 All right. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Christina Capiste, and I lead our policy and program analysis branch at NHGRI. And I am here to welcome you today on behalf of NHGRI to the second annual Louise M. Slaughter National DNA Day lecture. This lecture is named after Congresswoman Louise Slaughter because 16 years ago, she led a group of legislators who passed a concurrent resolution creating National DNA Day to celebrate the completion of the Human Genome Project, as well as the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Last year, sadly, Mrs. Slaughter passed away after a barrier-breaking career dedicated to science and public service. She was one of the earliest champions of genomics on Capitol Hill and a steadfast advocate for policies that have allowed genomics research to advance to the point where it's at today, including the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, also known as GINA. This lecture serves as a reminder of the groundbreaking individual and the importance of science in our everyday lives. And now, I'll hand it over to Carla Easter of our education branch to introduce our speaker. So thank you, Christina. So I want to say again thank you all for coming. Welcome to the annual DNA Day lecture. As Christina said, we felt it was important to pay homage to Representative Slaughter. And I cannot think of a better way to do that than by introducing and having our speaker provide you with a presentation today. So we, being the DNA Day committee, spent a long time thinking about what type of speaker we wanted. And in the past, DNA Day has been the kind of opportunity to show how much fun doing research around genetics and genomics and DNA can be. And so I have to say personally, when Roseanne brought the bio of our speaker to me, I was so excited. And my only question was, can we get him? Because when you hear him speak, you'll see how in demand he is. And I have had the opportunity to spend this morning and this afternoon with him. And I have decided that we are going to adopt him and ask him to come and work in the Education and Community Involvement Branch if he'll have us. But anyway, a little bit about Dr. David Kong. Dr. Kong received a master's degree in nanotechnology and a PhD in synthetic biology from MIT. He is the director of the MIT's media lab. And he has been recognized as an emerging leader in synthetic biology as a leap fellow and served as a guest faculty member at the marine biology lab in Woods Hole. In addition to all of these amazing things, because I could go on and on with his accolades, I just want to bring up the fun stuff that he does. He has performed as a DJ, a beatboxer, vocalist and rapper at hundreds of venues, including South by Southwest, the Staples Center in Los Angeles, the Brooklyn Bowl. And he is also open for Tonight Show band leader and hip hop legend Questlove, which is awesome. He is also an award winning vocal arranger and producer. And his photography has been exhibited at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, the Japanese American National Museum and other museums and galleries across the country. He is truly a renaissance man. And I cannot tell you how pleased and excited that I am that he agreed to give today's lecture called Crossing Cultures and Exploration of Microbial Music and Community Bio-Movement. So with no further delay, I introduce Dr. David Escom. All right, everyone. Thank you so much. It's such an honor to be here with you all. And please let me graciously accept that adoption offer. I completely accept and I'm excited to be a part of the family here at NHGRI. I just had such an amazing morning and early afternoon with so many of you folks here. Meeting you all actually has been really just the highlight of my trip. And it's really an honor to meet you all and be so inspired by all of you. So as was mentioned, I'm a synthetic biologist. I'm also a community organizer and an artist. So part of what we're talking about today in terms of thinking about crossing cultures is also the intersection between science and engineering, but also the arts and also design, right? I think all of those modes of creativity are really, really important. Before I dive in, though, I did want to, again, just acknowledge and really, really, again, it's such an honor to be speaking in this lecture that was named after Representative Slaughter. As mentioned earlier, I've been just learning a little bit about the impact that Representative Slaughter had on not just genomics, but on science broadly and her work in securing the first 500 million by Congress for breast cancer research, the NIH Revitalization Act, the Office of Research on Women's Health and the NIH, which was established through her work. And again, as was mentioned, the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, which for myself as a community organizer and a social justice activist, is really critical and important. And along with, again, work like the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which has been really employed effectively to try to counter some of the threats of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. So it's a real honor to be able to speak here at a lecture named after Representative Slaughter, and I really want to acknowledge her and all of the impact that she's had on genomics and society. And so again, I come from the Media Lab at MIT, and I should say, just so in case anybody at the Media Lab is watching, I'm actually not the director of the Media Lab. That's Joey Ito, who's my boss. So, but I direct, but I'm very privileged, so to direct an initiative within the Media Lab called the Community Bio Initiative, which I'll talk more about. And the Media Lab is a really wonderful place. If you all have come to Boston, I encourage you to come in, come and stop by and visit us. We've got a huge selection of different types of research groups that explore a huge range of different types of areas of, again, art, science, design, and also engineering. This was a diagram created by my colleague at the lab, Neri Oxman, which is the Krebs Cycle of Creativity, which talks about the interplay between these four domains. And again, I think, especially as we move forward with science and the life sciences, thinking about how art can engage with science and design and engineering all connect together, I think, is a big part of the future. And so at the lab, folks like Neri has worked at the interface of biological design, so thinking about how we can be inspired by the living world and employ those insights into designing architecture and the built world. My colleague, Hiroshi who leads the Tangelo Media Group, has made these incredible materials that include spores actually that are responsive to, in this case, a dancer's perspiration, so smart materials. My colleague, Hugh Her, leads a group called the Biomechatronics Group, and he himself, of course, has the prosthetics and has been really doing research at the forefront of human augmentation through these different types of mechanical structures. My colleague, Ed Boyden, leads the synthetic neurobiology group and explores basically the frontiers of the brain and human consciousness, and has developed some really remarkable technologies to help us understand the brain and even map the brain. And in my group's work, we've also explored things like microfluidics or lab on a chip technology, which I'll talk a little bit more about, and the whole idea of being able to miniaturize entire chemical and biological processes into tiny chips that you could potentially even hold in your hand in a mobile format. So there's a lot of really exciting work happening at the lab. And one of the big themes we explore at the Media Lab is this idea of anti-disciplinary research, which again, I think is an important idea to think about in the future of innovation and the future of the life sciences. And so anti-disciplinary research is the idea that the cool stuff actually happens in between the disciplines, right? So there might be biology and chemistry, and interdisciplinary research might be the chemists and the biologists working together. But actually, the anti-disciplinary notion is the exploration of all the whites based in between the disciplines. And I know for myself, as a synthetic biologist and a community organizer, it was really a wonderful thing to find a home and a place like the Media Lab where I could do my work. Another key idea we explore a lot at the lab is this idea of innovation at the edge. So what happens when technology becomes accessible and very, very diverse communities can start participating? And so again, that's a big part of I think of a lot of the research groups at the lab and what we work on and certainly in the initiative that I lead at the lab. And so what I work on again in leading this community bio initiative is sort of the intersection of three different areas. So one part is community organizing and movement building. And again, I'll share a little bit more later, but that's a big part of in my career. I've spent a lot of time working and organizing different types of communities. Another part is around collective intelligence and social science. So actually studying the way that communities and crowds can drive innovation. And then the third part is really on technology development. So actually inventing really accessible low cost biotechnologies that can be used globally to empower this grassroots driven movement in the life sciences sometimes referred to as community bio. And so part of what we believe is that the emergent power of these decentralized diverse communities augmented with digital tools and democratized biotechnologies can really drive disruptive innovations in life sciences and inspire creativity and improve lives. So that's a big part of what we work on. And it's a real pleasure to work with all of these wonderful young people that are part of the initiative over the years. And so again, I learned so much from all of the different group members that I've had the real pleasure of working with. And so today I'll be talking about a lot of different topics and I really want to pay homage to this idea of a national DNA day. What an awesome idea. I love so much that there is one and that NHGRI has been leading this. And I also want to give a big shout out to the organizers of DNA Day and also this lecture. So Roseanne and Chiara and to Cherise. Thank you so much. You guys are amazing. Again, I'm an organizer myself and it's one of those things I know for me. You know, I just show up here and I'm giving this talk, but the organizers are really the ones that do all of the work and really should be the ones getting all the credit. So thank you all for all of your hard work. And so in acknowledging this kind of idea of crossing cultures, I wanted to start actually by giving a little shout out to DNA in culture today. So again, I'm a person that's really interested in and I love hip hop, I love DJing and so on. I don't know y'all if y'all know who this this this image refers to. Does anybody in this room know who these people are? Maybe it's maybe an idea. So this is a boy band called BTS. There are a major major Korean pop group taking over the whole world and one of their big hit songs called DNA. So shout out to BTS on DNA Day. I'd also like to give a shout out to one of my favorite artists, the legendary Kendrick