 Onw eich bod yn fwy oeddiad, fel y clywed ar y gwaith, eich sefyllfa yn ei fod yn ddiddordeb yn ei ddiddordeb. Rwy'n ddiddordeb yn ddiddordeb. Rwy'n ddiddordeb, eich ddiddordeb yn ddiddordeb. Rwy'n ddiddordeb yn ddiddordeb yn ei ddiddordeb a'n rhaid i chi bobl ydym ni, ac oedd iawn i'r digon yw eu tawch a'n fyddo i'r gwneud. ond mae'r cyfnod yw'r cyfnod, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r gweithio gyda'r ysgol, ac yw'r cyfnod. Felly yw'r gweithio'r gweithio ar y cysylltu o'r ddwylliant, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r ysgol, yw'r cyfnod o'r ddwylliant, a'r cyfnod o'r rhaid. Yn amlwg yma, Mark Miodownik, mae'r cyfnoddau cyfnoddau. Yn amlwg yma yw'r cyfnod o'r ddwylliant, a'r cyfnodd awr oderio'n cyfeirio'n gyfnod o'r cyfnodd. Yn amlwg yma, mae'n gweithio'r cyfnodd a'r cyfnodd ar beth sy'n cael rhaid i'w ddwylliant. Felly mae'n ffordd graddog ar gyfer y cyfnodd yw'r cyffredin sy'n gweithio'r cyfnodd. Fe gaf eu brydiau, y bwyddon o'r cyfnodd, y mor bobysiau, gynnwys ymhyf sydd wedi'i broses bwydden nhw, in the next century or so and I'm really wondering what everyone else thinks about these kind of topics and what our speakers think about these and I kind of just want to kick off by saying a few things one of which is that this is bio so we heard wonderfully about all these different bio systems today from our speakers, starfish cells, geckos, beetles, plants, bacteria and I think like you you know we all marveled at them so that there's the bio we had today and we had the inspiration, the sheer beauty in some senses right which is nothing to be ashamed of I mean it's part of I think I'm probably sure that a lot of us are doing this because that we're attracted by the sheer beauty of nature but it has to be more than that and I suppose the other inspiration which we've heard about today is things like a creative spark an idea that's just that's it it's just the idea and off you go in a different direction doesn't have to be a replica of the biological system and we saw Ray just throwing out you know here's a biological system I'm fascinated by someone so hopefully someone will get inspired by that and I think that is the purpose of these meetings and I think that's the purpose of science in general so all those things are great and also I think there's a cultural significance as Neil alluded to earlier that you know things like photosynthesis all of these things we are biological organisms of ourselves we live on our planet I think it's important just as it's important to study history and literature and music it's important to study the natural world just for its own sake as we are it but then the title of this meeting is new technologies by inspired new technologies so we have a duty to look ahead look at what's going to be inspired by them and I really would like to provoke my fellow panellist to have a go at that however kind of speculative you think it is because that's it's this is the time you're experts in your field we've got a global audience it'd be great to hear your thoughts about that but I'll just throw out a few things one of which is you know we have some big problems we have a big problem about global warming I feel like you know if we're going to have a society dedicated to science and by inspiration we really need to be thinking about how that's going to be do something about that we also have a problem with waste and this may be not matter to some people because essentially we've got lots of big holes in the ground which we currently put all of our waste and there is plenty more holes in the ground that we could put it into and it's probably not an immediate problem but I just feel like it really it's terrible for the scientific and engineering community that we've created all these wonderful technologies and then they end up floating in the Pacific Ocean and the people who see that and the organisms that get affected by that you know it just tells you that we haven't really thought it through that we're not as good as we think we are and I feel like that is a terrible advert for our community and we really really need to do something about it so it may not be an economic imperative and it may not be a social imperative I think it's a cultural imperative to get to do something about plastic waste in the oceans anyway there's a couple of ideas I wonder if I can hand over what we're going to do is give each one of our panellists five minutes to have a kind of bit of a rant perhaps or a discuss and then we'll bring it together and we'll open up to the audience for further questions so we've got Patricia Basaru from CNRS we've got Mark Kokoski from Stanmaw and we've got George Whitesides from Harvard you've heard them all before but here's five more minutes shall I hand over to you Mark first? Sure and actually there's one or two slides on the laptop there just to illustrate the points I want to talk about so I want to go back to the opening comment that sort of kicked off today's events which is that biological structures and processes have been refined over millions of years and so why should we not take advantage of what nature has discovered in our own technology? Well yes exactly and in fact the more we learn the more inspired we become and I must say already very much inspired by many of the talks I've heard today I have all kinds of ideas but I'm also very daunted because everything is just extremely complex and in particular I look at some of the processes and structures that were talked about by Yrw Deng by Patricia Basaru