 Hey, well, thank you everyone. My name is David Kong. I am the last speaker between you and lunch So this is a tough spot to be in but I will move as quickly as I can I'm going to talk fast not as fast as Pat That was like one of the fastest talks I've ever seen in my life, but I will I will try to Be fast but not too fast as my computer as we have a biodigital interface here between my computer and the screen I just want to again congratulate all the organizers of patty the food interfaces group and particularly Pat For really having the vision to pull together this this wonderful community again I think one of the strengths of the Media Lab is our ability to work across different disciplines And I'm curious even here in this room. How many of you consider yourselves to be a synthetic biologists are identified synthetic biologists Fewer than I thought okay. How about designers? Lots of designers artists Okay, and how about a human computer interaction folks? Lots of HCI people very cool So I mean already I think this is this in a way is history being together folks from really disparate communities like that into one Room for us to hopefully really formulate and think about what this new field could be So it's such an honor to be here with you all This is just a photograph of some of the wonderful students and research that I get to work with some of you are in the Room today, so thank you all for being here. I really love this prompt of cultivate I'll talk a little bit about cultivation in the concept of both tools interfaces and communities the next generation of innovators that will hopefully Launch this whole field so quickly about tools We heard earlier from Rachel about a project like Moushtari, which has a wearables for microbial systems A project that I led a prior to prior to coming to the Media Lab at MIT Lincoln lab was on 3d printed artificial guts Right, so how could you elaborate leverage advanced digital fabrication tools and build sophisticated multi-material systems? That could capitulate some of the features that we find in real guts They could have a polymeric components that could squeeze and enable peristalsis And then you could also have different types of gradients built into the structure as well You can imagine now folding in technology is like what Deepak was describing with organoids where you could have a system That was built using digital fabrication that's integrating different types of biological materials Again one of my technical areas of expertise in microfluidics or lab on a chip based systems So we've done a variety of work as well trying to recapitulate and study how you could create these different physiological and biological Gradients that you find in nature, but doing it in ships again to try to Develop some in-vitro models for for animal testing for example One of the projects that we're working on in the group right now is something called zappor So Baranis is here in the back. I think Teja is not here But Teja is really the the innovator and the visionary behind this tool. This is a $10 DNA electroporitor Okay, so electroporation I think for those of you that may not know is a foundational tool in a way We can get DNA into a cell if you want to reprogram an organism you have to get that DNA And there's somehow an electroporation is one of the ways to do it Teja was really brilliant in thinking about different types of high voltage sources that are available around the world One of them is a flyswatter less than $10 available almost everywhere on the planet He figured out how to hack the flyswatter and turn it into a functioning DNA electroporator And it's been figuring out how to workshop this tool and get it into the hands of different communities all around the world We're also working right now on some very high throughput microbiome technologies using droplet microfluidics as a way to sample Isolate different types of microbial communities and then systematically study how those strains can interact We've seen some of the examples already today If you want to have a community of organisms that could live in your gut and perform some type of sensing and actuation and function You have to be able to study and characterize these strands somehow So we're working on different co-culture technologies to do that Again a big part of our initiative is all about sharing How do we ultimately take all of this knowledge and wisdom that we have out there and put it out to many diverse communities around the world I'm in collaboration with Lincoln laboratory and also Ron Weiss's group. We developed a platform called Metafluidics, which is a large-scale repository where you can find all of these design files to build artificial teeth and Biofilms and all kinds of crazy systems. So you can go check out Metafluidics to look there I'll shift now and talk a little bit about how to cultivate communities again I'm a community organizer in addition to being a technical synthetic biologist So I do with social justice work and community organizing One framework that I think is really cool and interesting and very media lab is this idea of innovation at the edge What happens when the cost of innovation goes down and so now more and more actors can involve in a field We see this all the time in information technologies and computation But what's gonna happen with the life sciences, right? And so connected to that idea is why is diversity important? Why is it important to get people from different technical and creative disciplines working in a field? Before synthetic biology and we had biology as a life science and the founders of synthetic biology included folks like this This is Jurendi a dear friend and a mentor a long time MIT guy as well Kit was talking earlier about Tom Knight who's shown here in the front and both Tom and Drew were engineers Right Tom was a computer scientist drew as a civil engineer and both of them asked themselves Why can't I engineer a cell the same way I can engineer a computer or build a circuit or the built environment? And so this whole field in a way was born by non biologists a bunch of non biologists came in and said Why can't we engineer things just like we do in other disciplines? And so now I think synthetic