Lamar. Some of you may be familiar with his track also called DNA. So I point out BTS and Kendrick in part because I'm a big fan of their work, but also because I think there is a really intimate connection between science and innovation and culture. So this is a quote from Franklin Foer who says that innovations don't magically appear or simply proceed on the basis of some scientific knowledge. The culture prods them into existence, which I think is a very powerful idea. We were talking earlier about this idea that could we think of the Hamilton for science and genomics? How could we make a really broad cultural impact and much like Hamilton has for history, could we think of something similar in the sciences? And I think and I hope that we really can, because I think that's a big part of how we can really ensure that science belongs to communities all around the world and get those folks excited and activated. And so when we think about DNA, and again in my field, which is a synthetic biology, there's a really kind of key history. So recombinant DNA technology, I'll start there, there's a lot of history about DNA before that, but I think recombinant DNA technology is an important historical moment where using different types of proteins or enzymes, we're able to basically manipulate DNA molecules and being able to cut them, being able to copy them and work with them. But again, a key point here I think is always working with molecules found from nature, right? So one of the kind of critical technologies that's been driving the field that I've been really grown up in, which is synthetic biology, is DNA synthesis, which is the idea that we could design in a computer an arbitrary sequence of DNA molecules and literally have a machine called the DNA synthesizer that takes the DNA bases, the AG, season T's and essentially can print an arbitrary sequence of DNA, a molecule that has never before existed in nature, right? And this is, I think when we reflect back on this era, we'll look back at DNA synthesis as one of the major, major foundational technologies of our time. In my own research, and again, a big shout out to NIH who funded a big part of my own graduate research, I worked on building a type of a lab on a chip or microfluidic system to miniaturize the process of assembling gene-length DNA constructs. And so again, certainly my research couldn't have been done without the NIH, so I'm personally very grateful. And when we think about DNA, right, there's a whole spectrum of DNA that we might want to consider. And so again, in my work, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about individual genes, which might be hundreds or maybe like a thousand base pairs in length, but increasingly over the past couple of years, I've been working on a type of DNA, basically larger constructs that you could call a genetic circuit, right, which has not just individual genes, but many genes and other types of biological parts that could be included together. And moving up another order of magnitude, hundreds of thousands of base pairs, we start getting into investigations of minimal life, right, so Michael Plasma Genitalium has got 580,000 base pairs and is the smallest genome for a known self-replicating organism. And then all the way up to the complete rewrite of bacterial genomes at millions of base pairs. So, and again, I think critically here, already to date, researchers have been able to build synthetic DNA molecules going up to even millions of base pairs, which is a really incredible accomplishment. And so, again, you know, connected very much to the history of the NIH and a lot of the work done here, we have we have one of the core principles in molecular biology, which is the central dogma, DNA being transcribed into RNA and then ultimately being translated in protein, which is a key insight, which has much of synthetic biology is built on top of. And so one of the key ideas, I think, in synthetic biology, which has been really exciting, is this basically experiment and mapping a metaphor, which is this metaphor of engineering, the idea that could we actually engineer a cell the same way we could engineer a computer, right? And so it was a very interesting type of question that a lot of the early folks in synthetic biology were asking. And this was a paper from Nature in 2000 by Ella Whitson Lieber that was basically demonstrated the first repressilator it was called, which was essentially a series of a series of different plasmids that when injected into a cell behaved much like a ring oscillator from electronics. So over time, if you monitor the expression of a fluorescent protein that's tagged to one of these, the expression of one of these three proteins that are lack or lambda, you can actually see this oscillatory function, which looks a lot like a ring oscillator from electronics, which is a really amazing thing, right? So this is one of the first kind of bits of evidence that shows that we could actually potentially program a cell like we could program a computer. And now at places like MIT and labs all around the world, folks are working on things like genetic circuits. So again, you can see this kind of very intentional mapping of these engineering principles onto a biological system. So the idea that you can employ, for example, digital Boolean logic, you can see over here this kind of code at the top, which, and again, all of these symbols here represent different DNA elements. And the code that's running in a cell with this genetic circuit asks if that if these two microRNAs are present at a high concentration. And if these three microRNAs are present at a low concentration, if all of those conditions are satisfied, then this is a cancer cell. Okay, so this is a type of a classifier that could be used and a way to apply these genetic circuits inside cells. And so, you know, this is a picture that I love from technology review that shows this bacteria that has all of these, you know, cool, like a potential stat and all of these other kind of circuitry. And the idea is to really think explicitly about this metaphor of engineering, the living world. My colleague and the founder of the Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, has been saying over the past couple of years this idea that biotech is a new digital. Nicholas is very famous for making a lot of predictions about the future, specifically as it related to digital technologies and the ways that the internet would impact society and the world. And I think what Nicholas is really referring to here is the impact that biotechnologies in the life sciences will increasingly have on society. And so, we're really in this very interesting historical moment. And if you look at synthetic biology, there's a lot of really key and exciting areas, I think, that people are starting to make innovations in. So one is this notion that cells could be engineered to actually produce stuff, right? That you could actually make all kinds of different materials, chemicals, different types of fuel or other types of compounds could be produced through biological engineering. So this is a image showing the different metabolic pathways and plants. And the idea here is that you can take one compound and essentially modify it through biochemical reactions to produce another type of compound. And so nature has produced this incredible array of these different products. And one of the big goals in synthetic biology is to figure out can we actually leverage these incredible metabolic pathways in nature and engineer them to make stuff that's designed by humans. And so we've been able to do a lot of really powerful things from producing, again, different types of chemicals and fuels. My friends and colleagues over at Ginkgo Bioworks, which, again, it's a very important synthetic biology company, they started out engineering organisms to produce different types of flavors and fragrances and increasingly are working in chemicals and other types of therapeutics. And so Ginkgo, again, I think is really one of the interesting companies in synthetic biology and their tagline is the organism is the product, right? So this is just a sense of kind of where Ginkgo is. I mentioned before this idea that we can introduce a genetic circuit inside a cell and that the cell, based on a computation, could decide, could know whether it is cancer and based on if it is, actually destroy that cell. Another really exciting area of research is this idea of cell-based therapeutics, right? We're used to being able to take different types of medicines that have been produced chemically or even biologically, if you take insulin, for example, but this whole idea that a cell could be a therapeutic itself and that it could be installed into the body and could potentially directly sense and respond to disease is a really amazing idea. And so, again, we're starting to see all of these wonderful advances and also increasingly different types of commercial products that are starting to impact our everyday life. So some of you may be familiar with this idea of cellular agriculture, being able to grow animal products without having to actually kill any animals. So using bioreactors, essentially to grow these different types of food products or being able to leverage a different bacteria to produce materials that could be used for fashion, right? So this is the work of a Suzanne Lee from Modern Meadow, which is really cool. Some colleagues in the Bay area have started a company called Bolt Threats. And the idea here is to actually be able to synthesize a material like spider silk, which has incredible materials, but using biology to do it. So basically being able to use bioreactors and being able to grow these materials in the lab, I think one of the scariest things that I could possibly imagine is a spider farm where you would actually have to harvest the spider silk from spiders that terrifies me. So I'm very grateful that Bolt Threats has figured out a way to do this in a bioreactor. One of the more really kind of mind blowing aspects or applications of synthetic biology is this idea of gene drives. So my colleague Kevin Esbelth at the Media Lab has been working on a type of technology, which is actually a very clever application of CRISPR, Casinion, which I think many of you are familiar with, which is a very precise genome editing technology. And the idea is by using the CRISPR gene, the CRISPR machinery, in conjunction with a trait that one might want to engineer in a population of organisms, let's say you're interested in ridding a population of mosquitoes from malaria, you can use basically this gene drive and through rounds of sexual reproduction, the engineered trait is basically propagated or driven through a wild population of organisms. So after multiple rounds of sexual reproduction, all of the offspring will have the genetically engineered trait. So we're literally talking about the ability of being able to sculpt an ecosystem, which is a really profound idea. And so as we think about the impact of these technologies, one question, again, where many of us here are science nerds here at the NIH, and I'm sure many of you on the internet watching as well. And so what are some of these tools that we can actually use to engineer the living world? I'm from Lexington, Massachusetts, which is a very historic town. Each year we celebrate and re-enact the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which