and by others they're actually much more complicated than the adhesive structure of the gecko and that's already too complicated for me to fabricate correctly so I have to make crude approximations so I'm also very much in the market for new techniques, new technologies and the slide up here behind me is we learned that some people that we've collaborated with had received one of the new two-photon stereolithography machines, nanoscribe and we became very excited because the resolution of that machine at least in theory is down to around 350 nanometers and so we made up a CAD model of what we thought look you know if we could only make it this is what we really would like to make we kind of know what shape we want, if it would look like this and if you go to the next slide you'll see what happened it actually clicks through a couple of times well let's see what do I want, page down? aha, allright, well there was our first approach we took our CAD file, we had the software decomposed into slices and there was result remember this is what we were trying to make this is what we got and we realized that there were all kinds of problems basically when you're trying to push the limits of a machine you can't just let it decompose your computer aided design files you have to take it in hand and drive the laser yourself started to get a bit better but it was taking an entire day just to make this little array and they still don't look quite right and then we realized that you know what we really only need the laser we don't need to solidify the whole structure we only need to solidify the outer shell sort of the exoskeleton of this structure to solidify it and then we can put the whole thing in batch irradiated under UV light and it started to get a little better and indeed the geometry is looking actually quite promising now but there's still a problem which is to make a little batch of 10 by 10 of the, not even I think maybe 8 by 8 of these things is taking hours more or less an entire day and of course I don't need a fraction of a square millimeter I need hundreds of thousands, I want square centimeters so that's the thing, that's the question I want to leave with the question to everybody which is that we need processes that if you think about what's going on in nature we have things growing and differentiating cell by cell in parallel and making these wonderfully complex and sophisticated structures and if you think about what's going on with the gecko that's just beta, the adhesive structure is not living tissue, it's just beta keratin like a fingernail or like hair so what's happening is that cells on the gecko's toes are excreting or secreting as material and it's starting to clump together and clump together until you form a sedal strock and it's doing this every month because they molt and that's what I want I want a process where I can start to program some of these wonderful geometries that I'm hearing about with a range of length scales let's say from 10 nanometers up to 10 centimeters without incurring enormous cost and having to go to a completely new set of machinery each time I try to add another level of complexity thank you I feel like it needed that Patricia so I'm not going to do anything propose anything to clean the ocean but unfortunately I would say that after this day I realized that we didn't get much about synthetic biology I mean the way it's normally or at least classically understood and I think that for many cases so far synthetic biology is basically a smart way to do nice chemistry so to produce for instance drugs by using bacteria I would do your job for you and make kind of let's say precursor for drugs for instance or producing all your stuff like that so I think we didn't hear much about that but I think it's the way that synthetic biology is done so far but I think nail was somehow showing that at least some can be done by playing with retinal molecules but I would say that going back to what I was talking this morning about I was trying to explain to you that it's possible to build up systems and the system based on membrane and machineries which can produce something so I think that is something which is also one of the possibility for synthetic biology in the future so I don't know what will be done eventually but I think that in many cases I mean for instance I think an interesting example some time ago people were building up DNA origami for instance and when I saw these people being up DNA origami I was wondering what can we do with that and it was maybe 10 years ago and I thought it was kind of an interesting game but I didn't see the purpose and I think that right now we see many more applications of DNA origami and it was difficult to predict before so my point would be that now even though the system based on membrane and machinery encapsulated in vesicles is still very basic I think it's difficult to predict right now which will be done in 10 years I mean we don't know what we can do with that and I think that just by trying to by copying and being inspired by cells for instance maybe we can just build something that we have no idea about before I think and so based on that I mean also I wanted also to maybe to share some ideas with you about some question which I think are interesting and also can maybe bring to new system and I think maybe I can use my slide yes exactly so I think that what I was showing to use this morning that at least you need to have in cell in many cases you need co-operativity between proteins to produce some action so for