 So, I want to introduce Don Ingber and Pam Silver. I'm going to do a brief, very brief bio of them because there's, you can read online, I mean, their bios are pages long and the credits to their, I mean, it's just unbelievable. So, Don Ingber is the founding director of the VICE Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. He's the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School in Boston Children's Hospital and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Don's organ on a chip invention, which is included in the exhibition upstairs and which we'll hear about in a moment, was named Design of the Year by the London Design Museum in 2015 and was one of the top 10 emerging technologies of 2016 by the World Economic Forum. And it's also included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and maybe we'll come to Cooper Hewitt. We have to discuss that. Pam Silver is the Adams Professor of Biochemistry and Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School and the VICE Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. She was named one of the top global influencers in synthetic biology, which is a really hot topic these days and she's going to talk a lot about that. And her work was one of the top 10 breakthroughs at the World Economic Forum. So, I'm going to first talk a little bit about the exhibition and what VICE Selects is. For those who don't know our Select series, this is when we as a curatorial team decide to we choose or select someone to basically mine our collection. We have 210,000 objects in our collection. So, we ask someone to come and look at aspects of our collection knowing that they probably have some kind of theme or several themes in mind. And then based on the final theme they come up with, we choose objects. And our whole curatorial team is involved in helping them because we can't expect them to go through every 210,000 objects. You did, you came very close. So, that's how we do it. So, Don was kind of as he liked to call himself the wrangler of his team of scientists. We wanted to also feature women scientists at VICE. Smithsonian is having this initiative to celebrate women both in 2019 and 2020. So, we felt a particular need to do that. So, we have Pam here, the other scientists. Yeah, you can, so you can see all the women scientists. And these are the four women that are included in the exhibition and you can see their work upstairs. So, I wanted to then have Don talk a little bit about the VICE Institute and what it means because I'm sure most of you, at least you don't know Don and Pam, don't know what the VICE Institute is and why, you know, why, and I can talk a little bit more about why we chose you at a point later on. But, go for it. I'm very briefly, VICE Institute is 10 years old. It was started based on the challenge to kind of envision the future of engineering and particularly bioengineering across Harvard University and all the hospitals and we're talking 30 year ahead type envisioning. And cut a long story short, we basically looked back at what's happened over the past 50 years and we saw that engineering principles were being applied to develop new innovations in medicine, manufacturing, et cetera. And we have things like hip implants and drug delivery and some of the things you see in the collection that, you know, are implanted in the body. But we realized that we're at a tipping point where we've actually, where the boundaries between living and non-living systems are literally breaking down when we've uncovered enough about how nature builds controls and manufactures from the nanoscale up that we're at a point that we could actually harvest biological design principles to develop new engineering innovations. And this is what we call biologically inspired engineering. And the last thing is that we're a research institute, but even more importantly we're a translation institute in that our measures for success, our mission is to have near-term impact. And as an aside, we were kicked off with the largest single philanthropic gift in Harvard's history of $125 million, which we doubled because we were so successful at translating and having impact and we've tripled. So it's really been quite an enterprise, about 375 full-time staff at this point. We're responsible for 25% of all of Harvard University's intellectual property patents. And we are 18 part-time faculty, so it's quite an amazing thing. And the reason why we chose these, or I particularly pushed for it, was because as you all know, we have the nature, Cooper Hewitt Nature Design Triennial on two floors. And we decided to turn over the whole museum to the theme of nature. And so also with the select series, we wanted to either feature a scientist or have a research institution. And these happens to be the first research institution, scientific research institution that we have included here. So we felt this was like a great opportunity. And that sort of fine line between science and design is very blurred and there's lots of collaborations of which is what the triennial celebrates. And in fact, there's four these projects within the triennial itself. So maybe you can begin talking a little bit about each of your projects that are in the V-select show, and then we can talk about the exhibition in general and some of the themes that you chose. So I mentioned the organ on a chip, which, yeah, we're very proud you won the design award. We beat out a Frank Gehry building in the Google car that year. So that was something I'm very proud of. So organ on chip, when we started the V-Sinstitut with that huge gift, we were challenged with taking on sort of high-risk, high-impact challenges that government agencies wouldn't fund. They don't take risks. And the biggest problem that I could see was that the drug development models broken that essentially right now something like 70% of drugs that go into clinical trials fail. And a big part of that is because they use animals to test and mice are not humans. There's also incredible ethical issues. Obviously in terms of all the animal lives. So we set out to develop a device that could replace animal testing to accelerate drug development. And so the device, which I actually have one in my pocket, is the size of a computer memory stick. It's made out of clear, flexible rubber. You can sort of bend it. And I'm going to show you a video of how it works, but we line this with living human cells. It doesn't have cells in it at this moment. So this video shows the device. So if you were to cut this in half, you will see that it has three hollow channels. The middle channel is split horizontally by another thin, flexible membrane that has pores in it. We coat that with molecules that are anchoring molecules in our body