 First time you'll know that at most seminars, you ask any questions, you know, always always very quiet. Yeah, so I'm glad there's a lot of, you know, questions and answers and interaction from the audience. And for the next speaker, yeah, we have Mark who will talk about who's actually from California and you'll be sharing something about this snicker net thing which some of us may not be very familiar. Right. So I'll hand over the stage to Mark. Yeah, hi. So I'm here presenting at SB7 about this thing called the Bionet that I've been working on, but I just wanted to quickly go through where I'm coming from and how I ended up here. Because I think I had a lot of trouble getting to the point that I am right now and I feel like a lot of people might have the same problem. So when I was a teenager, I discovered open source. I read this book and I realized that this wasn't just like cool code to play with, but it was more like a small revolution happening. So I was playing around with Linux and I got excited about that there's a whole community around open source. But it was early days and I couldn't find any real community. I was in a small town and couldn't find any community around working on open things. So when I got to university, there was a Linux user group joined this. But you know, it's just in the end, it's just like 5, 10 people sitting in a room staring at each other and playing with source code. And we had trouble getting the community to move beyond just that. So, okay, this is kind of a dark image, but this is kind of a dusk image of KS Communications Camp. And for those of you who don't know about KS Communication Camp, there's a KS Computer Club in Berlin that's existed since I think 1987 as a hacker activist group and a hacker space, a sea base in Berlin. Probably the first real hacker space in the world. They put this on every four years and the next one is in two years. So it's basically an old Russian air base that's now an air museum. So all the planes are there and all the old hangars are there. And you just come there like 3,000 hackers and hang out and camp in tents and then you have a week-long conference and it's awesome. It's like a hacker city. It's like a hacker burning man. And everyone comes there and they're like, should we just stay? And I have a hacker city and live in a hacker city. So I was very inspired by this and the 2007 one happened to be the one where the people who started the meta lab hacker space in Vienna, they showed up and they said, here's how you start a hacker space. We just did it. And they did it very easily because they got all the people from Germany who already had a hacker space to come and donate all the stuff they needed. The day they opened the door, the day they got the key, there's a whole cadre of hackers standing there with computers and never-ending gear. But they were like, here's the blueprints. Here's how you start a hacker space. Everyone came to this, went home thinking we should start a hacker space. And a lot of people did. That was 2007. It was just the one of the cool photos where they lit up the jets with LEDs so they looked like they're burning fuel. Okay, so meta lab in Vienna, which I just had the opportunity to visit last week for the first time. So that was really good to see. So then every year they have this conference. It's just a normal conference in a conference hall in Berlin or Hamburg. It's the Chaos Communication Congress. There's this guy talking. I wasn't there but I was live streaming it. And I saw this talk by this guy I didn't know about called Drew Endi. And he was talking about programming DNA. And I was like, what's this guy doing at a hacker conference talking about biology? And he made it sound like you can just program DNA, program life the way that you program computers. So I thought, oh, I want to get into this. How do I get into this? I had an email. I said, Drew, how do I get into synthetic biology? I'm an IT person. And I'm in Denmark. And he said, maybe you could try getting a job in a bioinformatics department and then slowly move edging into the lab. So I tried that and learned some stuff, but they didn't let me into the lab. So I was like, how do I get into a lab? I want to try this stuff. I was in Copenhagen. There's a lot of restrictions in the European Union on genetic engineering. In the meantime, however, we finally started our hackerspace in Copenhagen in 2009. So at least we had that. We had a decent sized hackerspace. And we had a community around us. And finally we had some community around openness in Denmark. I need that. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So then we tried to start. And I was like, well, if I can't get into a lab, maybe we'll just start a lab. So we tried starting a DIY biospace or a biohackerspace in Copenhagen, ran into a lot of issues because of the regulations. We tried to talk to the people who were actually certifying things for biosafety level one. They wouldn't talk to us because there's rules about that. They can't really hold your hand. They can just come in and look and certify good or not good. It's one of those things where they have this separation of powers. So you basically have to hire someone who has already done it to go through it. It's a very complicated process. So we just had to work with stuff that was legal. So you can do genetic engineering in the European Union without certification, but you can only move things around within the same realm of life, basically the same