instance I was talking about producing a vesicle so you need a sequential action of proteins to produce a vesicle same for motility so you need a sequential action of different protein and they have to work co-operatively for that and I would say that one of the important questions I think right now that we should address is probably how you can manage to get the time and space localisation of the protein so basically how in a cell you can have the right protein at the right time and doing his right job and if you talk to biologist and we tell you it's normal to get the ligand there at the right time but I think it's not it's a chicken and egg problem so I think that it might be very possible to use this in vitro system in vivo system to evaluate what is a relative contribution of biochemistry in one hand on the other hand what is a relative contribution of physical parameter like membrane shape membrane tension, viscosity and also the role of cell shape and size so I was telling you this morning that Petrashfield is trying to do this to reconstitute the decision machinery and for that he has to adjust also the size and the shape of the cavity so I think this kind of question is interesting and on top of that I think if we can do that using both in vivo and in vitro we can also find out about feedback mechanism and I'm pretty sure there is also interesting system about that how the shape feedbacks about recruitment of protein and so on and I think on top of that if you had a set of skeleton and so on you end up with a very rich very rich very rich problem something also about this problem of time and space is a signaling and I think that signaling in cells or at least in system biology is often seen as a sequence of reaction and I think the special aspect is also often missing and I think it will be also interesting using some in vitro system maybe to understand better that so I think ok so what I'm trying to do now is trying to use a very simple what I find a kind of simple system to address this question both within vitro and vivo and is to constitute this kind of structure you can see here which is called philopodia that you can see at the level at the edge of cell which is used by cells for sensing the environment and as you can see on the left sketch you can see this is a combination of different type of proteins actin and membrane and now to understand how this process is basically nucleated, initiated at the membrane level and how the proteins are sequentially recruited depending on the shape and the feedback between shape and recruitment and so on and how you can build up this system which is complex but not as complex as a full cell I think it can give us already some idea about how space and time can just play a role so this is a sum that I propose to you So let me start by disagreeing with our Chairman and agreeing with our Chairman I agree absolutely with big problems like CO2 and energy and water but on the other hand think of urban garbage dumps as just ways in which our society is storing valuable rear metals and things like that for a slightly later time and make the same case about nuclear waste disposal dumps so you know one man's trash is another man's will of livelihood What's really struck me about today is that if you look at the range of problems that can be mimicked or understood in biology we've just, just, just barely scratched the surface we've had a fascinating series of talks but they've talked about a very small fraction of the things that one could in principle find in biological systems and that's very encouraging because it says that it's all there but there are two other things that I think are encouraging one is that if you think about biology it's intrinsically in the words of our friends in physics a low energy phenomenon and this does not require the large Hadron glider or cryoscopic temperatures or anything of that sort at least with current life as we know it and what that means is that a lot of the questions the really most profound questions in this area can be addressed without complicated stuff and one of the, one of the I think mandates of this meeting was to think about the question of whether this was an area in which developing world science might have something to contribute and I would argue that this almost uniquely is an area in which there is the potential for smart people and you have to be smart clever experimentalists to do something anywhere in the world in competition with what's being done in Europe and the United States in fact maybe ahead for the reason that we get all tangled up in expensive instrumentation but let's just think for a moment about what we haven't talked about that's interesting one subject is information the way that information is handled in biology is really I think quite different from the way that information is handled in most of our world we tend to think about information from the point of view of Mr Shannon and if you think about Mr Shannon he came to that by being asked the question of how do you pump bits down in aluminum wire to get the most error free message transmission he was working for the telephone system on a very practical problem so we now have a statistical mechanics of information that actually is perhaps completely inappropriate for biology and the wonderful wonderful thing about biology is that it is essentially completely concerned with function so that if one is looking for new functions and new solutions to new functions one plausibly looks to biology and it's hard to find anything