so that cells adhere. If we want to make a lung air sac, we take lung cells, human cells put them on top. We put human blood vessel cells on the bottom. And we just recreated what's called the alveolda capillary interface. And the trick is we have cyclic suction through the side channels, and it stretches and relaxes at the same rate and degree as when we breathe in and out. And your lung goes up. The air sacs expand and contract. We then put air over the top, just like in the lung. And then we could flow a medium with or without immune cells or even whole blood in the bottom channel. And if this were to work, it should mimic organ-level response. So imagine you have an infection with bacteria. Normally, there's a signaling response. The cells, the lung cells, put out molecules that activate your blood vessel cells. Normally, white blood cells just flow by. But when they're activated, they stick, they roll, they go across, and they kill. They kill the back. They eat the bacteria. So what I'm going to show you now very briefly is these are living white blood cells. They're fresh. We took them out of my postdoc, who did the experiment. You can't see the capillary cells. They're black, and behind the screen are the lung cells. To begin with, healthy cells just flow by. They just keep flowing. Put the bacteria on the other side. That signaling occurs. They get sticky. And we're watching this in real time at high resolution. You could do any imaging. You could do in the body or on a dish. And I'm going to show you in one second a higher mag of one cell right here. It sticks. It goes, finds a space between two capillary cells. You can't see. Then it finds that little pore in the membrane. It wiggles its rear end out of focus to the other side. And you're going to see it come up right there. It's now coming up by a different imaging. Now I'm going to show you the white blood cells in red and the bacteria in green. And you'll see them in golf. So you just watch the entire human inflammatory response in this little rubber chip. Now we have made, just looking at it, we've made many chips. This is, that was an air sac. On the left is the airway chip, which have cilia and mucus, just like in our lungs. At the right is an intestine chip. Those are villi. We could even grow complex microbiome, which now you hear about being important for health and disease. We've done over 20 of these. We've linked them together to make human bodies on chips. We can predict drug dose levels in patients on these. And the interesting part is that you can now, the idea is you can begin to make your liver on a chip and your lung on a chip for personalized medicine. You can test drugs for individual patients. That's an example of what the organ on a chip. It's hard to see that in the exhibition. Thanks, Don. And I thank you for celebrating women in science. It's wonderful. It's wonderful to be here also. So we work at perhaps the other side of the scale. Not only do we need healthy people, but we also need a healthy earth. And we need to worry about how we're going to make an earth that can support twice as many people now. Now our greatest natural resource is sunlight. And nature has actually figured out how to use sunlight. They're called plants. And they do it really well. And we would like to harness that ability to help us provide medicines, provide food. Plants can do all these things, but we would like to do it better. And so we've been inspired by what plants do to combine the sort of awesome power of biology with the awesome power of chemistry to create what we call the bionic leaf. As just as an aside, this is one of the fascinating things about being at the V-Sinstitute and Harvard, my community, is that I actually met my collaborator, Dan Nocerra, who's in the chemistry department. We co-invented this. I literally met him at a cocktail party. And it was a rare instance where Harvard faculty got together and invented something, which was helped by the V-Sinstitute. And so we call this the bionic leaf. The idea is that sunlight can come in. The energy from sunlight can be captured. Some of this is sort of high school science. For some of you, especially in New York City, I think they teach photosynthesis in high school. We don't teach it to Harvard undergrads. They do something called the water splitting reaction. And then we can take the product of that and feed it to bacteria that can take CO2 out of the atmosphere and then grow and do things. So the design aspects of this on the left is Dan's what he calls the artificial leaf. This was quite an amazing invention where you can shine light on essentially this chemistry device, and it will do that water splitting reaction. And on the right is actually the artificial leaf. And I don't know if you can see that there are bubbles coming off of it. Those bubbles are hydrogen. And that is the result of shining light on this thing. Now what we did, our part, which was perhaps not as challenging as this, but to figure out how to grow life using that hydrogen. Now I know this is about design. And I have a lot of reporters come to my lab and say, show us the bionic leaf. What does it look like? Well, it actually looks like a chemistry experiment. The design is actually quite disappointing. They go over to the lab bench and they say, oh, that's it? They wanted to see a real leaf or something. So we've got to work on our design angle here. However, let me just end with telling you some of the accomplishments we've done with this. So we can actually engineer this device to make all kinds of different things. So we can make biodegradable plastics. We can make different kinds of fuel-related molecules. And the idea here is to replace the petroleum industry and use nature to do that. And so let me just finish with one example. We can actually grow a bio-fertilizer in this device. And the result of that, the radishes on the right are giant radishes that have been fed this bacterial-based fertilizer that was grown in the bionic leaf. And so it's actually a carbon-neutral cycle. So I will leave it to there for your imagination. Wow. So we started the process of the vis exhibition with not with these projects, although we were very interested, we had already been researching for the triennial. But we started with our collection. So we, so Don, I've known Don actually sort of for a long time, even before you were at these. Before I knew it. Yeah, before you knew it, exactly. Because I remember going to a lecture of yours and being very impressed. And with a colleague and now friend, Chuck Oberman, and you were lecturing at Princeton. And so I was very interested in how you kind of incorporated design and art into your scientific discussion and sort of the natural world. And so I thought