biology has been a incredibly successful experiment There's now multi-billion dollar industry around it But now I think what's happening in this room is a prime example of that We're seeing this influx of other creatives into this field which I think is so critically important a number of years ago Now I taught a class on micro fluidics and synthetic biology just as an anecdote There were two students in this class I'll highlight will Patrick and Julie go some of you may know them they were former immediate media lab students Both will and Julie were designers They'd never been in a wet lab before never pet picked up a pipeter before taking this class And now just a short few these years later Both of them are CEOs of their own biotech companies very successful biotech companies So Julie has founded a company called Amino many of you may know it It's a desktop biology lab that does microbial salt culture for education and learning purposes Will Patrick leads one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley like people are he's like don't give me more money I have too much money people are trying to throw so much money at him But culture biosciences incredibly successful and I think will skills as a designer have really helped bring a new level of innovation Into engineering fermentation systems, which has been something the field is really needed So synthetic biology and exploration of how Engineering can be mapped to biological systems Something that happened around ten years after the founding of synthetic biology was a something called do-it-yourself biology, right? So a bunch of people said why does synthetic biology have to be just for the fancy academics or the industrialists or the people in government labs? Why can't everyday people start getting involved in synthetic biology? A field that I have been trying to push and crystallize and frame might be something called community bio It might be something about not just individual actors or individual Laboratories, but networks of labs communities that are actually working together in concert When I joined the media lab in 2017 the first thing we did was he organized the global community biosummit in a way You can think about these community laboratories. They're like maker spaces or Computer club houses or fab labs except for the life sciences this first event that we had in 2017 was like a family reunion with the family You didn't know you had folks from all around the world that really cared about bio coming from totally different cultures geographic Regions and really had a really incredible meeting right here on the sixth floor We had folks like George Church, you know commenting on the historic nature of the 2017 meeting Since then we've had two more biosummits in 2018. We nearly doubled in size actually this photograph was taken right here in this room Which is pretty cool Pat. I think it's still a dinosaur in this photo as you can see in the front Then last year just this past fall we had biosummit 3.0 We could barely fit everybody into this room now more than 500 people were accepted to participate and again incredible global Representation one of the things about the biosummit. I think that is so so powerful We really have this be a really experiential event. We had more than a hundred seventy participant led talks breakout sessions and workshops This is a whole field. That's about co-creation. It's about participation Everybody getting involved in science and synthetic biology and so as we've been doing this work There's a whole key research and scholarship aspect to this So how do we ultimately structure these global communities, right? One thing that's for me has been a new field that I've been getting into but really excited about is this idea of collective intelligence What does this network look like? How do we ultimately create a system and a global community that can do synthetic biology and bio design and bio art in a more powerful way? Tom alone who's a close collaborator at the Center for collective intelligence at Sloan School has this framework that I really like A lot called super minds right you can imagine this room could be a super mind this whole field of wearable Biotechnology and global interfaces could be a super mind. So in the case of commutinie bio, how do we ultimately activate this super mind? So what brings the global community together? It's not a hierarchy. There's no CEO There's no dictator you have to have some way to bring communities together And so there are a couple things that we think are really important having a certain sense of values a shared vision a shared sense of ethics all really important I really appreciated the the talk earlier from the design lab talking about values and how that connects with design So one thing we did at the second bio summit We actually did a large-scale exercise where we measured the values of our global community So you can see a few of them here self actualization pioneers in progress But these were the measured values that we found from our global community We also had a really powerful co-creation exercise where we designed a statement of shared purpose Why are we all here together? I actually think that might be a really valuable exercise for this group to even think about Why are we here together? What is our shared purpose, right? So this is something that we did in collaboration with Harvard Kennedy School and Marshall Ganz was a legendary community organizer I'm gonna read to you the statement of shared purpose. I think it's really cool I hope you like it too it goes our shared purpose is to Fundamentally transform the life sciences and democratize biotechnology to inspire creativity and improve lives by organizing life science Changemakers and bio enthusiasts to build an inclusive global network Cultivate and accessible commons of knowledge and resources launch community labs and projects and enable local educators What do you guys think of that statement? Yes, I Loved it too something. I was really proud of when we released that and again It's co-created so people could see oh we contributed that word we contributed that phrase In order to scale this thing It's a big global movement one thing that we launched