that's more permeating in our society than information so where are we going to get new ideas about information and I think one way is going to be from biology and in particular one area of great interest which I'll come to in a moment is the stability of networks so information is one thing a second is energy in the words of our chairman and I remind everyone of something that I think you all know which is the largest methods the largest batteries and the most widespread method of storing energy on the planet is as a concentration gradient across a 2 nanometer thick wall otherwise known as the cell wall and these concentration gradients are sodium potassium or protons and that storage is what drives ATP synthesis which drives cell and it's interesting that we all know about it and after decades of trying no one can really come up with anything synthetically that even vaguely resembles it so it's a completely misunderstood process no, not misunderstood it's understood in a certain sense but not in another but it leads to another very interesting subject which is large molecular machines and of course the molecular machine that converts the sodium potassium gradient into ATP is one of the most amazingly complicated things that you can find as is the ribosome, as is many other things how do we think about these machines is it all there for a purpose or is it just baggage that's hung on from some other part of things I don't think we have any real motion why are these the size and complexity they are and how do they get together fascinating, fascinating, deep to me question and then a question that I ask my students to their vast annoyance it's one of many things I do to their vast annoyance think about two systems that are dissipative and out of equilibrium one is the cell which we've been talking about today the second is a candle flame and they do the same thing they both burn a reduced hydrocarbon fuel with oxygen and make CO2 in water but in the case of a candle flame basically it makes some light and mostly heat in the case of a cell it makes everything we know how are they different and one of the ways in which they are different is that there is a capture and reuse of free energy in a cell which is unimaginably more complex than there is in flame but both of them are complex kinetic networks and these are enough examples I could go on at some considerable length but I just want to close with one last thought and this is again both for us and for the rest of the world in a sense and that is that one of the questions that one can ask about new areas is there something fundamentally new here and I periodically talk with my friends who are physicists I have friends who are physicists and they say shorting our equation we've got it the pathway from H2 or proton plus an electron to Beethoven is completely deterministic we just need to know a few of the details along the way and this touches on the word emergent which we brought up somewhere along the way because in principle that remark may or may not be correct but in practice it's certainly not correct so what is there in biology that we need to think about that's fundamentally new and I would argue that nowhere in science at this point do we have any idea about how to handle large dissipative interlocked networks of anything and in the sense that the world was revolutionized by quantum mechanics and understanding at least empirically how things that were very small are very different than things that are mesoscale I would argue that the ability to begin to even think about understanding the cell leads us into understanding climate leads us into understanding mega cities what do you do with 50 million people in one place what do you do with all of these constructs that have the characteristic that we can admire them from afar but we actually can't manipulate them very well right now so I think in looking at the cell we see something that we don't see with many small systems which is classical chemistry and physics but being played out in a new arena which is one in which there are many parts dynamic out of equilibrium not understood so I actually think this is a marvelous area both for the potential for science for new function for the solution of problems and to integrate in some way science globally and I applaud our sponsors at the Royal Society who picked this out of what I'm sure was a flood of very interesting possible prospects but I think this was an exceptionally good choice and the first step in a thousand miles thank you so I guess there's probably a lot of questions we haven't got too much time so I'm going to forego the pleasure of just coming back to you on some of the things I thought and let the audience really speak because I feel like you need to have a chance to talk about some of these things that our panellists have brought up are there questions from the audience that are immediate? that's one over there on the multi-scale structure can you think of a way to let them assemble themselves and build from the bottom up I don't want to use that but I think we've got an expert of self assembly in this battle that may have something to say about that I mean yes of course that's the sort of thing I'm thinking of and there is work on self assembling structures I'm not able to assemble anything terribly complicated or useful from my perspective yet but that's not to discount it as potentially an important future direction question there this is sort of a general question from the things that have been said today I was thinking