that this would be a perfect match for the triennial. So I came knocking. And then we had these sort of discussions back and forth. And you finally made a trip to our storage facilities, which are both off-site and on-site. And they told me they'd have to kill me if I'd tell Don. Yeah, exactly. You can't even tell the city. So anyway, and so we went there. And you looked at a lot of things. But you already had something in your mind, I think. And I had gone through, you sent me a bunch of books and also the website. So I had searched a lot and had things I wanted. But then your curators had also picked out things. And then I could just walk through it. It was amazing. I have to make one little, I want to make a comment because even before we had a checklist, you had already written the brochure, which was like, oh my God, we have to pull teeth usually for people to write anything. And I think obviously you have such an extensive writing resume that I'm sure that this was just, it was nothing. But anyway, we were very pleased because you stuck to the deadlines. But anyway, and it changed a little bit over time, but you had a fairly good idea about how you were going to approach it. And so what was the overarching theme? Yeah, I mean, I mean, you came into my office and you said, would you like to curate a collection? And I said, yes, you were trying to convince me, but no, I work intuitively. And the first thing that came into my head was, and I say this in the brochure, was a memory of seeing artists from exactly, pretty much exactly 100 years ago, an artist's movement called Futurism, which was all over the world, largely starting in Italy, but all over. I remember a part of the movement called Plastic Dynamicism, which was basically trying to convey changes in form and over time within a changing environment. And it struck me because we work in biology especially how things form and develop is very much exactly that. Everything's changing in form over time while everything around it's changing. And I never forgot that. But I also knew that it was essentially an artist's view of seeing technology about to change the world 100 years ago, automation and all sorts of things coming in. And so it was from an artist's perspective, but I realized that what we're doing is basically biofuturism. It's just a little different. We work from some, we use design principles, but biological ones. We often collaborate with designers. Chuck Oberman is a faculty member at The Beast and the winner of a Chrysler Design Award. So we really cross boundaries seamlessly. And now rather than just telling, trying to communicate that technology is gonna change the world, we're creating the technologies that are gonna change the world. And then I had to link those two thoughts together with transitions. And I think we can go through that as we speak. Yeah. So these are just a couple of examples from each section in the exhibition with the Marinetti on the left and Desky on the right, but really sort of certainly different periods, but really kind of showing this kind of futurist moment. And as you said, the kind of the advancements of technology, this dynamism that the artists were after. They've been visioning a future world, but how much technology would be part of that. If I can... Yeah, keep going. Let's, oops. So the theme is really bioinspiration for us. And I realize that artists have always been bioinspired. This is an old idea. And there's so many ways you could show that. And I was trying to simplify it in a way I think artists, designers could appreciate. And I thought of the spiral. And so that was something that I searched through the web. And then when I visited you, it was a gold mine because every time we'd pass storage shelves, I would catch something that turned out to be a La Leak escargot vase or the chair with the spiral cane or many different examples of that and or the spiral poster that's on the cover with the nautilus. Right, the Eric D. J. Yeah, and I think it's just really trying to simplify that concept that bioinspiration is essential to art and designed from the very beginning. And we have objects from 1500s in here. Right. Well, one thing that's interesting about this particular section, Natural Forms, and I kind of want to ask Pam about it too, is this idea of bioinspiration because it's something that we also talked about in the Triennial. And we're very cognizant about bioinspiration versus biomimicry. So what is the difference? That's a very interesting question. I guess I think of myself as always being inspired and not mimicking. So I think as a scientist, you can think about, I want to understand the mechanism of how things work and then I'm going to understand how an organism develops, for example. But then imagine instead you take that knowledge and instead I say, I want to grow a house. So you're taking the essence of what you know about how bio, this is how I think. I take the essence of things I know how biology works and we draw on, well, you draw on hundreds of years, we draw on at least probably 70 years of molecular biology that came with the discovery of cloning DNA and that is really at the core of what we do. And we say, okay, we know some things and how they work. In fact, we know a lot. So let's try to make something new out of that and that's what inspires me. And so really, can I grow a house? Can I take what I know about how a tree grows and instead grow a house, for example? Can you? This actually came up recently. Are you really? They're actually, we had a meeting about it recently. The architects are... Growing lampposts and houses. So who are you working with? Sorry, I don't mean to like... Discussions about it, there's actually, it turns out quite a group at the Harvard Design School which you know of that also is... But I actually, in the course of that discussion, thinking about, I'll give you an example. How do you make a street light that can draw on biology? And I actually came up with an idea and some of you may relate to this. If you're swimming in the ocean when there's a fluorescent algae bloom, have you ever done this? It's amazing. And it is so bright. Or if you're on a sailboat and you're sailing through the ocean, it's almost the light of day. And I realized we could take those same kinds of bacteria and put them in the soil and then as you walk through the village or whatever, it would light up. And so you have that, you know, that's biologically inspired. That's interesting because we have something like that in the triano. You were commenting on that Phantasma dress which is we, the designers injected the DNA of a jellyfish into the silkworm and then the silkworm spun the cocoon which created the phosphorescent silk. I was actually fascinated