occurred in 1775. Each year there's this vocal contingent that's rooting for the redcoats. Each year they're sorely disappointed when the redcoats lose. But this is a historical re-enactment. And there's a scene, I think, this was when I was teaching at Woods Hole over one summer of students there. And this maybe will become a historical enactment as well in the future. And what I mean by that is, if you look at the first pipette pattern from 1916, not a lot has changed, shockingly, in 100 years. If you compare that with the advances that we've had in information technology, there's a lot that we can do, I believe, in the instrumentation side to make biology and the living world easier to engineer. And so, as I mentioned, one area that I've done a lot of research in is microfluidics, or lab on a chip technology, which basically involves working at length scales of fractions of a millimeter and smaller. So the width of a human hair is about 100 microns, which is a very typical feature size in microfluidics. A nanoliter, which is a volume that we work very closely with in microfluidics, might be around the volume that you see on the printed period on a sheet of paper. A microliter is sort of like a little droplet of fluid that one might work with in a lab. And if you get that even smaller than that, this is an image of a human cell. And so this is about a picoliter, so 1,000 times smaller than a nanoliter. And the cell has been infected by bacteria, but this is chlamydia, I believe, and these are 1,000 times smaller than a picoliter. So basically, these are all the different size scales we work with in microfluidics. So this is a femtoliter. And you can do some really cool things with these devices. So you can create these little pumps and channels to manipulate these fluids. And really the goal is to try to make a lab on a chip, a make a device that actually can miniaturize a lot of these chemical and biological processes. And you can make cool mixing devices. Each one of these little features here is a valve that is basically oscillating up and down to mix these fluids together. I mentioned before some of the previous work from my own PhD on miniaturizing gene synthesis. In my time at Lincoln Laboratory, which is where I was before I was at the media lab, we collaborated with Professor Ron Weitz from MIT to miniaturize key sets of biochemistry that were used to build genetic circuits. So ligation, gateway, Gibson and Golden Gate, these are different types of biochemical processes for making very, very big pieces of DNA. And of course, this work was funded by the NIH. So again, very, very grateful to the NIH for their support over the years. And so we built a really cool system. This is an open source hardware tool that allows you to basically execute arbitrary operations in one of these microfluidic devices. And so this is a paper we published in Nature Biotechnology two years ago. And part of what's cool about microfluidics is that you can scale easily. So going from one reaction to tens of reactions to even hundreds of reactions and maybe someday in the future being able to execute something like 100,000 reactions in a type of a device. Another format that we worked a lot with in the lab is this idea of droplet microfluidics. So being able to encapsulate, for example, fluorescent bacteria and have those be little droplets where you can run different types of experiments. So this is an example of a very high-frequency droplet generator, very monodiverse droplets that you can operate at around a kilohertz frequency, so 1,000 droplets per second. And so as I've mentioned, we can use these tools in a variety of ways, right? I've talked a little bit already about the idea of being able to classify a cell type based on the presence of different types of microRNAs in a cell. And again, microRNAs are, again, another type of nucleic acid. But in this context, really interesting because by just looking at a handful of these microRNAs and if you have a sense of their approximate concentration, they can act sort of like a cellular fingerprint and tell you what kind of cell it is, right? So going back to this genetic circuit and the idea that if you put these classifier circuits into a heterogeneous population of cells, some are cancer and some are not cancer, the classifier will help identify the cancer cells and then initiate apoptosis and kill the cell. And so we worked with Professor Rice's group to try and leverage microfluidics as a way to build libraries of these types of genetic circuits, right? In a manufacturing process. Another project, another application of these types of fluidic tools is in protein engineering. So for example, if you were interested in trying to understand or engineer a protein that could break down a toxin in the environment, one might want to actually produce many, many versions of that protein and test them. And so one of the really cool ways you can use microfluidics is actually as a prototyping system. So what we did was we worked with what's called in vitro transcription and translation, which is basically like cell lysate or cell guts. You cut open a cell and take out the lysate inside. And all of the machinery for transcription and translation, the central dogma biology is all present inside that cell lysate. And you can introduce that into the microfluidic device. And basically each one of these dots that's shown here is a different protein design. And so by introducing this in vitro transcription translation mix, you can express many of these proteins in parallel. And the idea is ultimately to assess whether or not each of these proteins is functioning well using fluorescence. And so this again was some of the work that was done by myself and colleagues at Lincoln Laboratory a number of years ago. The third example I'll share is around the microbiome. So I know again there are folks here that are very interested in microbiome research. It's one of my favorite areas of science right now. And so how can we ultimately work with these fluidic tools and with the human microbiome? Again, a few facts about the microbiome. I know we have a lot of folks here that are probably pretty knowledgeable, but I think there's some really interesting ones. So one really key idea is that we just have an incredible amount of organisms that are part of the body. So if you add up the total mass of these organisms, these microorganisms, you might end up with several pounds of bacteria and microorganisms which actually has a similar mass to the human brain. So some microbiologists refer to the microbiome as the lost organ because of how significant it is. And again, just in the intestine, we've got hundreds of trillions of microorganisms. And the colon, this is always a fun fact before or after any meal to think about, is actually the densest source of microorganisms in the entire biosphere. So 10 to 11 to 10 to the 12 cells per mil in the colon. And so we've got around 30 trillion human cells. I'm curious for even folks in the audience, how many bacterial cells do you think we have if you count every single one of them? Any guesses? We're at the NIH, so I know somebody knows. Was it? So the answer actually is, so that order of magnitude is, I think, close for the next question I was going to ask. But it's about 40 trillion, OK? So again, you're definitely more microbial than human if you count up all the cells. From a genetic perspective, though, again, we've got around 20,000 human genes and human genome, right? And so the follow-up question is how many genes are represented in the human microbiome? And again, and I think the answer to this one is a little bit closer to what you were saying, which is several orders of magnitude more, right? We humans are these super organisms that have around 20,000 human genes in our genome and then two to 20 million environmentally acquired genes from our microbiome, right? So the microbiome plays this incredible role in regulating and influencing so many aspects of human health and development from important disease states to cognition and mood, the gut, the bidirctional gut brain access is one of the more exciting areas of microbiome science. And so much of this research has been made possible through sequencing, right? And again, it's such an honor to be here at the NIH where the human genome project and also the human microbiome project, which I'll talk about in a moment, have been so heavily impacted. This is one of the really great images that I love from Richard Wintel showing three eras or three eras of DNA sequencing technology from stanger sequencing to capillary sequencing and now next generation sequencing. And so with metagenomics, which again is I think one of the real incredible technology revolutions of our time, we're able to, in a very high throughput way, analyze just the genomic DNA from communities of microorganisms which could be found environmentally or again inside the gut. And again, one of the projects that I'm so inspired by is the Human Microbiome Project where researchers identified several hundred healthy humans and basically sampled and looked at 18 different sites of the body to try and understand and study their sequences. And so some of the results I think are so amazing. Again, this is an image showing, this is from Rob Knight, where each one of these dots represents a different type of microbial community. And what the researchers found was that there was similar, that there was great similarity basically between the metagenomes found in similar body types. And one of the insights here, which I think is really, really poetic is the idea that, that if you look, for example, at the oral microbiome and something like the fecal microbiome, that they're as different as places in the biosphere like a coral reef and the plains, right? So we humans, we actually are this incredible ecosystem of organisms. And it's something that we're not always conscious of, but I think is a really incredible fact. And so there are folks that have been really thinking about this and thinking about how do we design and how do we introduce these other layers of creativity. So this is a really great tech talk that I love talking about the ways that in which the built environment actually have different microbiomes within buildings and could we actually leverage that and design for that. Another project that's come out of MIT from some colleagues is this idea of underworld. So being able to study the microbiome of a city, right? Through the sewer system. If we're actually able to monitor and sample the microbiome in different parts of a city, then we could actually have a sense and get a lot of insight for public health applications, right? And so there's this really, of course, interesting interplay between science and engineering, right? So we understand about the microbiome, but then we need to develop technologies and tools to try and apply that science and knowledge. And so this is an image, I don't know if any of you can guess what this is, what this represents. Anybody here want to take a guess? This is a process that I think many of you are studying, I'm guessing, for those of you doing microbiome research. Any guesses? So this is an artistic depiction of a fecal matter transplant, okay? Which to me is, this is one of the best pictures I've ever seen of a fecal matter transplant, which is really elegant and a lot more beautiful than probably the