particularly about the cockroach example cockroaches can feed on sewage and so they're basically able to recycle sewage into these amazing structures that you described earlier the legs with 230 muscles and so on is it possible that perhaps one day we might be able to create machines that we find useful that can do the same thing that can consume sewage and create them related to the question that's just come up and these amazing structures to for our use if you like I think it's an interesting thought I mean of course we already have sewage treatment plants and we already have all kinds of work on biological remediation of groundwater pollution and so on apart from methane or maybe the ability to concentrate rare metals or something like that terribly sophisticated is coming out of those processes yet let me hand it over to some of the other panelists and see how they'd like to enlarge on it I would only point out that we are the product of sewage production and so the part of digestion which really works is what we call sewage it's the microbiome so there's a lot there that obviously can be done You guys all work in this area you're not just in awe of biology's ability to use all of it stuff again and again and again I mean isn't that just inspirational of the most and the fact that we are so far away from that despite George's comment earlier about these being presents for huge generation we've left them lots of presents haven't we nuclear reactors that have got nucleotides that are going to last for 100,000 years they're going to love that maybe they will find a good use for it but haven't we been a bit proflicate as a generation and have been leaving them lots of problems that are sought out I want to respond to one thing as you brought the point up that occurred to me is that whenever I try to think about what we might do at a national level I get very depressed and when I think at a local level I feel much more optimistic San Francisco has declared that it will become a carbon neutral city and it's pretty close to being there it's also decided it will be a zero waste stream city it's not so close to that but it's much closer than it used to be and things like urban mining are practiced today and the idea of 100% reuse of whatever is on that parcel of land and I'm just making the observation that it seems that I'm seeing more progress at a local level than I am at some larger scale nothing more to add there's another question there I wanted to say is it possible that you mentioned the idea of perhaps one day there might be soft robots walking down London streets like Starfish but bigger trucks is it possible that those soft robots might be the very things which we need to clean up our seas one day Yes they certainly float the issue with cleaning up junk in the sea is a very intriguing one there is one thing to remember about organic matter that is it doesn't last for very long so I do think that these gyres in the South Pacific they're certainly unsightly and they're certainly not a good idea on the other hand, unlike rare isotopes which are with us for several hundred thousand years they're with us for maybe a hundred years and so every time you have a large leak from the sea floor from an undersea oil bed you probably produce more organic junk I'm not denigrating the importance of these but I think they're a hundred year problem not a hundred thousand year problem There's another question there again Very general question How should we go about actually developing new science should we be driven by motivation or should we be driven by curiosity so touching upon the DNA origami so it was first developed not with any motivation per se but more out of curiosity What's the way to go? Good question Over to you three It's a big question for a long time I would say that usually it's good to probably to do both my impression is there are things we cannot just imagine from the beginning I mean you have to do science without very unapplied goals from the beginning you have to continue to do that but we were talking about many problems we have to do with ecology and so on you have problems to solve so of course you have to use a technology or imagine new technology based on your expertise to try to solve the problem so I think you have to do both at the same time I mean there is no good solution for that I think but I'm pretty sure that doing things by curiosity or at least for understanding problems is always bringing new technology Is there the right ratio now? Is there too much curiosity and not enough applied or what would you say? You've got a certain amount of money to spend Exactly I think that probably by making too much apply from the beginning you cannot do everything and the money is limited so of course you somehow cut on the curiosity and if you do only curiosity also you have some urgent problem to solve so I think that the balance is usually not what politics thinks I mean personally I'm always amazed with the global warming problem as scientists and engineers we understand how big this problem is we can see it coming and we're not all downing tools on our curiosity driven research and just getting on with you and are we why aren't we? I mean this was a war and it did happen in the war people just stopped making whatever they were making and they went on to do things that were for the war it's not happening with global warming for the science community, why not? Too much I think there is too many too much financial interest not to take it seriously so far so it's a very