species. That's not very interesting. But you can do stuff like, you know, you can run 16S RNA, just do species identification, stuff like that. Okay, so skipping ahead. So I gave up, basically, and I just took the easy route and Denmark Education is free. So I just was like, well, fuck it. I'm going to go get a master's degree from the university that has a lab. I'm just going to fill my course schedule with lab courses. I did that and cheated. And I got lab experience. And then I was like, oh, I need to do a master's project. Hey, Drew, who I haven't contacted since my initial email a few years ago. Can I come work in your lab? And he was like, yeah, sure. And so I went to Stanford. Or actually, at that point, I went to J-Bay in Emeryville and worked with Adam Arkin and Drew Endi. And it was a great opportunity to work with the team there. So I recommend this. If you have this opportunity, you have a bachelor's project or a master's project. You can use that to get into places by saying, hey, I have free labor. You want to choose your own project. But if you give that up and say, you tell me what you need to work on, you can get into a lot of places. That's what happened there. Then while I was working on that, I met someone who was trying to start a hackerspace in Oakland. And they already had a name for it. So we started meeting around this place called Suderoom that Jenny mentioned before. So we managed to start a new hackerspace. And it kind of came out of the Occupy Oakland movement. So it's much more radical and much more organized around activism and activism in general. Okay, let's get me ahead of it a little bit. Well, once we were starting this hackerspace, there was already another hackerspace in the area. And one of them was BioCurious. Turned out a lot of people at BioCurious, and if you don't know about BioCurious, it's the oldest hacker space in the US, I believe, or maybe around the oldest, one of the first. And it is in the South Bay. And a lot of people were commuting from Oakland or the East Bay about an hour and a half to go there. It turns out a lot of the co-organizers weren't living where the space was. So they were like, we should start our own space. And they were showing up at Suderoom. So we thought, well, maybe we can start it out at Suderoom, or maybe we can take Suderoom and Counterculture Labs, which was the name of this new biohackerspace, and maybe some of the other groups that do radical organizing and get together and get a bigger place. And because rent is expensive. So while we were doing that, we started some projects to just start working and stuff. So this is actually like the back room of someone's house, where we just like... What? I always share this moment again, but I'm doing my part. Yeah, yeah. So this is by the... So one of the people in the group, they had this guest room, basically, that was unused, and we set up with the first Biolab there. This is the US, so you can do this when you don't have to get sort of... Yeah, so I'll play the video while I'm talking, I guess, if there's... Oh, I don't have internet, sorry. Offline copy. Do you want a Wi-Fi? Here we go, I have it here. Offline copy. So it's kind of... There's a voiceover, but never mind. So this project, we were trying to find a project to kick off our biohackerspace, and we thought, it's okay, I'll just talk. And we thought, what if I start... What if we do something that is related to it, something everyone cares about, or like food? So we thought, what's something that's lowering fruit, like a first-generation genetic engineering project, where we just have to make a protein, not like a whole pathway. And it's something everyone cares about. So we said, oh, what if we just make cheese protein? And we just take... And this is actually a collaboration between Biocurious and the now almost existing counter-culture labs. So if we take the cheese protein genes, there's like three important ones, stick them into yeast, and then just purify the protein, and then we can just add the other parts of milk that go into cheese, which is like fat, and water, and sugar, lactose. And maybe we can make a cheese. So we put a Made in the Go-Go campaign. We got about $37,000, because people got excited about this project. We hadn't aimed... I think we aimed at 10K or something. So overwhelming response, a lot of media attention. And then a lot of people were like, when can we have this cheese? Where does this stand? What? Where does this project stand? Yeah, so this project, we got to the point where we got small amounts of expression of the proteins we're interested in. The most difficult one was kappa-casin. Kappa-casin is kind of the magic of cheese. Actually, the magic of milk. So brief detour, I guess. But the way milk works is that what milk is, evolutionarily, what this purpose is, is it's a delivery mechanism for high concentrations of protein through a fluid medium, from a mother to offspring. And protein's difficult, because protein's generally hard to dissolve in water in high quantities. So kappa-casin acts kind of like soap acts for oil and water, but between proteins and water. It's a hydrophobic and hydrophilic protein in different ends. And it creates these little micelles, these little spheres where all the hydrophobic ends are pointing inwards and the hydrophilic ends are pointing outwards, and it's like a ball of protein. So once you have kappa-casin, you can dissolve huge amounts of protein in a liquid, and then you can, and that's