that you had that in the exhibit because I wasn't actually involved in the very early part of that work. Oh really? Wow. And that was one of the earliest, actually experiencing the silk industry was amazing because that is one of the oldest industries in the world. And we actually were interested, got interested in engineering silkworms to do different things. And this fluorescent protein was one of the first things. And we went to Japan and talked to the factories there. It was fascinating. There's also people are engineering yeast to express the molecule that generates light in fireflies. And they can get probably 60 watt bulb from that. So you know, in terms of light, I have some slides of people beginning to do that. I will say at the, we generally do bio-inspired stuff but people do biomimicry. Biomimicry would be like trying to make an artificial abalone shell which is known to be strong or we've made artificial insect cuticle as a. Which one? A rottica? Yeah, we'll come to that. We could talk about it there. But so biomimicry I think more of is really trying to reproduce in artificial ways what you see exactly in the world. And Joanna Eisenberg does things like that with artificial optical fibers and so forth. The bio-inspiration is more what Pam said or like I did with the organoanship. You could take the best of the man-made approaches, alternative approaches, but be inspired by the design principle. Right. But onto your point about the firefly. Yep. We also have a version of that in the triennial. The Michael Stranolab and Kennedy Violich Architects who it's on the first floor in the conservatory and they are injecting on the, it's water crust leaves injecting firefly DNA or whatever it is I'm saying it very simplistically. So when you open the little peephole you can actually see the leaves or part of the leaf grow, I mean glowing. So all to bring sort of natural, truly natural light to areas that don't have access to electricity. So. That's the concept. Yeah. Interesting. Let's go to the next one. So the next one is close to my heart and it really is, the title comes from a Scientific American article I had, but it really is a transition from the futurist because in the futurist I included people like Buckminster Fuller who was working at that early time really thinking about, what future buildings would look like and having helicopters bring in a pole that had an apartment complex hanging from it and so forth. But he was, I guess as I described in the brochure I was trying to transition from pattern and form to structure and what is the basis of form? There's a famous quote of a biologist that says that patterns or diagrams of underlying forces that hold things together like in a building and Fuller's geodesic domes, he gave the story of, he was in the back of a ship in World War I and saw bubbles coming up in the wake of a boat and he realized that you can't use an irrational number pie every time you wanna make a bubble and he started to think about what if spheres are the basic building block and that's how he got to geodesics and then he realized the geodesic dome is incredibly efficient and then he tried to figure out why is it so efficient and he realized it's not like a man-made building with brick upon brick type construction which depends on compression like stone hinge, hit it from the side, falls over like dominoes. He realized it was due to continuous tension. You can't see it because it's all rigid rods but it's the way our bodies are built where we're made of actually 206 compression resistant bones that if you go to an anatomy lab you have to wire together, hang from a stick to look like us. But in reality we're pulled up against gravity because we're connected by all these muscles and tendons that create tension and the tension or tone in my muscle makes me stiff or flexible. That's called tensegrity and he used that term but nobody understood what he was talking about and then he was at Black Mountain College which was this cauldron of creativity of every field and Kenneth Snelson who built the sculpture on the left was his student and he was inspired by Fuller and he went home and he built the first sculpture where those sticks are steel girders, they don't touch one another, they're just pulled up and held in suspension because they're connected by continuous tensile cables. So this is actually a fundamental building principle that inspired me as a scientist where I saw this in an art class to explain how cells are constructed and then later realized that this is how our bodies constructed at the big scale, molecules, cells, tissues, organ, they use this tension as a principle. I love the piece on the right that one of your curators, Susan, I can't remember any. Yeah, Susan Brown. So we went to this, I called it the Raiders of the Lost Ark Storage site in New Jersey and so the curator said chosen a few things around the objects that I had chosen, the two on the left I had chosen already and that is a textile that's hanging on the wall that has rigid rods that are, I don't know if it's the warp or the weft, I think it's the weft. The weft, weft. And then basically, I think it's linen threads holding the other way, but if you were to tie it like a hammock between two tree branches, it would be like a spider web between two and the stability would be because of the tension and compression and so she kind of picked that out, I think it's wonderful. Yeah, that's great. But that's what the architecture of life is. What's underneath all the form? And from the time of Plato, we talked about triangulated structures, tetrahedra and Plato said the world is built up of tetrahedra, which are triangulated, that's what Fuller basically kind of said also. So that was why I have old and new. And I think that's why it's, I mean, why this show is so interesting and I think in the Triennial too, it's like these, you know, the macro and the micro scale are very much, you know, so similar. And, you know, we as, or I'm not a designer, but designers, they work usually on the macro scale. You all work on the micro scale and that's why it's interesting to see that kind of similarity between worlds and that it makes that probably collaboration which I think the Triennial celebrates that much more interesting to kind of see those similarities. What about the next one? Okay, so this as Pam was referring, this is the work of Radhika Nagpal who couldn't make it. And Radhika actually builds ten-segrity-based robots that move around, but these are another level of biological design principle which is the principle of self-assembly, which is, you know, we don't have any blueprints when we form in the embryo. Everything self-aggregates, groups of cells form a tissue and they group with other