last year was a global community bio fellowship program We identified 36 leaders from all around the world with a strong emphasis in Africa and Latin America We had them go through a leadership development program They all came to the biosummit right here last in October and they had a whole bunch of awesome projects I don't have time to talk about them, but just trust me when I say they're awesome So I'll skip through these but they're really really powerful projects that I really appreciated The other thing we did last year. We did a co-design of a community ethics document. What are our norms? What do we want to think about when we design these technologies in contrast to computers, right living systems? They replicate right it's a it's you know, if you release it under the wild there are serious consequences around this So we did a whole co-design of a co-created ethics document, which I think was really wonderful as well So we had 11 ethical principles that we identified and and again you can look at this on the biosummit website In closing I'm wrapping up now Education and knowledge getting this this know-how out to the world very important There's a course that I teach called how to grow almost anything with George Church Joe Jacobson and others It's a biotech class across scales We've taught it as an MIT class Pat was one of our students last year I think there are few students in the class here right now from bio design to protein design and so on So we've taught this as an MIT course But also critically we've taught it in a global context to the network of fab labs and also community bio labs that are out there So that's been a really powerful thing I gem many of you may be aware of the international genetically engineered machines competition also a really valuable educational institution I've been involved with I gem since the start back when it was founded here at MIT My most important role probably is that I'm the official I gem DJ So my favorite thing to do is to a rock parties for nerds if you have a nerd function, please let me know I'll DJ it for you I'm also the official media lab DJ. I've been DJing parties here 99 Fridays for about eight years So so let me know if you have a nerd function. That's what I'm here for and finally my final project I'll talk about is on the interface side right so this project I think hopefully will will give a sense of what can happen when you bring together artists designers Technologists musicians, etc. So we asked this question. We're looking at the human microbiome an incredible area of scientific research But what is your microbiota sound like? What if we could create a new interface? I would allow you to look at the microbiome from a musical perspective So we create something called biota beats biota beats is a record my Microbial record player that translates data about the microbiome into sound and music so again I'm a DJ we like to scratch violent vinyl records. What if you could scratch biota records, right? Notice the the gloves and the good sterile technique So what we did was we built this system a whole bunch of hardware a bunch of imaging as well And we used a retrofit record player turned it into an incubator We had biota records that you could swab different body parts from inoculate them inside this this incubator The microbes get imaged we collect data from them over time and use algorithms to convert that data into music So here's an example of some of our biota records This is Annie view one of our students sampling her toe bacteria And then we image the microbes over time and then we get this cool data, and I'm gonna share some music just to wrap up so Okay, so here's some microbial music. So Maybe we can turn up the sound now. All right, so this is a feed bacteria No more needs to be said here the belly button The oral microbiome and when you put it all together it sounds like this It's my favorite part, this is the mountain foot Incredible cross-disciplinary team that's required to make a project like this happen. We thought to ourselves cool You've got vinyl records. What if you could sample the bacteria of like really cool artists and make beats out of their bacteria? So again, I'm a big hip-hop guy. These are photographs. I think this is q-tip quest love. So my favorite DJs. Anybody know this is? Yes, yes, so you might know him better from this we're getting old here. So this is DJ Jazzy Jeff I was at this event with speaking with Jazzy Jeff two years ago, and I set up a little DIY lab in the green room And I was like Jeff at this project biota beats we make music out of microbes can I sample some of your bacteria and Jeff looked at me and it's like, you know, this is the weirdest question anybody's ever asked me But yes, you can so so this is DJ Jazzy Jeff, you know sampling some of his oral microbiome So this is like the favorite picture. I've ever taken of all time. Look at how happy DJ Jazzy Jeff is He's inoculating some of his oral microbiome onto one of our biota records. It's also good branding You see the Media Lab logo like reflected in his sunglasses. Anyways, so So so Jeff it was a super great project We made beats out of his bacteria and then we made beats out of i-gem So we went to i-gem we sampled the microbes of about a hundred of students in a project called universe Anyways, so you get the idea. This looks like a like a coronavirus map, but it's not this is this is where we The different teams that we have sampled so there the the organisms from so each continent represented a different musical sound and a different body part and then you know, we created this really cool composition You can look it up on YouTube I won't play the whole thing because I'm out of time but we had hundreds of students participate this in this project Which again, I think is a really great example of an intersection between art design technology and so on so with that Just thank everybody for all of their time and again This this meeting again, I think what we're doing here. Hopefully is a historic moment for all of us as a community So I really hope that we can bring these these features together and do some really great brainstorming and I'll leave you with this meme So thank you all very much