milk, well, with some other stuff. And once you have it in the liquid form, with a bunch of fats floating around as well, and sugars, if you suddenly cleave off all the ends that are sticking out all the hydrophilic ends of that protein, then it rapidly drops out of solution, really rapidly. And in fact, all those fats and sugars and a lot of the water gets trapped in a protein matrix, which is what's basically cheese. Then the only thing remaining is to squeeze it, salt it, and age it. So if you can make kappa-casin, the theory is you can make cheese. So like I said, we only made my new amounts of this stuff, and we still have a lot of money in the bank account, because we decided we're only going to use the money to buy lab equipment and we're only going to buy it used and reagents. And we're not going to pay anyone, because it's not enough money to pay someone to work on it. Approaching purification. So because it's so small amounts, we've only done jellies. We only run jellies for the approaching purification. So of course, we ran some immune essays, so we managed to get some antibodies for some of these things, because they're so well-known from the dairy industry, they've been analyzed a lot, so you can get antibodies for them. What we just did is we replied for funding from New Harvest, which is a group that supports these new-style engineered foods and vegan replacements. They actually came to us, so I think we have a good chance of getting funding for them, and if we get this funding, we'll probably hear back next month, we have enough for two people to work half-time each eight months, and that should be enough to get us to a small scale proof of concept, which hopefully will get us enough attention from funders that the people in the group who are interested in doing a commercial product can do that, though of course everything that we develop is on our wiki open source, freely available for everyone. What about our foods for the day? Oh yeah, our evil nemesis. You're evil nemesis? I just wanted to make sure. No, they're stealth modes, so they don't talk to us. So there's another different group that they start out copying called Moufri, and they're doing almost the same thing, they're focusing on milk, which is slightly more complicated in some ways, less complicated in other ways. You don't have to get the capricious in micellular structure right, but you have to make more different proteins. They've been going for almost as long as we have. I think they started like six months or something after we started. In the beginning, they weren't sharing, we talked to them and they were like, we can share, we can talk and we'll share our info, and then they stopped talking to everyone, including the media, and we actually got pissed off journalists calling us, complaining about them, because they wouldn't even talk to them about the stuff that had already been made public earlier. So I think that happened when they got investors involved and the investor was like, you have to be secret. And then we haven't heard anything since then, it's like two years ago. So we don't know what's going on. We're going to have a product schedule later this year, right? They keep saying that. Anyway, let's see. Sorry. So I was talking about how we wanted to get all going on a big space, so we actually did that. A bunch of different groups that we knew and a bunch of different people who had ideas for groups that we wanted to start all went together and said, okay, let's find a space. And then we found this awesome space. It was a 20,000 square foot and it's about 2,000 square meter space in this north neighborhood of Oakland. It's an old Italian space that was actually built as a community space. It's like an Italian social club. And it was just being used by these two older people who were living there using it as their home. So after much negotiation and lots of running around and finding enough groups that we can actually afford the space, one of our friends doing most of the work of negotiating with these people, they agreed to a three-year lease with an option to buy with a lower-than-market rate price to buy. And we rented for two years and we moved in. We started the hacker space and the buyer hacker space in the same big room in the back next to each other and a big beautiful boat. Actually, I should have played the video by Etron. Thank you. There we go. So we also did crowdfunding campaign for that. And we had one of the collectors happen to be a radical documentary film-making collective. So of course they did our video. It's all one-shot. Yeah, it's a one-shot video tour of the entire thing. And after two years and a lot of effort by a lot of people, especially Jenny over there, we managed to buy it a few months ago. We got a $1 million anonymous donation that helped quite a bit. You said no? You said no? Yeah. Okay. Mark, this is the camera. Yeah. Let's read it. It's on Shattuck Avenue of North Intimus Cal. So this is, as you can see, we just moved in and we just put up stuff to make it look sciency for the video. We didn't actually have anything yet. And here's the normal, here's the studio room, the normal hacker space. It was a little more established at that point. So we actually had some real stuff going on, including the repurposed, reprogrammed robot arm pouring tea, as you can see here. So that's an old industrial welding robot. And then, as you can see, a lot of antennas here, because one of the products we have out there is a community