real life depiction. But again, through our understanding of the science of the microbiome, folks have been really able to start doing some really interesting research. So one of the key ideas, of course, with a fecal matter transplant is that you can actually perform a whole ecosystem transplantation of the microbes in the gut. And so some colleagues at MIT set up a nonprofit entity called OpenBiome, which is the first public stool bank. And so the idea here is that, you know, donors could be screened for their stool, which ultimately could be used in therapeutic purposes. My colleague Mark Smith, who helped to found the OpenBiome, just told me that the percentage of people that actually can get their stool into OpenBiome is something around four or five percent. And so at MIT, I think the acceptance rate for undergraduates is like seven or eight percent. And at Harvard, I think it's even lower, like five or six percent. So if you can get your poop into OpenBiome, you have extremely elite poop, basically, is the message. And so, and you know, it's funny that I think that you can, for each sample, they'll give you like 40 US dollars for each sample. So, you know, I've given this talk before to undergraduates and they're like doing the math and they're like, huh, it's like 30 or $40,000 a year, you know, just for my poop. So I don't think I've inspired any, or this work has inspired any career changes, but again, pretty, something interesting to think about at least. So my colleague, Eric Alm, who's the director or the co-director of the Human Microbiome Center at MIT, of course, so I said, right, you know, fresh stool ultimately is a poor drug, right? You ultimately really don't want to be using, you know, stool from a donor ideally because of a variety of concerns. What would be more amazing would be if you could actually have something more kind of like an apothecary where you could actually take different organisms that you cared about and actually construct rationally different types of communities. And so, what we did, this is a work when I was still at Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, we thought, you know, could we actually try and create something like an artificial gut, right? Could we actually create a type of a structure that had a lot of the wonderful physiology represented in a real gut, but do it in a type of in vitro and artificial environment? You know, the real gut has all these three-dimensional structures and all of these different gradients from bacteria to pH and oxygen. And so, one of the ideas was to leverage cutting edge 3D printing to try and use that as a tool. And one of the ideas here was the idea with some of the more sophisticated 3D printing technologies, you can actually control the material composition of your print in three dimensions. So arbitrary voxels could have a different material composition to create different types of graded structures. And so, my colleague at the Media Lab, Professor Nuri Oxman, has done some really amazing work at the forefront of 3D printing to create structures like this. This is mush tari, which is a microbial wearable. This is an artifact that you could wear. And the idea is that organisms could be cultivated inside this wearable that could respond, for example, to light and produce different types of compounds. So this is really more of an art and design project. But again, at Lincoln Laboratory in collaboration with the Media Lab, we worked on trying to build this three-dimensional 3D printed guide, which could have a soft material that could be used for peristalsis, for pushing a semi-solid materials and with these finer graded structures where microorganisms could live and then a larger structure for creating different types of environmental gradients. So, these are just an example of some of the projects we've worked on over the years. And so, one big theme, I think for me, has been this question of how do we ultimately make these tools more broadly accessible to very, very diverse communities all around the world. And so, I've been a very big believer and advocate in open source. So the idea that we should be, to the extent that we can, doing research in an open and transparent way and to share our insights as deeply as we can. And so, for the past couple of years, I've taught this course called Open Source Fluidics for Synthetic Biology at MIT. And again, I'll highlight a few folks here. This was a former student of mine, Will Patrick, who before this class had actually never been in a wet lab before. Never done any pipetting. And a few years later, he's now the CEO of a wonderful company called Culture Robotics, which actually builds bioreactors. This is Julie Legault, who was a designer and who also had no wet lab experience. And for her master's thesis, basically, I wanted to explore the idea of a Tamagotchi for bacteria, right? The idea that we should develop empathy for the bacteria of the body or bacteria in the world and that we should try and take care of them, much like in a Tamagotchi, you can take care of it of a digital animal, right? And so I point this out just to say we're in a really amazing era now where folks that come from different disciplines, like design, like the arts, can come in and actually make a real impact on the life sciences, which is something I think is really important. And so in the context of this course, we leveraged some commodity 3D printing tools to basically build 3D printed fluidics and we miniaturized in these 3D fluidics genetic circuit assemblies. So we built a bunch of DNA molecules and tested them. And again, this is just a slide showing some of the design iteration of some of these fluidic tools. A lot of this work was done by Will Patrick and it's really beautiful. And again, I think gives you a sensibility. I know for myself, somebody that's not trained in design, I don't think I would have been able to come up with some of these beautiful structures that Will created. And so we published some really neat papers on this work together and we had a lot of fun doing it, which again, I think is really important. It's a very important light to have a lot of fun. And over the years again, through this course, we've been able to prototype different types of 3D fluidics but also for, for example, prototyping microbial communities like the work I shared earlier. And so one of the big things we focused on though is ultimately sharing all of this work. So again, this is a paper from a couple of years ago in Nature Biotechnology where we built a large repository of all of these design elements called metafluidics. And the idea is to basically create a repository that's sort of like Thingiverse, if those of you that interacted with that before, where you can go to this wonderful site and I encourage you to go check it out. And all of these designs for these different microfluidic systems are there. When I was in graduate school doing work in microfluidics, I was always very frustrated because I would look at a scientific paper and I would try to reproduce some of the work from a colleague and I had to, I was literally looking at a little image inside of a journal article and I didn't have a real design file to work with. So through this site, we've been able to create a really wonderful global community. I think there's several thousand users now that have downloaded and interacted with the different material on the site. So again, this is a big part I think of where we're headed is these type of large open source communities that can share insights globally with each other. And so given all of this, right, you know, what does the future look like? Where are we headed? I shared with you a little bit about, oh, sorry, I jumped ahead. I shared with you a little bit about Ginko Bioworks which is again, one of the major synthetic biology companies. And to date, I think we're still in an era where biotechnology is still really for the privileged few, right? Here at the NIH, places like the Media Lab, places like Ginko Bioworks, we're privileged enough to be able to work in the life sciences and work with biotech. But this, I think, if you want to think about the analogy to computer science, you know, it's still early days, right? This again is an image from one of the biofabs that Ginko Bioworks has, which is one of their major fabrication facilities. And this picture I think is really similar to this picture, right? I don't know if those of you in the audience know what this is, but this is the ENIAC, right? This is one of the very first mainframe computers. And I love this kind of comparison, right? It's in many ways, you know, we are kind of early days with biotech and going back to Nicholas's statement about biotech as the new digital, I think we're really in this historical moment now where we have the opportunity to try and educate the world about what's happening with the life sciences, right, which is so critically important given the power of this technology. And so there are a lot of ways that all of this can unfold, right? I don't know how many of you watched this TV show, Westworld. A few of you. So I'm real privileged to know the creators of this show. And again, it's a really great TV show, I personally love it, but it's really scary, right? It maps, it's this depiction of a pretty dystopian future where the folks that have all of this advanced technology from the most advanced 3D bioprinting, the synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, that there's a really asymmetric distribution of these resources, right? And to me, the question is, how do we take the life sciences and synthetic biology and biotechnology and ensure that the future looks something a little more like this, right? So this is a photograph that I took at my community center in central square in Cambridge called EMW, right? Where at EMW, we have these incredibly diverse communities, right? We've got folks that are socioeconomically diverse, culturally diverse. And to me, my hope is that we can really bring the life sciences and synthetic biology and biotech to all of these folks from all around the world. And so this is a question that in our initiative, we think a lot about, which is, how do we ultimately ensure that we have broad diverse participation? And so one first question to ask is, why is diversity important, right? Fortunately, there's a lot of wonderful social sciences that have studied this. And basically, the social science has shown that diverse groups actually can outperform quote-unquote high-ability problem solvers, right? This is my colleague, Karin Lakhani, who is over at Harvard Business School and leads the laboratory for innovation science at Harvard. Karin is also a hip hop guy, so I love Karin, a really, really awesome guy. We're collaborators. And Karin, in his research, has introduced this really powerful idea called technical marginality, okay? So the basic idea here, and I'm gonna read you a sentence that explains this idea. So what Karin and his researchers did was, they got groups of people together to basically solve problems. And what they found was that the provision of a winning solution was positively related to increasing distance between the solvers field of technical expertise and the focal field of the problem. Said another way, if you're trying to find a disruptive or creative solution in a field like biology, for example, actually the likelihood of a