tissue. And we know about swarms of fish and termites and insects and she has developed, she's a computer scientist and she actually writes computer algorithms that can program robots to act like a swarm of birds, for example. These are called kilobots. They're actually a commercial product. They move by a motor that's out of your iPhone, vibrating, the vibrating function of your phone. They just took them, put them in these. They have lights. Each one is programmed identically, just like every insect knows what to do identically, but then they could flash some simple rules and they will collectively do whatever you program so they'll follow the leader or the form of a starfish and there's a video of that. But the amazing thing is that if you take five or 10 of them out or you injure a few, the others will make up for that and correct it, just like ants will do if they're building a hive. So this is a different type of bio-inspired principle. One thing you mentioned, I don't know if you've talked about it, but both of you would be interesting to hear. The sort of process, because you do the research at the VEAS, but then when it gets to that point where the research needs to then go and it forms a company or someone buys it, what is that process? And for instance, like for the kilobots, what is it being, what's the application for it? So this was an educational tool. So it's used in colleges and around the world to try to teach the idea of computing where you're dealing with a swarm of things that are sort of flexible and floppy in their capabilities, but you have robust properties, which is a very hard thing to tell someone about in this way they could experience. But the translation at the VEAS, we actually have a whole structure of having our own strategic intellectual property attorneys, our own business development people. We do the de-risking on site. We talk to investors, we talk to the FDA, we talk to venture capitalists. We try to identify what the actual challenges are out there that we need to overcome to get investment or to license to a company. And then we've hired over 40 people from industry, 10, 20, 30 years of product development experience, product design experience. And they're at the VEAS working with our teams. And so it's not your usual academic place. Right. I just wanna comment a little bit about the bionic leaf because that again is in a different space than the medical space. And so that's been fascinating for me to come out of the more traditional medical research and get into environmental issues. And we have indeed founded a company around the technology that I just showed you, the ability to essentially in a carbon negative way produce a fertilizer. And it has been absolutely fascinating to interact with people who are interested in land remediation. We are doing field tests on farms. And it has just a whole nother level of interaction with different kinds of people, different industries. Who knew I'd be talking to farmers? And by the way, it's a heavily political crowd. You all here are all fine. But when you go, it's amazing. And in fact, places like us people on the East Coast don't necessarily have a lot of interaction with them. And so they're loving this outreach to between the sort of biotech community and people who are in perhaps otherwise places where we might not normally travel. And also internationally, there's a huge interest, especially in China, in bioremediation. So this is turning into an amazing adventure for me. Well, it's interesting because when I was sort of doing a little poking around on the internet, and I emailed you about this, and we're working with the World Economic Forum. So what came up was in 2019, the World Economic Forum announced the top 10 emerging technologies. And Smarter Fertilizer was number five. And it says Smarter Fertilizers can reduce environmental contamination. So I think, I mean, it was, they were describing little pellets that is time-release so that it still emits the toxins, but it was over a period of time so that it wasn't as serious an impact on the earth. But yours sounds different. ours is acting as an actual fertilizer and delivering nitrogen to the soil. And the production of fertilizer, which was last century's revolution that brought us to where we are, the Green Revolution. But the process of generating fertilizers, one of the most energy-intensive processes, it puts a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. It's heat-intensive. And so now, as you say, rightly so, there's a reverse on that. Eating the, having bacteria eat the pollutants. So having bacteria eat plastic is for an example of what you're saying. And I just wanna throw in, I was recently in Australia where they are, of course, concerned about the reef. And the reef is generated by bacteria. And so we came up with the idea, what if you could make a bacteria that will regenerate the reef and eat the plastic at the same time? So that's bio-inspiration for you. That's pretty amazing. The vis is amazing because it's, they're talking about this big challenge and having slow release pellets and we're coming up with technologies that are just way out there. We have a, and you talk about translation, it's really hard to translate in the areas that are particularly non-medical. There's one technology invented by someone named Oscar Sahin, who's now at Columbia at our place, which generates electricity from changes in humidity. And it literally uses bacterial spores. You hear that things can be dry for hundreds of years and then you add water and they can grow. And these spores are actually used as cattle feed so they're safe and they're made inexpensively. And when they're dry, it's like a raisin, like a grape shrinking to a raisin, it's all wrinkled. And when you, even if you just breathe on it, there's enough humidity that it immediately swells to a grape. And that energy is incredibly high for the small size and he's able to harness that, thinks he could be at the level of solar, but it could be, you know, whether night or day in places that just literally have changes in humidity. But to commercialize that, we haven't been able to because that's a huge game changer. No one's, it's so far out there, but these are the challenges that we face. Just to add on to that, having experienced this space a little bit, when you start dealing with, I think biofuels is the classic one, the scale becomes so huge. And Don alluded to this, that you're talking about, yeah, I'm gonna put this bacteria all over the place or if I'm gonna make a biofuel, I've gotta make a lake the size of Texas. So the scale of everything is way different than what people who, for example, develop drugs do. So drugs are high value commodities. You don't have to make very