mesh networking project, because we're really pissed off at Comcast and AT&T so we're trying to replace them with a community network. And lots of space, like this printing press collector is one of the few collectives that, not a few actually, quite a few, the collectives that didn't exist before the Omni ended up not lasting. They didn't try to start things and they fail. So that put us in a bit of a crisis situation with God's to Wrench. But a lot of people in our community came together and just lent us money, kept piling money into the black hole, until we could buy it. We have about 10 member collectives right now. 10? Yeah, so. Ten member collectives, which have varying degrees of participation. Like one of them is conduct bombs, which distributes, if we move to the people, it's all volunteer, some days a week. And that membership is pretty big. It's probably 200 people who occasionally volunteer, maybe 20 who are super regular. The suit room is kind of similar. We technically have 180 members, but only 15, 20 people who are there regularly. These collectives are all very different. So there's the hacker space that has traditional membership structure, but it's open to the public. And then there's stuff like Food Not Bombs, which they exist solely to pick up excess foods from grocery stores and restaurants, and then give them to people who don't have cooked them into meals and then serve meals six days a week to anyone who wants them on the street. And they're trying to renovate the kitchen, the old industrial kitchen in the basement. Okay, I'm skipping in. I think we're generally on a scale basis. So maybe we'll split a share of the door, or maybe we'll ask for like $200 for the evening, or if they're actually charging at the door and making some money, then we'll ask for like the standard, which is like $400 for the ballroom. Okay. For meeting spaces. We should move on. Okay. So we also developed on software all these things, all these collectives. So I just wanted to mention a couple of them, if people are interested. DumpScribe is a piece of software that takes the smart pens, the live scribe. It supports everything except the newest wireless version. And basically you run this piece of software on a computer and like a little Raspberry Pi, hook it up to the thing, and then you check your lab notes with the normal, writing them normally in your book, but on the special paper. And when you dock it back, they instantly go online, get converted to open formats like PDF and Agrabiz for the audio, and just instantly go to your website. So this helps when people want to see what did people do on this community project yesterday. Just like everyone takes lab notes and they're instantly available online. We also have Google Labeler because when we created all these crowdfunding campaigns, suddenly we have to send people a t-shirt and all these things. It's really difficult. And so we created this thing that prints pre-paid shipping labels and like normal address labels from the CSV dumps from Kickstarter and at Indiegogo. Yeah, as I mentioned, we're also doing a community mesh network. It's one of the more active projects. It's not really open science, but if you want to do open science, you need infrastructure, one of those communication. And if we don't own our own communication networks, then people can censor what we do. So long-distance Wi-Fi links from rooftop to rooftop using mesh networking protocols, a firmware that we developed based on OpenWRT allows people to communicate directly and without relying on the internet. This is another one we're doing, disaster radio, which was the reason I was in Vienna, presenting about it. It's a very, very low bandwidth, but much easier to deploy and completely off-grid based on solar power network that we just had the first prototype on. It's only like a few kilobits per second, but that's enough for chat and things like that. Okay, so right now, I work for Biobricks Foundation because I ran out of money, so I had to get a job after three years of just doing all these volunteer projects. So Biobricks Foundation, for those who don't know about it, it's a little bit like the Free Software Foundation for software if you're a software person. They support, they create supporting technologies of both legal technologies and software and hardware for promoting openness and just improving the situation within synthetic biology. So we're here presenting this project called the Bionet at SB7, and the Bionet is a decentralized wetware sneaker net. It's kind of like the internet for stuff. So the internet is cool, but you can only transfer information, and a lot of people are like, well, you can just transfer the DNA sequences and then synthesize them, but first of all, not everything's just sequences. A lot of stuff is actually like other kinds of samples, and you can't really synthesize a full organism quite yet. It will take a while before we get there, especially for some organisms. And a lot of people can't really afford to synthesize everything every time they need something. So we're trying to make a way for people to share their biological information really easily. And for that, we created the Bionet. And the Bionet is multiple different things. It's both wetware and software and hardware. Let me just put a full video where I'm talking here. So, this is, well, wait, this is a little too big, isn't it? Yeah, now we can see it. Okay, so this is the Bionet software. It's basically just an open source