quote-unquote winning solution, you should try to find somebody as far away from biology as possible, right? That people actually farther away from your field are more likely to come up with an idea that's more orthogonal and more innovative and creative, because again, they're not part of the establishment, part of the set of ideas that everybody's already thinking about. And a parallel idea is called social marginality, right? And so again, here, as a part of the study, they found that if you consider a scientific establishment, which again is largely male and largely often white men, in this particular study, they looked at female solvers and they found that by introducing more women into groups that those groups also performed much better, right? So this all is kind of part of the social science that for me is really exciting thinking about why diversity is important for innovation. I know this anecdotally through guys like this. So this is Drew Andy, who is one of my colleagues and mentors who's one of the founders of the whole field of synthetic biology. And Drew was a civil engineer, okay? Drew was a guy that built bridges and thought about the built world and he asked himself, why can't I engineer a cell the same way I can engineer a bridge or a building, right? Again, this is Tom Knight, who is a computer scientist and electrical engineer and Tom asked the same type of question, right? Why can't I engineer a cell the same way I can engineer a computer, a program computer? And so it took a bunch of non biologists basically to come into the life sciences and help create essentially what is now a major, major field of research, synthetic biology, which again has been growing in a real significant way economically. So okay, so we've seen at least in synthetic biology that bringing together these diverse creatives is important, but these are technical creatives, right? So how do we move beyond technical diversity, right? I think we're doing a pretty good job, I think, as an innovation community in the life sciences of bringing in engineers and computer scientists and other folks, but what about other types of diversity, right? And this gets to a more fundamental question, which is who gets to create? Who ultimately has agency in the life sciences, right? As I mentioned, a lot of what happens in the life sciences happens in corporations, it happens in places like MIT, but one really kind of amazing thing that started to happen in the late 2000s was the emergence of something called do-it-yourself or DIY-bio. And so this was a really kind of a global trend that started right around the same time, around 2008, 2009, and a lot of it, I think, was driven by folks that looked at synthetic biology and said, why can't I participate in synthetic biology? Why can't I also be involved in the life sciences? And so laboratories started to emerge in some really interesting places, right? So this is my colleague, Rob Carlson, and this is him shown in cartoon format inside his garage, right? And here he is with his PCR machine in his micro-centric fuge. Also his washer dryer right over here all in his lab. And so this quote is, the era of garage biology is a harness. Do you want to participate, right? And so this idea of people kind of doing biology in garages, I think some communities or some folks are alarmed. Other folks are really excited actually, right? I go back to this whole idea of innovation at the edge. And again, it turns out historically that there's been some pretty cool things invented in garages, right? I don't know if you know who these two guys are, but these are two very famous thieves, right? Who are involved in helping to invent the personal computer. And actually there was this really interesting study or report that I saw that referenced the idea that in the life cycle of almost every major innovation that a garage has been a part of that life cycle at some point, okay? So this is a photograph that I took of my boss, Joey Ito, who's the director of the media lab. And you know when Joey was first trying to get into synthetic biology, we tried to find a place for him to do this work. And it was really interesting, right? There's so many laboratories at MIT that do biology research. But the idea of having somebody like Joey, even though it is Joey and he's the director of the media lab and a really wonderful guy, folks didn't wanna have him there, right? Because this guy's never done any research before and now he's gonna come into our lab and do work next to our BL2 tissue culture hood, right? It's like very polite, like thank you, Joey, but sorry. And so we actually ended up doing some of his first synthetic biology work in his kitchen, okay? And so ideally, he shouldn't be doing it in his kitchen. Ideally, there should be more community-oriented spaces where this type of work can happen. And fortunately, there are. So again, happened in around 2009 to 2010 where the emergence of these, what are called community biology labs. So these wonderful spaces where the public can go and can learn about synthetic biology, biotechnology, and really experiment and have a really powerful experience there. So this is Jen's space in Brooklyn, Biocurious in Sunnyvale. Again, for those of you that are hip-hop heads like myself, I feel like Jen's space in Biocurious are kind of like the Tupac and Biggie of community labs, the East Coast, West Coast rivalry. Over here in Maryland, actually, a big shout out to Bugs, the Baltimore Underground Science Space which does a lot of really wonderful work. And so part of what's exciting to me about the community labs is that they represent something with a different type of incentive structure than academia or corporations or government, right? In academia, we're trying to publish papers. We need tenure, right? There's a whole kind of system around that. And in for proper corporations, you're trying to maximize profits for your shareholders. And in government, you know, places like the NIH, also very different motivations than what happens in a community lab where there's a lot of freedom to really kind of be much more creative and be a little boundless in what you're trying to explore. So folks in places like Jen's space have collaborated with academic institutions to do things like sequencing the environment, urban environments in this case, and an example here of a project on the Gowanus Canal. One of the real cool projects that has come out of the West Coast Community Labs is this idea of real vegan cheese, right? And this idea that you could actually synthesize the milk proteins involved in dairy but without having to use cows or other dairy or other animals. And so this, again, I think was really connected with the cellular agriculture movement but was really sparked in a community lab environment. And again, a lot of these labs have also been at the forefront of thinking about what is the, quote unquote, personal computer for biology, right? Could you actually have a desktop lab? OpenTron's, which was founded by one of my friends and colleagues, Will Canine, who is at Jen's space, he looked at liquid handling robots and said, hey, these are normally 100,000, $10,000 machines, very, very expensive and required a lot of expertise to use. Why can't I make a little desktop version of this that could sit in my lab, right? You can get one of these for several thousand dollars now. So really wonderful projects, and even this one I love, open-source gender codes from Bugs Lab, which I think was more of a speculative type of design project, but was looking at how organisms could be engineered to produce hormones as an exploration of gender fluidity, right? And again, these types of projects, they're really inspiring and I think a very different type of type of work that you would see and certainly in academia or in a corporate environment. Glowing plants are another really interesting one. This is one of the biggest kick starters of all time. And this was done many, many years ago in BioCurious and now places like MIT are actually investing serious research dollars into trying to engineer a glowing plant, right? Many, many years later. So the community labs I think are doing really interesting and really exciting work. And we're starting to see these labs diffuse into all kinds of interesting spaces. So this is a public library in La Jolla where they've got a biotech lab. This is the BioBus, which I would love to ride on one day, which basically travels around and brings science to the people. My colleagues at Little Devices at MIT have been setting up these different types of maker spaces, bio maker spaces inside hospitals. This is one of the cooler projects that I'm so excited and really hope comes to fruition, which is led by one of my former students, Benno, from Lima, Peru. And they're basically trying to build a floating bio fab lab, okay? The idea that this laboratory could actually float down the Amazon River and you could conduct different types of biological studies and also engage with the many indigenous communities that are on the Amazon. So really, really wonderful and very exciting and interesting places where the life sciences are now starting to emerge. One other really important institution to mention is IJEM, which is the International Genetically Engineering Machines Competition. How many of you've heard of IJEM before? Okay, a few of you. So this is basically like a giant synthetic biology science fair for nerds, right? Like, thousands of students from all around the world at the beginning of the summer get a set of DNA parts, which they then use to engineer an organism to do something cool and interesting. And so this started out as a very, very small little class at MIT and has now grown into this really important global institution around synthetic biology education. I've been involved with IJEM since almost the beginning and probably my most important role that I play for IJEM is that I'm the official IJEM DJ. So I get to rock the big party that happens at the end of each IJEM. It's my favorite party I get to DJ all year, in part because the students, they have so much energy, pent-up that gets to get released in this party, which happens at the night that the final competition ends. And it's the only party that I've ever DJed where I genuinely fear for my life because these synthetic biology nerds are all crowding around and it gets a little intense and crazy. It's also often at Halloween, so just add that in there. So anyways, but it's a lot of fun and this is kind of my thing is DJing for science nerds. So if NIH needs a science nerd DJ, please sign me up. So this is some of the work that's happening globally and I wanted to tell you a little bit about some of the work that's been happening locally that I've been working on over in Boston, in the Cambridge area. So as I mentioned earlier, I also am the founder of a community space called EMW and the reason it's called EMW is in part homage to my dad, who is a professor at MIT in electromagnetic wave theory. So his three favorite letters were EMW for electromagnetic wave. And my parents also took over this storefront in the late 90s, which used to be a sex toy shop called Hubba Hubba and they took it over and turned it into a Chinese language bookstore called East Meets West Bookstore, which is also EMW. And so when that happened, the neighbors were very excited that the sex toy shop was moving down the street