much to, and you can sell it for a lot, unfortunately, but, but things like fuel is a low value, sugar is essentially a low value commodity. Food additives and things like this. The profit margin is very small, and so commercialization is a whole different issue that we're working on. Well, in terms of, do you think that one of your highest priorities or at least a high priority is coming up with applications that do have some kind of environmental positive impact or can, I mean... For me, personally, absolutely. There are people, actually a vis, hopefully sponsored project will be to engineer bacteria that make biodegradable plastics. And that is, that's harnessing so much, so you can think of cells as the world's best chemists. Now all those plastics were the last centuries revolution, better living through chemistry. Now we're gonna have better living through biology, and they can do it better. Which is a good segue to the next slide. Oh, I love that you picked... Or synthetic, but Wilson, do you talk about synthetic... I love that you picked this partly because of the image on the right. I just, every time I walk in and see that work, I'm inspired, but I wanna just comment on the dragon for a moment. Because it's just magical that you picked the dragon. The dragon, for me, is just the ultimate synergy between fantasy and biology. And I grew up reading a book that is by C.F. Forrester that was called Poopoo and the Dragons, and it was illustrated by Robert Latham, who you may know, and he drew these amazing pictures of dragons. You should get them, but this really reminded me of that. And I think of dragons as friendly, actually, because of that book. And so there's a whole thing in my laboratory, though, of when are we going to grow a dragon? And this is inspired, of course, by the other image we all have of friendly dragons, which is Game of Thrones, right? And those are beautiful dragons, by the way. So I love that this, for me, is just sort of the essence of, I don't think there are any dragons yet, but if we could, maybe we can bring them back if they used to exist. So the synthetic biology, for me, was transitioning from the artist's view of bioinspiration to the artist's creative view of alternative worlds, which is synthetic biology depicted. And the one on the left is actually a study for a float, for some sort of feast parade or exhibition, like Leonardo da Vinci used to build. And the right, of course, is a Jihuli glass sculpture, which I didn't know it was him, I kind of figured, but I just loved that it looked like barnacles. And there's a lot of other things in the collection that look like they're alive. There's a plate that's from about 1700 that I found when we were walking through that if you look at is an entire ecosystem, like looking under the water of snails and eels and frogs and seashells and it just fenced. So it was truly synthetic biology. And then that transitions into Pam's world, this is what I call it. The other thing I wanted to say about sustainability is, you usually think of energy, coming up with an alternative to fuels, but there are people like Joanna Eisenberg, who's not here tonight, but has things in the collection where she worked on a project to develop ways to prevent ice from sticking to airplane wings because the ice decreases energy efficiency. She used biomimicry in a sense that she figured out, she looked to a plant in Africa called the pitcher plant, that when it's dry, insects crawl all over it, but when it's wet, it's so slippery, they slide into it and the plant eats the insect like a Venus flytrap. And she figured out that it had to do with the nano-scale topography with fluid. She made artificial materials, she called slippery surfaces. That is now a company and it's being commercialized. The first thing are paints on big ships to prevent barnacles from sticking because barnacles are a huge energy drag. She also has put it on refrigeration coils and the ice on your refrigerator decreases energy. Turns out you can save a huge amount of energy with something that prevents sticking. Who would ever think of that? Incredible. Okay, last one, we have to make it quick so we have time for a few questions. So this is the... So this is really what we talked about, biofuturism is now really beginning to develop technologies that are inspired by nature. I try to find things in your collection. I think things that we're doing are much further ahead, but certainly the cheetah artificial leg, where I try to figure out how we harness energy from the muscles and the bones is amazing. I think the wearable fabrics are almost like artificial skin that move like we move, but the two things in the collection from our other faculty, the one on the left is from Jennifer Lewis and I wish we could show videos of what she does, but she just got a lot of press the last few weeks on the web. She does 3D printing of living organs, human living cells, and she could print them at the density of our bodies. Most people do 3D printing layer by layer. It's kind of like Westworld. She has, on the web, you can see a video of a big jar and there's a slurry of little balls of living human cells that are made out of called inducible pluripotent stem cells. You can take your skin or your blood cells and you can induce them with a few genes to become stem cells that can become any cell type. And she makes them to become, in this case, must heart muscle. So you have these little balls of cells, but she pours it in like a slurry. It's goopy, just all cells. And then she prints with a nozzle, a blood circulatory system, which is like on the left, which she can then fill with capillary blood vessel cells. And at the end she has a, so far it's about a centimeter high muscle that contracts. And this is really the idea of printing living tissues for transplantation. And then finally the one on the left is just so beautiful. That's Joanna Heisenberg's. There's a black and white one on the back of the program that won the Nikon photo of the year a few years ago. This is artificial nano-structured surface. Those are artificial cilia like in the lung that I showed you in the lung that move debris out of your lung and then you cough it up. She was basically making artificial surfaces that could be self-cleaning and that's like a little ball that it can grab. But that's, you know, I think each little cilia is a tenth of a width of a hair, but just absolutely beautiful. Okay, so are there questions? I'm gonna throw it open to the audience and see, yeah. I think do we have microphones for, yeah. So just raise your hand if you. Someone in the middle? Yeah. I just wonder whether you could give us some more examples of the applications of tensegrity to different levels of biological organization. So