web-based inventory system written in Node.js. And as you can see, it has nice 3 visualizations for your lab inventory. So you can put stuff into it and tell it where stuff is. And then when you scan barcodes on it, it'll open up like this and show you, oh, it's in this box and this rack and this freezer. And the idea is we give people a free and open source really nice inventory management system. People use it in labs because everyone's lab management, unless they have like the expensive thermo-fisher solution or something, this shit. And then people happy and they use it. And then there's a little button on every single thing you add to the system that says, make it open, make it available to the world. So, this is not just one web app running on one web server where you go and use it on our server. You can install on your own web server and then there's multiple installations and you can use your own domain and it's all, you can keep your data private. You can keep it on your own computer in your space if you want. But then as soon as you click make public, what happens is that all of the nodes, they find each other. They actually, it's actually on the back end using the BitTorrent DHT so it uses peer-to-peer technologies to discover and connect all the nodes together. And then when you search, the search travels across the entire bionet and gives you the results back and right now we just have plain text search, we just basically launched it today and it's very alpha level software but I think in like a month we'll have the blast search ready as well and the elastic search so we'll be able to do more like human language stuff that corrects our spelling mistakes and do real blast searches across the entire, all the sequences of bionet. We support FASTA, FASQ, GenBank and Espo out of the box but of course you can always add more formats because it's open source and we also support these, I didn't bring the printer because I didn't want to lug it along but basically we have the scanners and printers and especially off-the-shelf stuff that we just hook up to a little Raspberry Pi running our software that Cloud enables these USB things so you get a little cheap label printer, a USB label printer and then it's like $60 thing from Brother and then you get the special label paper that can hold up to minus 80, it's not very expensive and then you load our software onto the Raspberry Pi, it automatically connects to your node and then when people hit print in the web app it sends it to the Raspberry Pi, sends it to the printer and prints it and we have the same thing with a little scanner unit also equipped with a Raspberry Pi and then we have, we're developing a system where you use these little Bluetooth low-energy tags, see if I have one, they're like $6, you've probably seen them to help you find your keys and so basically when in a lab it's usually a fairly secure environment so logging in doesn't have to be like using a password and two-factor authentication so basically the Raspberry Pi is just detected when you're near so you associate this with your user account and then when you walk over to the scanner and scan something if you haven't pulled up on your phone or your laptop anywhere you haven't pulled up under your user account it shows what you scanned and if you print something it doesn't print until you walk over to the printer and then spits it out when it detects your proximity and that's easy to do because the Raspberry Pi is built in Bluetooth and these things are cheap so another thing that happened today is that we announced this partnership with the Briberpix Foundation and TWIST which I thought you might find interesting we're basically buying about 10 megabases of synthesis from TWIST and we managed to convince TWIST somehow I was not part of this so for those of you who don't know most synthesis companies almost all of them when you buy stuff or see DNA from them they actually release it under these terms that don't allow you to share it with anyone else most people don't know this because they never read the terms but it was hard to find a company that was willing to make this stuff open so another thing that was released that is not quite probably yet because there's a common period that's like a request for comics for 60 days right now on the open MTA so if you've ever dealt with material transfer agreements you've probably dealt with the UBMTA which is what all academic institutions use almost all to transfer materials between each other and the UBMTA is like a contract that you sign in order to get something from someone else saying that you only use it for academic purposes you won't use it for commercial purposes and you won't pass it on to anyone else out of sight of your lab that's really limiting and if you get something from Edgene it's under UBMTA so then there's always a way around it which is to re-synthesize if it's a piece of DNA that can be expensive sometimes it's difficult if it's a special piece of DNA or if it's an organism you can't do it so we release the open MTA which is basically like MIT style license you can do whatever you want but it makes all the lawyers happy at the universities so our lawyers have been going around signing people up signing universities out for this at the institutional level so that the academics can share in a way that can be reshared these 10 megabases 10,000 genes I don't know why they say 10,000 genes these 10 megabases will be decided by the community and will probably just