and that the Chinese academics and their bookstore were coming in, right? So this Chinese language bookstore was kind of doing its thing for a number of years before we had to kind of shut down for a little while. And in 2004 and 2005, myself and a number of other community organizers and social justice activists reinvigorated the space and we started hosting open mics and different types of creative events held in our space. And over the years, we've really evolved into this wonderful art technology and community center, again, called EMW. And so I've had the honor of working again with really wonderful folks over the years in organizing our space and in doing organizing work for the community. And we've really, I think, made an impact, certainly in the Boston area, with folks that are working, for example, in poetry, spoken word, again, in hip-hop. We have a wonderful program called East Meets Beets which engages with electronic music. This is the mighty and legendary eloquent from Canada. This is Teclon actually from the Maryland area. Also jazz musicians. This is Madame Gandhi who is an MIA's drummer. One of our programs is called Beast Box which features some of the greatest beatboxers in the world. This is some of our local artists who are of Tibetan descent doing a gallery space. And again, a lot of emphasis on social justice and street art. And then this is Juno Diaz speaking at our community library opening. But all of that leading to kind of the key connection to this talk which is the idea of democratized biotechnology and life sciences. So one of our programs is called Street Bio. And so here I am with, here we are with some colleagues from the media lab doing synthetic biology inside our gallery space, right? And so we had this really wonderful community lab that we've set up over the years. And again, in partnership with Ginko, you've really given us a lot of the core equipment. And this is around 2015. We started to set up our own community lab where we've run all kinds of workshops and engaged with the public. And we've also had these wonderful different art galleries exploring the interface between citizen science and the arts. And probably one of the programs that I'm most proud of is our Youth Science Initiative where, again, we've been bringing cohorts of young people, many young girls of color, and getting them excited about synthetic biology and the life sciences. And so this has really been a really, really fun experience working with NASA and astronauts like Katie Coleman to think about life beyond Mars. And another one of key kind of educational initiative that I'm a part of is a course called How to Grow Almost Anything, which we also teach in the context of our community bio lab. So I teach this class with this guy, George Church. Hopefully you know George. George is one of the major figures in synthetic biology. Excuse me. And this course is an exploration in a way of biotechnology across scales. So we start teaching students about DNA design and then DNA synthesis to metabolic engineering, tissue engineering, and then even ecosystem engineering. And so what's cool about this course though is that we teach it globally. So there's a network of what are called FAB Labs. I don't know if you've heard of FAB Labs before. I'm going to pause. Excuse me, I'm just going to take a sip of water here. Has anybody heard of FAB Labs before? Okay, a couple of you. So this was a network of laboratories that was set up by my colleague at the Media Lab, Neil Grishamfeld. And the idea was he taught this wonderful course called How to Make Almost Anything. And what they did in this class was they identified the minimal tool set that you need to make quote unquote almost anything. And it turns out if you have those tools, so things like 3D printers, laser cutters, water jet cutters, you could actually make a biolab if you think about it. You could actually use your FAB Lab to make a biolab. And so there are more than 1500 of these FAB Labs worldwide, and so Neil kind of tasked myself and George with this idea of trying to augment these FAB Labs with biolabs. And so although of course in the past couple of years I've had the great privilege of working with a variety of faculty around the world and also Jean-Michel Mollinar up here in the upper left corner to teach this global class. And again, we do it by video conference, so laboratories from almost every continent participate. And again, this has all happened in also in EMW. And again, I think back to my parents and them getting this Chinese language bookstore, and would they have thought that 20 years later that George Church would be teaching a synthetic biology class there, you know what I mean? So that's really funny how the world works and how things unfold. But it's been really wonderful teaching this class over the past couple of years. And again, in our community lab has participated and I hope others will join. And the students have generated some really amazing projects. So this is a type of a project exploring the idea of a biosensitive tattoo that could respond to different compounds being released through the skin. This is another project, the Living Color Palette which is led by Yixiao Jiang. Yixiao is actually really amazing. She found out about the course through the internet and moved to Cambridge from China, not knowing anything about biology. And now again, two years later, she is also the CEO of our biotech company called Feliz Bio, or Feliz Bio. And they're also building a lab in a box type of tool and actually they're launching a Kickstarter in just a couple of weeks. So for me it's been really, really exciting seeing all of these folks get into the life sciences that don't necessarily have a lot of the same type of technical training and already in a couple short years being able to make a real impact. And so again, she's done a lot of wonderful work. We've made bioprinters and this year, again, I'm teaching this as a spring course at MIT. So this has all been really, really fun and something I've enjoyed very deeply. And so two years ago, when I first joined the Media Lab to lead this new initiative, one of the big things that I really was thinking a lot about was the whole global community that was working on community bio and really trying to engage globally. And so I started to kind of travel around and visit a bunch of different laboratories. So I had the real privilege in 2017 of going to Switzerland for the BioFabbing Convergence Conference where I met so many incredible folks working on community labs, folks like Thomas who is from Cameroon and now a dear friend and colleague. And so again, I think what I want to stress here is that there's an incredible global movement happening now around these community labs and the fact that life sciences can happen in some of these grassroots spaces. This is Hacquarium, which is in Lausanne in Switzerland. And again, over the past couple of years, I've had a real privilege of engaging with a lot of different folks, including a law enforcement like the FBI. This is the Synthetic Biology 7.0 Conference in Singapore where again, this is Adeline who's one of the major organizers in Southeast Asia. And so part of what I was doing was, again, I mentioned I'm from Lexington. This is sort of my community bio Paul Revere moments where I was really trying to round everybody up and say, hey, we really need to converge and meet in person to have a gathering. And so all of this, these by the way are photographs that I've taken. So this is when I was in Tokyo and Japan in 2017, which was one of the most amazing places to go to do street photography. And so part of what I was doing was traveling to really try and get this global community to all come and converge at the Media Lab. And that's basically what happened in October, 2017. So that's when we organized the first ever global community bio summit. And so we weren't sure how many people would come to this first summit, but we ended up having more than 200 participants from all around the world come. And again, this was a really, it was a very transformational event. I think as a community organizer, and this is a community of folks that works in the life sciences, I organized this thing like I organized a retreat in my community center. So really all about heart and again, I think this is a social movement, which is another key part of this, which I think the folks here really care about really trying to make a change in the world, right? Really trying to change the world. And so I think I personally have been so inspired by this global community. Again, I think Beth was at this event as well. She's in this picture probably someplace. And so over the past year, and again, this is still at the bio summit, all of these different labs from all around the world had the opportunity to meet and share. And it's sort of like having a family reunion with people that you didn't know were in your family, right? And so it was a really transformational event. And one type of word we used to describe community bio is actually a movement, right? So it's not anymore just about an individual lab or an individual. It's really about what we can do together as a big global family, right? And so as a part of that, we started working very closely with this guy over here. This is Marshall Ganz. Marshall is a legendary community organizer. So he used to work with Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King. He helped to lead the organizing efforts behind Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns. And so we really started to deliberately employ organizing tactics and thinking about how to structure this global movement. And again, a big apart I think about community bio and DIY bio is the idea of hands-on activities, right? So at the bio summit, we had all of these workshops you could take to learn about, you know, open trons and all kinds of different things. And of course, we had a really awesome party, right? Very important. And, you know, this is George Church commenting on the historic nature of the 2017 meeting. So fast forward a year to October, just this past October, and we had the second annual Global Community Bio Summit. And so for the second summit, we almost doubled in size, right? So we had more than 430 or so people that wanted to participate. In the end, around 350 or so folks came. And, you know, this really is this incredible emerging global movement. And so again, much like in the 2017 Bio Summit, we had all of these different hands-on wet wear workshops and hardware workshops. We had an exhibition where we showed a lot of bio art and bio design. And again, just had a really, you know, remarkable event together. And so, but the key thing I want to emphasize, and again, you know, great party, but the key thing I want to emphasize over the course of the couple of years is I think the idea that we are a global community and that actually there's a larger collective consciousness and a collective intelligence that's actually emerging in this global context. And so one of the big kind of questions I think is, you know, how do you ultimately structure and organize a global community, right? And so this is where for myself in the past year, I've had the real privilege of working very closely with the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. And so Thomas Malone, who's the director of the Center, has written a really