's yeast or a bacteria. Anyway, the bacteria or the yeast will produce cheese, and then it's non-animal cheese obviously, because it's made with bacteria. I don't know in the debate around, is it vegan or not, we'll start with. It's vegan for now. Yeah, let's leave it at that, that's for the break. Another example are actually the DIY gene therapy, so this is maybe NSFW, but this is a guy injecting a DIY, so do it yourself, cure for herpes, because herpes, it injects itself in your DNA, so you have it for life, but this guy has found a cure. This is kind of a hot topic now, there's these last months, many, many people who've been injecting DIY gene therapies in themselves to become stronger or smarter or to cure themselves or whatever. There's also this guy, I'm not even going to say it, I'll just let you read it, but this is a bit like, I'm happy to go into more detail afterwards, but to be short, it's kind of dangerous, it's mostly a show, because if you inject it here, it just stays here and then it doesn't really go anywhere, so it doesn't work. It's probably going to modify a few cells where you inject it, but for the rest it's not really going to do a lot. It's not going to change. A guy in Ghent that I know, he injected himself with a spider gene to become smarter. But it doesn't, it's not really going to work, and then you have to shock yourself with electricity because it makes it go in the cells and people do crazy things. It's mostly stunts at this point, it's mostly stunts. And you can have your opinion about like there's trans-units who really are like, this is it, this is going to be it, but for me this kind of shows that people can start doing this, like biotech is deserving of some more debate than it is having now because things are becoming very fleshy at this point. It's not coding into bacteria, it's really people are doing things like that. So another interesting thing that I find is the personal genome project. It's been around quite a while. The data people here will know about it. It's basically an open database, of genomes of people. So a genome is every letter of DNA in someone's body. And this is a repository of people, of open source people, who have donated their DNA, their sequence to the database online and you can just download them. So I did that a few times. It's actually a bit creepy and funny at the same time because you can download it in five minutes, you have someone's complete genome and then not only the genome, they have 120 kilos, 63 years old, a bit of a high cholesterol, some weird diseases or whatever. Even photos from every angle of the phase you can find online. Some people are very open source online. It's a bit creepy, but it's an interesting thing. It's been around quite a long time. Why? Because it can be a goal, these genetic data. It's really, really popular with big data companies now because while there's the hope that it can say a lot about a person, I must say that the most algorithms based on genetic data are for now educated guesses or frauds if you look at it negatively. But it's the hope that at some point this genetic data will lead to personalized medicine, to personalized food, things like that, that you can cure every disease, like no more disease, no more dying, just becoming old without any problem. Of course, the potential of that hasn't really manifested itself yet. But it's also important to talk about this and I think this is kind of a solution for it to have it open source because there can be quite fundamental abuse of genetic data in the future. There's the same pessimistic scenarios of people saying, well, genetic data and insurance, well, you're much more prone to cancer or whatever, so what does that do to your insurance? So, yeah, a lot of discussion around that but it deserves a discussion and so I won't go into it too much. Then, this is a project here in Belgium that we are involved with with reagents, Open Insulin. The goal is pretty simple, to produce the first open source insulin production protocol that is simple and economical. You may or may not know, but insulin was the first genetically modified, or produced by genetically modified bacteria a long time ago, it's a pretty sad story of the farm industry because the price has been rising by about 1,000% the last 10 years with the production cost of about 20 euros, a vial now costs 250 euros. So, there is this questionable thing going on where insulin is very expensive. People in first world countries are dying from diabetes basically because it's too expensive. Whereas the production protocol is not that hard but it's patented. So, we are working on that, an open source production protocol started in San Francisco. We have joined, there's also a team in Sydney, while the South American teams are not really operative anymore but Cameroon in Senegal and India are now popping up. This is pretty important because an open source production protocol would mean at least a 50% price drop and in Belgium we were just talking about it in the room. This would be about 50 million euros savings for the government in returns on your old mausoleum and all that. I don't want to make advertisements on that but to see like open source pharma could be a game changer. We're working on it, it's going slow but it's a moonshot so we need to keep at it. If you want to contribute, go to your local biohacker space. Our projects are of different nature. This is pictures of some insulin in San Francisco. It doesn't look like that in your body, it doesn't light up. This is a marker to make it more visible. It's one of the few times that you can actually see what's going on in biotech. This is a cooperative that we launched by Manibula with open source biomaterials. This is a lamp that's fully biodegradable except for the light of course. It's based on coffee waste and it's made with the mushroom. We have a small company around it with open source. Now we also engage the community. These are all designers learning to work with the biomaterials. We are running out of time so I'm just going to go through it. We have an open source water project so we're going to measure the water in gins. That's also something that you can do in a biohacker space to do like E. coli infections to measure E. coli infections we are harmless. We do a lot of education so as I said we involve children in biotech because education now like if you're lucky in school you get to do the parts of the human body which is like the height of how exciting biology gets but it's actually more than that so we're trying to give children also a relevant education there and we focus on other privileged groups as well because they are never going to see it. Who says that people with disabilities come to sign as well they can and they like it. We also train teachers we do a lot of things that's why I'm running a bit out of time these are other initiatives in Belgium that are also doing it but they're all not so active at this point but I hope they will I hope more labs will start so that we can do more of this open biotech. My last slide I thought well what's in the future all these things that I've been talking to it's quite scary it's quite whatever happens like people start injecting themselves with genes this would have been unheard of one year ago so I don't really know what's in the future like something random can happen I don't know but I think this is what I hope that would happen in the future I hope there's more open infrastructure for biotech because that enables people to do things like open insulin to really break these very very harmful monopolies I hope that we have more open conversations because this gene therapy thing this should be discussed like is this okay it's actually quite outside of the law right now but as well as the ethical implications of for example pharma monopolies that are actually artificial at this point because it doesn't take so much money to break them and then the Ecuador Foundation so we do a lot of work around including different people from different walks of life and we think that's important because the research you do becomes more relevant but also when you have someone like the other in front of you it's also harder to patent your thing and say well no you're going to pay ten times the production cost for my life-saving medicine that could help you you're probably not going to do that when they're sitting next to you so I think more people should be involved in the process of biotech there we go thank you