 Mike, the next speaker, all the way from Israel. Go to Illa, please. Ilya, yeah. Hello. So I will be talking less science, more community, because as you'll see in the talk, I'm here under the head of Biorb Israel. And I'll tell you more about it. So I'm a PhD student and Vice Minister of Science, which is irrelevant for this talk. I'm a co-founder of Biorb Israel, which I'll tell you more about. I'm also tutoring in Davidson Institute for Science Education. And there we also do some experiments with high school students in biology. And I'm also happily married. And since I value my work-life balance, I have to mention that. So what is Biorb Biorb? It's registered on profit-organized meetup. It was another ground, hacker space, which kindly lent me the space to give the talk. I think there showed up like 40 people there. It was very crowded. It was nothing like this place. It was mostly equipment and some chairs. But yeah, it was a lot of fun. We had like three talks, one over sky, from people around the world that are doing biohacking. And later on that year, I joined forces with Karen. That's her picture. And we rebranded ourselves as Biorb IEL. And she's been doing meetups about biology, more aiming towards the entrepreneurs community and the people who are educated in some extent in biology for about a couple of years in the same area. I was doing the meetups. And early this year, we registered as a nonprofit. So overall, we have around 60 members on Facebook. Some of them follow our Facebook page. Some of them are on our mailing list. And we hope to grow as we go on. So the thing I've been most strongly involved in is organizing our meetups. And you can see some of the pictures here. Some of these speakers are self-educated. Like this is Uri, he gave a talk about biomaterials and permaculture. And he is completely self-taught in whatever he knows about biology. And this was a talk about hydroponics. And this is Max. He's a master's student in the same institute, IMN. That's Gita. She gave a talk about genetic engineering in CRISPR-Cas9. One of our most popular talks. We had like 50 participants there. That's Neve. He gave a talk about do-it-yourself evolution. He actually built a chemostat himself. He's a PhD student in Weisman, full disclosure. But the building with Arduino and Pi and whatever he put in there to control the chemostat, that was, he completely learned on his own and laser cut the pieces in a hacker space and anything actually you can do. And that's just the crowd we usually get. It's in Google Campus in Tel Aviv. It's a very nice space that we get for free from Google to give talks about advances in biotech. And we also, thanks to Gita and a lot of donated equipment from Lifegiver she works and some other contributors and some stuff I took from our lab, managed to run a genetic engineering course for beginners. It was the 10 meetings, like over 25 hours of content that she gave the students for like a minimal price of about $100. It was accessible to everyone. It was overbooked. I had 23 participants aged 18 to 60. Some of them had no biology background. It was a lot of fun. And I actually did a hands-on transformation of bacteria in the classroom, which is illegal. So we're not going to repeat that. But we're not going to do that again. Now that we're registered as a nonprofit, we don't get in trouble. But the graduates, they continued interacting between them. They started a journal club. Some of them want to continue working in the entrepreneurship, do stuff. There's some pictures from the workshop. This picture screams, trust me, I'm a biologist. And I was like, I'm going to hack the world, right? Also here, there's Shmuel. He's leading the journal club. He's also like, he's like an artist, puppeteer, theater person. He just wants to clone himself and take over the world or whatever. So we have a great community. We also were the first group to be international partners of the ASM, American Society of Microbiology, for their annual agro-art competition. So for this, we actually needed a lab space. We couldn't do this in some office space that we get through collaboration. So we collaborated with Davidson Institute, so I'm pulling all my strings for this initiative. And we had 50, 50% of adults from our community and high school students from Davidson. And they all did the amazing agro-art pieces. That's two of them. The right one is the one who won the competition. She actually, this is a PhD student. She actually made stamps to take bacteria and print them on the agro with the stamp. And Nourit Barshai, she's one of the co-founders of GenSpace. She actually ran the workshop and she helps us a lot. She's now staying in Israel. And so yeah, that's some pictures from the workshop. That's Nourit with her charismatic lecture talking and that's like all the participants, the kids and the adults working together. That's the before picture of how the tables looked. Afterwards, it was a huge mess, obviously. But yeah, it was a lot of fun. We're working towards a lab space. There is this institute in Israel that's doing a lot. It's called the ADC. It's like a lot of entrepreneurship and engineering stuff. They wanted to get into biology. So we connected with them. One of our volunteers is working part-time there. That's Gilat. He's leading this effort. And we actually managed to get a small bench space. We're waiting for the safety permits to actually start working. They're gonna do some projects that interest the hosting lab and open up for our community as well. There are already like two projects in the community that are waiting to get started. They're one on biocellulose and one on diabetes. I think diagnostics might be treatment. I don't remember the details. So I'm telling you all this because I wanna get your input like on how you see such a community evolving. And for now what we have in mind for doing next is we get this bench space running and hopefully it will give us credentials and the way to grow. TwistBioScience is a huge DNA synthesis company. They have offices in Tel Aviv. They offered us their space for running the next courses because we got kicked out of the previous space where the course was run at. We were just the person owning the place and decided that he doesn't wanna give it for free anymore. And there's another effort for doing transformation experiments in high schools. We wanna get into like health and education. And that's gonna be an experiment that can actually be run with