wonderful book that I encourage you to check out called Supermines, which basically explores the idea that humans ultimately can be organized into different types of formats, right? We could be hierarchies, we could be democracies, and we can also be communities, right? And that these types of super minds in a way have a collective intelligence, right? An emergent behavior that could be something bigger than the individual parts. And so if you think about a community, right? What brings a global community together, right? It's a really interesting question I think because there's no CEO, right? It's not like anybody has the power to say like, hey, GenSpace, go do this or bugs, go do that, right? And in many ways, I feel like the community labs are almost like this kind of armada of pirate ships, right? Everybody's doing their own thing and everybody's just gonna do what they wanna do, right? So in this type of a situation, how do you actually bring people together, right? And I think there are a couple of key things, right? So shared values are important, a shared vision is important, having a shared set of ethics and norms and needs. And what we did at this last biosum at 2.0 was we tried to make some of these implicit things explicit, right? So we actually ran a series of exercises to try and explore those different dimensions. So one thing we did was we actually did an analysis of a set of participants and looked at their values. So we collaborated with Gunther Weill, who's a scholar and a coach at the Media Lab, and we basically did a bunch of work analyzing some of the values of our community, which I thought was a really cool thing and you can see some of the wisdom, the search for trying to understand the world, a pioneerism and progress, collaborative individualism, these are all some of the key values of our community. Ethics was very important, so we had a series of ethics exercises where folks could engage with a different type of a question and try to understand what the range of ethical positions could be taken in our community. We had folks sharing what different types of needs their labs had. And one of the coolest things that we did, I thought, was we had an exercise where we had, and again, probably 300 or so people contribute to a shared vision exercise. And this again was led by Marshall Ganz, but also Abel Kano, who is one of Marshall, works very closely with Marshall as a core community organizer. And so we went through an iterative process where first the organizers of the biosummit came up with the first draft of a statement, and then at the biosummit, we had groups of around 50 to 75 people develop a second version, and then finally, excuse me, we leveraged some digital technologies to ultimately have several hundred people contribute to the third version. And the final version I'll read to you now is something that I'm personally really inspired by and find a lot of, just a lot of inspiration for. So this is the shared statement, statement of shared purpose that we came up with. So it reads, our shared purpose is to fundamentally transform the life sciences and democratize biotechnology to inspire creativity and improve lives by organizing life science change makers and bio enthusiasts to build an inclusive global network, cultivate an accessible commons of knowledge and resources, launch community labs and projects, and enable local educators. I know what you guys think about that statement, but I personally found it really, really amazing. And when we announced it at the very end of the biosummit, it was one of the key moments I think of the whole event and something I was very proud to experience. So building off of last year's summit, we have biosummit 3.0 coming up in October, so please mark your calendars. I hope many of you will come and attend. It's October 11th to 13th at the Media Lab in MIT. And again, when we work with the folks at the Center for Collective Intelligence, we've been thinking about how this global community might be able to do science in a new type of way, or produce knowledge in a new way, and generate technologies and share knowledge even in a new type of way. I wanna give a shout out to my friend, Sebastian Kokiba, who's also a colleague and a plant geneticist, and he's trying to engineer a blue rose, okay? And he actually has a lab in his home, and what he does, which is kind of amazing, his lab notebook is his Facebook feed, okay? So literally, I wake up in the morning, I have my cup of coffee, and then I read what experiments Sebastian's gonna run that day. And part of what's amazing about this is that Sebastian shares everything, right? So all of the mistakes that he's making in the lab, he's asking questions, how do I do this? Does anybody know what's wrong with this? And to me, it's a cool anecdote, but I think a sign of what science really potentially could be like, right? Something that is more vastly open and transparent. And if we could get the incentive structures like, right, then maybe it could be something like this. I think NIH has actually conducted some studies looking at the financial impact of reproducibility, right? The idea that somebody published a cool nature of science paper, and now somebody else is trying to reproduce that result, and it turns out it's extremely hard to do and sometimes not possible, right? And so to me, the idea that we could have a type of science where we're sharing our failures and the things that don't work is actually really exciting to me, right? And so part of what we're doing is we're trying to build out a platform called community.bio where we potentially could have the global community interact with each other but also share science and scientific insights, potentially in a new way. So after the first biosummit, we ultimately started spinning out, there were basically different regional types of events that were inspired by the summit that got organized. So in Africa, there was a wonderful open science event called the African Open Science and Hardware Summit. This was my first time going to Ghana to Kumasi, and it was so inspiring to see again all of the folks there that are really trying to bring life sciences, in this case, to Ghana. This is my colleague, Andrew Kripmeyer, with his backpack laboratory, and we did a bunch of work inside the local botanical garden. This is the first time I ever held, I forget exactly what animal or creature this is, but it was pretty intense and awesome. And so again, we've been working now with colleagues all around the world to try and help build out these community labs. And again, over in Europe, there's been a lot of really exciting work. This is one of my colleagues, Winnie in Ghent in Belgium, over in Barcelona, they have wonderful spaces, and I was recently, I had the privilege of going to Southeast Asia, to Thailand, to speak there and engage with Freak Lab, which is one of the really up-and-coming spaces over in near Bangkok, or south of Bangkok. These are friends from the Tentacles Gallery in Bangkok. And so again, there's this incredible global network of folks that are starting to really work. And part of what we did to try and bring this whole movement to the next level is to establish a fellowship program, which we call the Global Community Bio Fellowship, where we've identified 36 emerging leaders around the world, and are really trying to build a leadership cohort to work together to really bring community bio to the next level. So all of us to say, in my closing little period here, I want to talk and bring it all full circle back to the opening of my talk, which is the connection between biotechnology and culture, right? So there's this interesting and maybe alarming set of polls, looking at the difference between what scientists think about certain topics in science and what the public thinks, right? And there are a lot of significant gaps there that are pretty alarming. And so to me, one of the big questions is, going back to this whole question of what's the Hamilton for the life sciences, how do we ultimately culturally engage with these diverse communities? And so this is a photograph that I took of Professor George Church from the March of Science in Boston. And George is the subject of a book that came out, I believe, maybe even two years ago now, called Woolly. How many of you have read Woolly or are aware of Woolly? Okay, so I've been giving you guys a good reading list. So hopefully you could check this out. Now Supermise is one, Woolly is another one. And so this is a book about George's lab's effort to de-extinct the Woolly mammoth. Turns out there's a variety of important reasons, including climate change reasons why we want to de-extinct the Woolly mammoth. And what's cool about the book, I think, is that the scientists here are actually the heroes, right? It's not a book about contagion or outbreak. This is actually science in a real positive way to impact the world. And so there's actually going to be turned into a huge movie, like $100 million movie that's going to be released relatively soon, I think in the next year or so. And so there are a bunch of actors that are exploring to play George. Any guesses on who would be a good George church? What was that? What was that? Inself. Inself? Okay, that's one answer. So there are a couple of actors that are looking at to play George. One is Jeff Bridges, who would be a pretty good George church, I think. I'm being totally serious. Jeff Bridges is one. The other one that I think is also would be really, really good is, and this is the other active person that they're looking at is Tom Hanks, okay? I'm being totally serious. Castaway Tom Hanks is, he's got that classic twinkle in the eye that George has, right? So, but again, I think there's a real cultural impact that can happen for the life sciences through things like Woolly and this potential movie, right? And again, bringing it back to DNA day, right? I think what you all are doing here through the work here of setting up the national DNA day, I think is incredible. And why folks like, you know, Korean pop stars like BTS can play a positive role in getting the word of DNA out into the world and Kendrick Lamar, right? So, and you know, again, this quote, innovation connects with culture, right? And so I'll conclude by telling about a project that we created in my community lab where we asked an interesting question. I told you about microbiome science, right? I shared with you some of the engineering platforms we developed, but we asked ourselves this question. We said, you know, what is your microbiome to sound like, right? What if we can make music from your microbiome? And we made this project called Biotic Beats, which is a microbial record player that translates data about the microbes of the body into sound and music. And so this is a, you know, an image of a DJ scratching a vinyl record. Again, you know, it's something I enjoy. And this is a DJ scratching a biota record, right? Note the gloves and the good sterile technique, right? And so part of what we were doing with Biotic Beats was to create this system that was actually built on a retrofit record player. So it's basically an incubator built on a record player. And basically we have these biota records where we sample organisms from the body and as they grow over time, we collect data about the organisms and then have a series of algorithms that turn that data into sound and music. And