can it be used also for protein structures, for instance, and is there a mathematical formulation that can be predictive or at which stage is this? So we, so tensegrity is definitely how proteins are built. And so proteins are molecules and they actually have like helical regions that are stiff and then flexible parts and then other regions that are stiff and then flexible parts and then they're under tension because they're bonding forces between. And we had a paper about a year ago where we, it's kind of a cool story. We combine this simulation software that scientists used to model, to depict how molecules move with physical reality. It's called molecular dynamics. And we took software from the entertainment industry that literally the person who did this worked for Peter Jackson who did the Hobbit films and does professional animation and combined these and we were able to model tensegrity at a single molecule level and we modeled and you sound like a scientist so it's called dining. It's a motor that's in the tail of the sperm. But then we put it inside the other filamentous molecules that are in the tail of the sperm at a larger scale and we put that in computationally in the tail of something this shape and length of a sperm and then we put the sperm head on it and then we simulate and it moves just like a sperm starting from atomic level with tensegrity at every size scale. For those of you who want to see this search Ingram and sperm, you will find it was written up in Forbes magazine and all these things because we did a parody of a Star Wars trailer using that software as well that is really a lot of fun. But yeah, it has been used at different levels. Rob Wood has used tensegrity for lightweight robots. Radhika has used it for robots. People are making artificial materials that have the right physical properties for tissue engineering using tensegrity. So it is being used at different levels. Hello, I have a question about synthetic biology as we move more into engineering cellular systems I can't help but to think about great literature by Michael Pryton Jurassic Park where he says the scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could do it, they didn't stop to think whether they should. Now I see the obvious benefits of using bio leafs as well as medical translational opportunities with synthetic biology. I'm just wondering the lessons of hubris is that it's easy to see the benefit it's harder to see what's bad. So if you have any thoughts on what are the negative impacts possible things that could happen with synthetic biology? Well, that's the question that we get asked all the time. And I would like to offer that first of all with our inception of synthetic biology which was now about over 15 years ago where we worked together with a group of bio engineers, computer sciences, myself. But from the beginning brought in ethicists and we're very, and that has actually become almost a discipline within universities now and so we're thinking really hard about that as we go. Predating that to be honest, there were in the early days of recombinant DNA the Asilomar meetings addressed the potential dangers of engineering biology and they got it right in a lot of cases. What they didn't address, and that's what we think about now going forward is the deliberate misuse of biology and so we also think a lot about that. Your point about you can't always anticipate this is the issue about risk. It's always about risk and people who think about vaccines. It's all about where do you draw that line around risk? If I get 99% benefit and 1% risk, how do you feel about that? So the answer to your question is long. There's a lot of things written about this. I'm actually on the National Biosecurity Council. There's endless, we work in projects around biosecurity to detect things in the environment. So there's a lot of thought about this but that isn't necessarily that there won't be problems but then you have to start weighing the benefits. So I wanna give you one example and you can, a thought experiment. So, and this has to do with medicine. So let's say you suffer, many people suffer from ulcerative colitis or IBD and they are in chronic pain and there is no good cure. Let me tell you that for example, I could engineer a gut bacteria that would relieve you of your pain, okay? And then I like to ask the audience if I could do that and I convinced you that within this level of risk that it was quote safe, it wasn't gonna do anything bad to you, how many of you would use it? I love this. I ask this question in New York City all the time and almost everyone raises their hand. When I go to a red state, almost no one raises their hand. So risk is a, this is a highly politicized issue and I'd love to talk to you more about it later. So this is, I am liable and responsible legally for my institute as the head of it with 375 people who are wildly creative doing whatever they can think of. This goes through my mind quite a bit. If you've ever watched Black Mirror, there's an episode on Robobies out of control and the Robobie was developed at the Institute, it's in the exhibition. We actually have a full-time ethicist on site right now. I'm actually speaking to a group of ethicists coming through, we do our best. The thing is that with the current biology, there are people who can do this in their bathtubs. And so, and I've been involved with the US intelligence and security and what they really, what you really wanna know. You wanna be ahead knowing what's going on and being able to figure out how you can keep tabs of what's going on. And so George Church at the Beast came up with a thing called gene drives. This is something that can move through a population without having to reproduction and the usual type of passage from generation to generation and it could get rid of malaria. It can get rid of Lyme disease, but it's terrifying if it got out of control. These are tough ones. I mean, before we published that paper, we had ethicists, we wrote proposals of how this is about to come out, how this should be handled. But it really is a hard question. It is a really tough question. I wanna just offer one last thought on that and it's the reverse. That oftentimes we try to do good things with biology and nature ends up winning. And so what I just described to you about this wonderful bacteria that could cure your pain from ulcerative colitis, there have been many attempts to do that and they've all failed. So nature is a worthy foe, just saying. Just curious, how successful is the organ and the chip idea when you have like really complex tissues like the brain, for instance, or is that done and how is that? So first of all, I should say that this has now been commercialized and has been sold