minimal equipment. Just, you'll still need an incubator but you won't need to store bacteria over time in a minus 80 or minus 20 freezer which is not, high schools don't have that. So basically with a 4C, like a regular refrigerator and an incubator, 37 degrees incubator, a 42 degrees hot bath, which you can also replace with just hot water and a thermometer, you'll be able to do transformations with the kids which you can also do yourself but you need an actual lab space that is under regulations in high schools they have these simple apps that have regulations but they don't have the equipment or the knowledge. And that's where we come in and to help them out. And we wanna do some more workshops and I'll be happy to get your ideas. I thought like there are those grow it yourself kids from a covative and how anyone heard of them. They sell this, it's like, I don't remember, it's like 25 or, oh, I think it's like 80 bucks for a classroom kid or something like that. You grow your own pot for a plant from mycelium, from fungi, fungal cells. They grow on flour and water. You let them ferment like for a while. You put them in the cast and you get a plant pot which you can grow and it's fully degradable. It's biocompatible. Where are they based in New York? I don't remember, somewhere in the US but they ship worldwide. You can order it online. Those are great kids and you have your own molds. You can make anything. You can make food packaging. You can make art. You can make pieces of furniture that you need or whatever. And it's like fully biocompatible. Those are some great kids. And any other ideas you have for workshops, I'll be happy to hear you. These are some of the people involved. That's Isha. Here might be giving the next biochem course we'll do and he helped us a lot with logistics and I think I mentioned all the other people and I'll be happy to take questions. Yeah. After people go through these workshops, what happened to them next? So some of them continue interacting through the journal club. Some of them are waiting for us to have the lab space so they can come and actually start working on their ideas. Some of them came from the industry and just came to get additional knowledge. There was this one person that works in biodeck but she doesn't do genetic engineering. She doesn't know enough about it. So she came to learn about that to have some more applied knowledge and skills for her work. Everyone with his own background stories some investors came to learn about the field and stuff like that. Yeah. Just wondering what your organizational model is for making decisions amongst the community like your governance model? Yeah. So we're registered on profit that requires seven registered members. So we have like, I think we have eight members and the... Of your board. Yeah. That's like the whole board thing. But that's like purely for bureaucracy reasons because all the board needs to decide is like the annual report for the government or whatever that we're doing fine financially and not stealing money or whatever. Like for actual decisions it's like the most active people get the same because if I'm organizing the meetups I'm not gonna ask everyone like who to invite because I'm actively doing this. I'm actively approaching people. Do you want to say... What? Do you want to say? Yeah, sort of thing. Those who are doing... Yeah, definitely. Gilad is leading the ADC effort and so he's deciding like what equipment to get them to buy or what to get through donations and like the actual project in the ADC was decided by the people from the ADC involved and Gilad together with some suggestions. Some of us just give technical support. Like I connected them to some people that may have some experience for whatever they're doing. So I'll be happy to, yeah. So projects, are you planning with this community lab? Like are you gonna set up something that people can kind of participate in or are you gonna just let people wander in? Well, my dream job, like the way I envisioned this to be is to have an active lab space where we can bring high school students in the mornings for additional experience which you can do at their high schools. And the afternoons have the hobbyists and the entrepreneurs work on their projects, have like an evening a week booked for a course that we're gonna teach people. Like to bring the whole everyone together and have like specialized events, for example, like to do bioart events or do and entrepreneurship pitches for investors. Like any need that comes up in the community, it should grow from the community and not from like what we actually wanted for ourselves. We're part of the community because it has to answer our needs, but also everyone else's. Yeah, yeah. Well, most of them didn't have a background yet, right? So they didn't quite follow up on exactly what each of them was planning to do. But as far as I heard, some of them have ideas for projects which they wanna follow through once we have the facilities. We just can't help them yet. Yeah, it's gonna be an uphill battle because like the real estate is really hard to come by and we don't have enough community members to fund anything on our own. So we'll need some support from municipality or sponsorships or whatever. Other members are due, like I really wish that there would be maybe like a monthly meetup or a monthly lunch where members can discuss or do a project. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, definitely. I will always encourage people that whatever they're working on to come and share. I mean, Uri gave the meetup about biomaterials and he's the one doing the biocellul start-up. So I couldn't attend, but I assume he told about what he's doing. I encourage him to bring samples of the biocellul as he's drying his home oven. But yeah. It is, so I'm a member of Studer Room and Hacker Space in Oakland. And we just recently started ripping off this idea from Noysbridge, the Hacker Space in San Francisco, about five minutes of fame. And every month they have these lightning-top sessions where anyone, well, they're somewhat curated, like someone volunteers to take on the next one. It's a really great way of like getting our community together where everyone can like have five minutes to talk about the project that they're working on. You can set up a next speaker. Or people that kind of help out with it, or, you know, just, just start the word, essentially. So, but I would encourage like a similar model, like we could just keep.