so this is an image of some of our biota records which are actually set up to look like real EP and LP records. And this is Annie who's from our community, you know, sampling some of her toe bacteria and inoculating a biota record with that. And again, you know, we tracked a variety of different data streams to try and create ultimately this microbial music. And so are you guys ready to listen to some Biotic Beats? Yeah, okay, cool. So let me play for you some microbial music and tell me what you think. So this is a feed bacteria. I won't say anything out loud about this but you know, some menacing sounds from this ecosystem of microorganisms. This is the belly button. This is the oral microbiome. And if you put it all together, it sounds something like this. So again, you know, we had a real incredibly diverse group of folks work on this from artists to designers to technologists. And what we did after this kind of initial demonstration, again, you know, this is really more of an art project. Again, I think part of maybe we can collaborate with the NIH actually to really get into, you know, deeper into the science of what biota beats could do. But we asked ourselves a question. We said, well, you know, people have, have you know, vinyl record collections, right? What if you could have a biota record collection? Like what if you could actually sample organisms from really cool artists and make music out of their bacteria, right? So this is a photograph that I took of Q-Tip who's one of my all-time favorite MCs and DJs. There's a photograph that I took of Kwaslov again and another one of my favorite DJs. And so I had the opportunity, I was speaking at this event with this guy. I don't know if you know who this is. So you might recognize him more from this picture here. So this is DJ Jazzy Jeff who's one of the legendary icons of hip-hop. And I was speaking at the same event as DJ Jazzy Jeff and I brought basically a little DIY lab into the green room. So I set up a little lab there and I found Jeff and I asked him, I was like, Jeff, you know, I've got this project we're working on called Biota Beats where we're making hip-hop beats out of people's bacteria. Can I have some of your bacteria? And Jeff looked at me and was like, that's one of the weirdest questions anybody's ever asked me. But yeah, I'm down, right? So instantly I was like, Jeff is basically the coolest person I can imagine. And so Jeff, this is Jeff here, basically sampling some of his oral microbiome. And this is, I think this is one of my favorite photographs I've taken of all time. Look at how happy DJ Jazzy Jeff is inoculating this LB media with some of his oral microbiome, right? So he really, really enjoyed it. And we worked on making a biota beat from Jeff's bacteria. And probably one of the highlights of my scientific career, honestly, I got this call from Jeff's manager one time where, and basically she said, hey, Jeff is about to go on tour with Will Smith for the first time in like 10 years or whatever. Everybody's on pins and needles. And we've been learning from you about how the microbiome is dynamic and responds to stress and all these other things. What if we could make a biota beat of Jeff before he went on tour, after he went on tour, and during tour and saw how the music changed? And I was on the other line of the phone, kind of just crying like tears of joy, you know? It's like this major kind of hip hop icon in their team were proposing like a rigorous scientific experiment, basically, right? And so to me, what this showed was that music ultimately is this universal language, right? If we're gonna make the Hamilton of science, I think something like this, like biota beats could be an inspiration for that, right? People, young kids especially asked like, hey, what does my microbiome sound like, right? All of a sudden there's an engagement and excitement about the microbiome that people might have thought about before with this project. So again, there's been a lot of interesting and cool press about this, about biota beats. And but probably one of the more interesting things that we did was, I guess, a year and a half ago now. So you remember IGM, I told you about that, 3,000 students from all around the world. And we basically worked on creating a song, which we call the universe, meaning one song. And again, this was this whole idea about thinking about a big global family. And that's what in part what IGM is too, much like community bio. And what we did was, we wanted to sample the microorganisms of these students that were from all around the world and basically from that data to create a global song, okay? And so this was really crazy. We had an incredible group of students working on this over the course of basically 72 hours where we had one day where we were just sampling microbiota from the students and then we would incubate them and then these different plates and then ultimately image them and then generate this MIDI data, which my dear friend and brother from another mother, Chuck Kim, who's a producer in Los Angeles, would then produce the final composition and ultimately we generate this visualization. And so we had more than 130, we had 131 teams contribute their microbes and basically each continent represented a different body part and also represented a different musical instrument. So South America, in this case, there were seven teams from there and they represented the scalp and percussion. Only a couple of African teams so they were holding it down with the atmosphere and were sampling their hands and so on, right? So for each one of these different continents, we had different body parts and different different sounds. And so I'll conclude by just sharing with you some of the music from Universe. Pony synth bass. This I thought was just a really beautiful way to kind of microbes of this global community look like. And so again, these are photographs of all the students that participated. And again, it was a really wonderful song, I think that we were able to create. And the closing thing I'll share is, I think right now, especially in the world, there's so many challenges that we face as a society here in the United States, but also really as a global family. And I think a big part of what I care about and through the work of Community Bio and through things like institutions like iGEM, I think that there's something we can do together as a big global family and that trying to figure out how we can communicate with each other and really, really be inspired by each other and work together to tackle some of these challenges is so critically important. So I hope that you've enjoyed this talk and I hope that you have learned something about synthetic biology and about the intersection of these different cultures. And so I'll conclude by just acknowledging some of the team members and folks that have worked on all of this research that I shared. And again, all of the organizers of DNA Day. So thank you all so much and I'll leave you with this meme. So thank you so much again. David and we just have a small token, a certificate to give to you. And again, like I said, you are... Oh, okay, we'll move out, we'll move out. Okay, okay, sorry. Kiana's directing us to be a part of ECIP, so. Boss, comments, responses. Yeah, I have a question. Yeah. So years ago I was on a committee that had computer scientists and biologists and it was about intellectual property and the computer scientists had no concept of why the biologists were so protective of their information. And so when you're talking about the Facebook feed, I was just thinking, will biology ever sort of move to that open source thinking that innately seems to be in the computer science community? Yeah, that's a great question. I think for myself personally, that's something that I'm very excited about and something that I hope can catch on more. But again, I think to your point, balancing these things with privacy, and we talked a lot earlier about consent, I think there's a balance between trying to engage and have very, very diverse participation, but also making sure that we do it the right way. Again, I think one of the major tasks that's before us as a scientific community is public engagement, right? Figuring out how do we get the public more knowledgeable and increasing that quote, unquote, DNA literacy, right? My hope is for DNA day, that this day and the fact that it is national DNA day, actually it's on the 25th, right? Which is perfect. So on the 25th, I'm giving another talk then, so I'm gonna have proudly wearing my DNA day t-shirt, just to kind of get the war down. So again, I think it's through initiatives like this that we can try to have that broader public engagement. But I do think though that trying to balance out how we share with privacy and consent, I think is a big part of what is in front of us. That's a good question. So I guess I'll get on the mic so we can record it. So my question is really, you're creating this global community and have you found that there are, obviously we have challenges in this country, what are some of the major challenges you see in other countries in being able to create a global community around science? Yeah, that's a super great question. To me, I think one of the things I'm most inspired by right now are my colleagues all around the world, particularly in the global South that are really getting into the life sciences, right? And we're having some conversation about this at lunch with some of the trainees here at NIH. And imagine trying to set up a wet lab where if your thermo-cycler breaks, who's gonna come and fix that thing for you, right? Are reagents gonna get shipped to you? Do you have reliable electricity? All of the things that we kind of take for granted in a laboratory environment here in the US, for example, there's so many of these challenges and obstacles that face our colleagues in the global setting. And so I think I shared a little bit about the African Open Science and Hardware event. And I think, you know, again, going back to one of the other colleagues' questions about open source, open science, I think is such a big part of how, in the developing world, an impact can be made, right? You know, if you have the ability to actually repair your own machinery because you have all the design files, then that's a big step, right? If you don't have to rely as much on the global supply chains that may not be as evident in certain parts of the world, then that's really important, right? So initiatives like Metaflutics, which I shared where we've got all of the design files for our fluidic systems and folks can download those and actually make edits and remixes and so on. And those I think are critical kind of infrastructure pieces that we need as a global community to try and bring science to these diverse communities around the world. Yeah, is there a question in the back? Maybe inadvertent hand raised. So much for giving this lecture. Yeah. We know where to find him, so if people have other questions that come up, yeah, please reach out. I'm on all of the, you know, you can send me an email or get in contact with me on social media, it'd be an honor to stay in touch with all of you and yeah, let's work together on let's figure out the Hamilton for science. I love that idea. That's something we got to do together. So thank you all so much again. It's such an honor to be here. Thank you.