around the world and is being used by companies and academics. We've done a beautiful model of the blood-brain barrier that looks just like human level barrier to look at how drugs get across. But we're not gonna model consciousness, right? I mean, that's not gonna happen in these models. At least I don't think so. It may tell me. Yeah, but we have linked the blood-brain barrier to neuronal networks and we have, so you can do incredibly complex things. So we've modeled many different diseases. We're modeling like influenza infection. We're modeling patient-to-patient transmission of infection, chip-to-chip, and watch evolution of virus and resistance to therapies. It's amazing what you can model with these things. There was one right there. First, I had a question about, we could maybe talk about it in the context of the chip. When you're kind of exploring these completely, unexplored boundaries, how often are you starting with your discipline within the field of science versus your discipline within or looking at nature? And which one is kind of the beginning of the inspiration or do you kind of ping-pong back and forth? You wanna take it first? Okay, I mean, I think different faculty take it very differently. Like Joanna Eisenberg is consistently looking at nature. Like she looked at how certain organisms make almost synthetic optical fibers and then figured out how to do that or this plant that non-stick. I go for more of a problem first and then try to figure what's the best possible solution to it and try to bring any design materials, people from different fields together. So it's different depending on faculty. I would agree, for me personally, it has become what is the question, what is the problem? Also, I want the problem to be sufficiently important, relevant, and so for me, that's an inspiration. There are many scientists that say, I wanna understand how a fly wing develops and that's what fascinates them. For me, the driver is, as I said, thinking about big problems and then it does require, what can we draw from biology to solve that problem? But also this idea of integrating with lots of different kinds of people and scientists and for me, that's also what the vis has offers and is what makes being in a community where you can do that really exciting. So there's really a vast different, it can span a large space between people who might be working on very large problems versus someone who still is working on a very small problem but that information can be useful for solving part of the big problem as well. And one thing that it's hard to communicate is that most in science people are kind of siloed in, like we learn in school, right? You have art class, you have science class, you have math class, but I love a quote from Buckman's Defoe, which is, nature doesn't have separate departments of art, chemistry, biology, et cetera. So if you start from a problem and then you just bring everything to it, creativity from all different areas, that's what I love about the Triennial and what I see happening. These organ and chips are currently an exhibition at the Pompidou in France, at the Barbican, various different places and I see this around the world, this movement where designers and artists are beginning to try to think about how they can learn tools from science but also offer their own design approaches. So it's this merging of disciplines where really exciting new things happen. The whole molecular biology movement came from physicists being really upset when they saw the atom bomb drop and leaving physics and going into biology and that really birthed that whole field. I wanna just go back to art for one minute because we've actually worked with artists. I don't know, Daisy Ginsburg has. Yeah, she does. So she worked in our group for a while and one of my students and Daisy created smell art where they were growing, they would take bacteria from different parts of their body and grow cheeses and I believe this was on exhibit at the MoMA until the cheese blew up in our cold room and the lab smelled forever. But I also reminded, as I told you, one of the things we work on is engineering gut bacteria to be diagnostic of what's going on as it passes through your gut and it will then turn color when it comes out. And Daisy independently developed something she called e-chromi, like E. coli. You can go on the web and see it. It's plastic poops that are different colors in a box and it was an art, it was a piece of art. I've never seen that. Yeah, we have one more time for one more question. Two little questions. The first one is, with that chip in your pocket, do you develop a level of empathy for a little human cells sitting there or is it just like... There are no cells in my pocket. Basically you put the cells on when you wanna do the experiment so I have no empathy for the cells in this. But I have more than, I have appreciation. I mean, we are using these to discover therapies, to discover biomarkers for diagnostics. We are mimicking malnutrition in kids in Africa by putting different microbes from their gut in the chips. It's amazing. So, but we all of us have done cell culture in science for years where we put them in dishes. If these really keep working like they are doing, I appreciate that they're gonna save animal lives and I'm an animal lover and always have been. They're a little more human when they aggregate to be like a human in that image that you had. Well, they're not like a human. They're like a human tissue or organ, yes. Life and like the other question, I'm just thinking like more like teddy bears. Would you talk to your set of cells that are human-like? I've never talked to my chip. Oh my. Okay, the second one. Not that I would admit to. Okay. The other question was what's the microbiome of the VICE Institute? You see all these images lately of like plants being this giant globe and humans being this tiny dot. Is there some kind of cellularly, is it all human cells or plant cells? Do you mean what we use at the Institute? We do, people have worked on everything. It's like 50, 50 or? It's mostly mammalian cells, but there's a lot of work in viruses, in bacteria. There's work in protozoans, there's work in... I mean, the microbiome is one of the exciting areas in biology and that in my lifetime in medicine, I went to med school as well as a PhD. It's the biggest paradigm shift that nobody knew at all that microbiome is involved in health and disease the way it is. There's an increasing amount of study about that, but because most of medicine requires human work and a lot of it's been done in animals in the past, I think we're doing more and more human cells, but we do everything. Okay. Thank you, Don. Thank you, Pam, very much. Thank you, audience. Thank you.