 I've ever thought about an escalator. If it's just me standing on it, it moves at this speed. But if all of you in this room join me on it, it will move at the exact same speed. So what's behind this? It's not overpowered machinery, but rather the application of feedback control to the design of the escalator so that it can maintain a constant speed. And it's feedback control that stands behind so many manmade automated systems. For example, self-driving trains and cars, fly by wire planes or automated manufacturing. The point is that the economic benefit of applying feedback control to engineering is really big. But I'm not here to talk about manmade systems. I'm here to talk about biology and how the same ideas can be applied to the design and control of living cells. The problem is that living cells are difficult to control. They are unreliable, unpredictable. They fight back, they evolve, they don't really like to be controlled. And this is the problem that I'm trying to solve in my lab at Imperial College London. I started my career as an electronic engineer. Then I spent some time as an applied mathematician. Recently, I turned my attention to one of the biggest engineering challenges of our time, biology. Why do you even start to think about controlling biological systems? Well, as we have heard today, cells can be programmed to sense their own state or their environment and to report back on what they sense. Cells can also be programmed to produce molecules of interest to us and release those in their surrounding environment. So what we want to do is to connect the sensing and the production to create a mechanism for feedback that the cells can use to sense their environment. And in response to what they sense, automatically produce what we want at the right times than in the right quantities. With this type of technology, we can start to develop some really exciting new applications. This is a pill like you've never seen before. It does not contain drugs. It contains engineered living cells, millions of them. These cells produce drugs on demand at the times and doses that our body needs. NASA really wants this for their astronauts. Based on the same principle, we are starting to engineer cells that can use feedback to sense and automatically respond to a whole range of signals, from sugar to cholesterol levels to treat diabetes and cardiovascular diseases to vitamins and nutrients to ensure healthy development and improve body functions. But there are many challenges lying ahead of us. One of the challenges that we are currently working on in my lab is to make sure that engineered cells equipped with our feedbacks behave reliably and predictably. And predictability in engineering means mathematics. The challenge is that, as of today, we still don't know if we have the right mathematics to describe biology, let alone to design it. Another challenge that we are working on is to make it as easy to design and build in biology as it is to do in electronics. I'm part of the largest international consortium for standardization in synthetic biology. Our objective is to create the standards and tools for computer-aided design, simulation, and automated assembly of engineered cells. Now, if we could solve both of these challenges, we would have the tools to program and control cells from our laptops. These cells would be more reliable. They would have guaranteed performance. And they could even integrate safety and anti-piracy control features. The consequences of this are huge. We will start to see a convergence between biology and technology in such a way that we can't really tell the differences between the two. But more importantly, we might generate a new source of economic prosperity, just as we have seen by applying feedback control to engineering. Let me put this back into context. In the past 50 years, we have seen that the application of feedback control to engineering has created a whole range of new industries. For the next 50 years, there is every reason to believe that the same will happen with biology. This new bioeconomy could contribute to a significant increase in the gross world product. But controlling biology needs to be done carefully and responsibly. By putting in place the tools that allow us to control living cells, we are creating for ourselves unprecedented power over biology and life itself. This might result into entirely new synthetic life forms that work a tightrope between socioeconomic benefit and controversy. So I would like to leave you with one last question. Faced with the prospect of programming and controlling life, who controls this technology? Thank you.