put up like a subreddit and people can like post I want this gene and then up vote and down vote and then the top genes will synthesize and release under the open MTA and then send them to the people and the only thing you have to do is you have to guarantee or you have to promise that you're going to reshare them with someone else so if you have ordered something and a lot of people wanted it then you have to be responsible for sending some out to other people yes yes, especially anyone who has a minus 80 freezer can I talk about the minus 80 freezer? yeah, okay I think I'm going way over time but I wanted to mention two little projects I'm working on so this is a little PCB maybe you can pass it around and it's just a funny little idea I had but I'd like to get more people working on it it's a the idea was what's the minimal what's the cheapest bioreactor you can make and I thought well two more important things a bioreactor has to do is maintain temperature and have a light and make a magnet you can spin or not spin to stir it so I thought can you do that on a piece of PCB so we tried to make this prototype PCB that has magnetic coils built into it that can both be heating and generating the rotating magnetic field and this is the first test and it definitely heats which is easy but if the glass is just a little too thick it can't spin the magnet that well so we need to upgrade our fab process to get 12 ounces instead of this is 4 ounce copper which is double the normal amount of copper but if we get to 12 ounces I think it will work and maybe we could get these made for like 5 bucks a pop plus maybe 5 bucks for electronics and then a little Erlenmeyer flask and then maybe we can say we can sell them as little kits for people to play with in schools and stuff and maybe they can be upgraded and then another thing that we're working on is a it's a personal minus 80 freezer because we realize this is a huge problem for a lot of labs that's like the limiting thing that makes a lot of things impossible for them it's no minus 80 we have a minus 80 we just got it we're very excited about it but even if you can get one for free the amount of power that it takes is just really expensive so we took this little what do you call it like a thermos you can get these thermos as a vacuum inside they're very cheap but you can get ones that are really big and wide and then we just add a ton of more insulation around it and basically made you know how incubators a lot of them they have water jackets on the outside like a basically a layer of thick layer of water on the outside to stabilize the temperature well this has a the opposite it has a glycerol layer on the inside to stabilize the negative temperature so if you mix a third glycerol choose there's water mental melting temperature is minus 45 centigrade so that means if you get it below minus 45 centigrade when you open it even though it's a tiny compartment that wants to heat up really quickly you have this water jacket where the temperature runs up from minus 80 to minus 45 and it stops until all the glycerol water solution is melted so it's a huge buffer which also means you can probably transport it and then we stick the whole thing in a bucket full of even more insulation and then the cooling comes from a chunk of aluminum just running through the glycerol that's connected to a bunch of stacks of Peltier units like three levels deep with a really beefy CPU power and then a couple of really beefy coolers like CPU coolers fans with well and there we've only gotten it down to minus 35 right now so we need to add more Peltier's that was with six for the 15 amp Peltier's at 12 volts but we're hoping to try to make this something that anyone can build so they can at least have a tiny amount of minus 80 in there what? wait for the unit? I don't know probably like six kilograms or something yeah okay it's very small it's like I haven't actually measured it but it's like this much diameter and then it's like a 10 centimeters deep what? no we're gonna have to three we're gonna have to laser cut some little holders for the tubes that fit inside of it you could probably have like two levels of tubes and maybe maybe you could have like 60, 70 tubes or something I think you could fit in there did it actually hold for a day? no I've only got it down to minus 35 so far but I ran out of do you do it? yeah and it runs on 12 volts so the hope is that you can toggle it into travel mode and then plug it into your car cigarette lighter plug and then just not open it and maintain temperature while you're driving but we don't know if that is gonna be viable with the amount of power consumption so we'll see I wish I had a picture of it I was forgot to take one before I left in a wax thermos? in a thermos just a thermos yeah yeah just a double hole how long does that last? how do you how do you prevent it from exploding with the dry ice you just you don't seal it? yeah I don't seal it yeah yeah okay they tell you the curious tyrofoam boxes with dry ice yeah with transformations yeah yeah the thing is you know some places like for example in Denmark you can't buy dry ice without a license the storage like to keep things cool and my friends in the food business and they have this packaging which is like I think it's wool but they make these boxes so it's like it's just wool and apparently you can see I really don't think they're for shipping for a long time cool okay well I don't have any more I thought it took so long thank you