short term view but it's a I mean I don't know a war is immediate so you see it and you die if you don't do anything so I think that so far in the history I have the impression that nothing has been done with a long term vision and this is the same for nuclear waste and so on I mean we know and we still don't do anything but I don't know you can probably react to that maybe Denise has some idea about it but I think that in the history not much has been done on a very careful plan even though if you know catastrophe is coming which we did but no that's not tomorrow it's an interesting point about this and the world is not quite as bleak as perhaps one makes it out to be to me one of the most surprising things that's happened in technology in the last period of time has been the enormously rapid growth of solar silicon primarily because of the utilization of capital in China and if you'd asked me ten years ago if I thought that renewables would be a big deal I would have said sure but not in my lifetime if you look now silicon is probably you know it's headed toward maybe 15% and with 15% from wind at least in some parts of the world you're up to 30 that's truly remarkable the United States has peaked in its hydrocarbon consumption that is we'll go down from here for variety of reasons so there's actually been on global scale things some pretty remarkable things have happened but and you say this is the result of innovation yes maybe but innovation comes in different forms there's innovation in science and technology which is what we tend to think about there's innovation in process and then there's information in business models and most of what's happened with solar because it's a global problem has had to have been an innovation in global in a business model and it may or may not make sense from the long term financial perspective you know it's not completely bleak we have made progress and given the fact that I think people have only begun to wake up to this problem in the last 15 years maybe 20 years it's not rapid enough but it's rapid are there any final questions is there any from our world audience questions or are they all in despair having a fear there's a question there yeah I just wondered if the panel could comment on current technologies we have quite perfect structures and systems like silicon based structures and nature tends to cope with irregularity defects fuzziness and I think is that something we need to come to terms with it's an essential part of Darwinian you have to have replication be error prone otherwise you don't spin off a variety of variants which allow the circumstances to determine which is the fittest so we don't know how to use that Florian's work is an effort to try to harness the power of that but we're still I think figuring out how to do it is there that's it I think we've run out of time thank you very much I think it's just down to me really to say thank you very much again to all our brilliant speakers who have done a fantastic job today thank you to the Royal Society for hosting this and thank you Dennis and your team well just to round the meeting up on behalf of the organisers first huge thanks to the staff here at the Royal Society to Stefan and his team for organising the first ever meeting of this kind worldwide so thank you all for the efforts you've put into organising this let's hope it's the beginning of the Royal Society really reaching out in this kind of way to people around the world the second thing I want to say is that I'm going to go briefly back to the reason for this meeting which is of course the first publication of a refereed journal of science in the world 350 years ago and it was a very interesting submission to the first editor of philosophical transactions I referred in the morning session to the architect of the bottom up approach which was Descartes and his treatise on the fetus saying effectively it's all in the sperm notice not the egg but that was the misogyny of that of course he was absorbing that from his contemporaries and that you could as it were mathematically reconstruct the whole organism from that. His arch rival the top down integrationist was Benedict de Spinoza who sent a submission to the Royal Society in 1665 and it began it was a letter to Henry Eldenburg the first editor and indeed the first secretary of the Royal Society and it began Concipiamosiamsi placket it was all in latin of course imagine if you will a little worm inside the blood this little worm would be able to understand the motions of its surrounding particles and how they develop but this little worm would not understand how those motions are constrained by the whole this of course is the top down view and we need both of course philosophical transactions never published Benedict de Spinoza's letter in his lifetime but if you look at the cover of the journal which is publishing this sequence and its first issue of interface focus you will find Benedict de Spinoza's Latin letter which is kept here in the archives on the first issue of interface focus and so that brings us finally to tell the world that that's where the articles are all going to appear in fact they're already online and you'll be able to enjoy the complete set very soon in a published form so and it remains for me to say once again thanks to the stellar group of speakers to some extraordinary questions from around the world and in the audience here in London and to the world to Bangalore to Sao Paolo and all the others who've been listening and watching online thank you all