 I'm going to introduce Debbie Shatra. She's going to talk about grinding as citizen science, and she'll probably describe to you what grinding is if you don't know what that is. So she's an associate professor of material science at Olin College of Engineering outside Boston, and her research and teaching interests include biological materials, materials for implants and design, and her favorite molecule is collagen. You can follow her on Twitter at atdebcha. So give a warm welcome to Debbie Shatra. So I'm Debbie Shatra. I'm a generally loud person, so I tend not to talk with mics. So I'll do my best to keep it level. So let's see. Where do I want to start? So I want to start. So Case talked about being a cyborg in kind of the broadest possible sense of that, right? In terms of how we interact with technology, what our environment is, I'm going to be talking a bit about being a cyborg at basically the bleeding edge, and more or less literally the bleeding edge. So thinking about things like implants. So just so I can get a sense of where people are, when we say grinding, how many people here have a sense of what that is? Some of you, not all of you. So I want to make a deeper disclaimer in a few minutes, but I would say I would not describe myself as a grinder. This is a community that I'm not part of, but it's a body modification world. So it's people who are interested in biohacking, DIY, augmentation, and basically changing the function or the appearance of their bodies, and sort of a rough, and I'm sorry, probably vague definition of that. So this is my, actually the background, so I'm, as I said, I'm not that. What I am is I'm a material scientist by training, and my specialization is in biological materials and biomedical materials. And I do a bunch of other things beside, but that's what we'll be focusing on today. So this in the background is my friend Quinn Norden. Some of you may be familiar with Quinn as someone who put a magnet in her finger in 2006. She wrote about it for Wired. This is her, it's getting taken out in this picture. Quinn and I met socially, we met at a friend's house, and you know, the exact point of dispute is now lost in the midst of time. But the first evening we met, somehow the topic of biomedical implants came up, and she made an assertion about how they behaved, and I made an assertion about how they behaved, and neither of us was about to back down, because both of us were like, I am an expert in this, I know what I'm talking about. And then our friend, who's the person who knew both of us, sort of came in and said, you know, Debbie is a material scientist, and does biomedical materials, and Quinn is someone who's done DIY biohacking. And what we realized is, we were looking at the same thing from two different perspectives. So I was looking at it from the perspective of sort of the medical community, medical device design implants, and she was looking at it very much from the perspective of, you know, putting things in your body, seeing how they respond. So mostly what I'll be talking about today is sort of the difference between these two worlds. So in the biomedical community, there's a big emphasis on reproducibility, you want to design things that can be used by a wide range of patients, and there's of course a focus on restoration, right, on restoring lost function. Conversely, in the sort of DIY biohacking community, it's very much about the individual, there's a lot of edge cases involved, so people, so individual people, and the focus is on augmentation and cosmetic rather than restorative work. And so what this means is that there's sort of two different types of constructed knowledge here, right? There's the one that sort of the traditional medical one, and the other one is the one that is a little bit more disjoint, right, it's very much more individually focused. And what I'm going to argue here for is the idea of taking that, taking that second one, and taking that constructed knowledge and making it a little bit more coherent, which is why I described it as citizen science. I'd also like to stress that these are not, of course, the only differences between the two, just kind of the ones that we're focusing on today. So I mentioned that I would have some disclaimers in caveat. So the first is I'm not a doctor. I think there's a standard one, which is I'm not endorsing this. I'm just describing it. I already said I'm not sort of part of the grinding community. So I'm really speaking about it from the point of view as an outsider or put another way, I'm speaking about this from the point of view with my background as someone who does biomedical engineering is interested in particularly materials, as you'll see, for device implants. So citizen science, when people talk about citizen science, they normally talk about sort of, well, so there's two things. So one, this idea of observing typically the natural world, documenting it and sharing it. And one of the things about citizen science is that it's typically done in conjunction with traditional scientists. So scientists who are part of the scientific establishment. And of course, that's a piece of it that we're not necessarily going to be thinking about today. I want to speak briefly about the share piece first. So on the one hand, there are lots of reasons not to share, right? In particular, in this case, we're talking about things that may or may not be legal. There may be social acceptance issues about how much people feel about it. At the same time, of course, there have been for and community for sharing since forever. I remember Wrecked Art, Body Arts, magazines before that and scenes before that. And of course, there are still existing communities today. So that's not going to be the focus of the talk. What I'm going to be focusing on is the other side, which is the observing document side. So the first thing I actually want to talk about is actually, let me talk about this first. You can't document something that you can't observe. When you observe something, what you see is mediated by what you think you're seeing, right? So if you want to observe something, it's actually useful to have a model for what you're seeing so that you have a framework to describe it and a way of thinking about it. So the first thing I actually want to talk a little bit about is the biological response to implants. If you put something in your body, how does your body respond? And it's super, super complicated. But at a very baseline level, you can tell I'm not used to using a mic because I'm like, I don't want to be right here. So the biological response is super complicated, but we are all familiar with it. Unless you've never like cut or hurt yourself, you have some sense of what the response is going to be. Infection is optional. That's why I put it in brackets. Back in the 19th century, when surgeons delivered children and didn't wash their hands and then went and delivered other babies, we always thought that infection was a necessary part of surgery or of implants until sterile techniques were developed, but inflammation is not optional. And you're, as I said, you're probably all familiar with inflammation. If you've ever cut yourself, hurt yourself, bruise yourself, there's a classic sort of Latin phrase, calor, doler, tumor, rubor, basically the four signs of inflammation, which are warmth, swelling, redness, and pain. And there's actually a fifth one, which is loss of function, and I don't know how to say that in Latin. Excuse me. So all of these things actually take place when you implant a device or any kind of implant into the body. You have this inflammatory response, and there's really no getting around that. So the inflammatory response happens for any kind of damage to the body. There's an inflammatory response. The immune response is what happens when you actually leave something in the body. And the immune response basically is a sort of targeted response from your body to basically get rid of this foreign object. So a number of years ago, I was in the middle of a long run, I was training for a marathon, and I tripped and I fell and I just messed up my knee. It was just, I mean, I didn't, it wasn't hurt, but it was all scraped up and looked terrible. And because I was like still, I don't know, 10 miles or something from home, by the time I got home, it was like an hour or so later, during the math there, I don't run that fast, probably a couple of hours later, got home and realized it was basically all clotted, clotted, and it was a mess. And all I could do was sort of clean it a little bit and bandage it. So unbeknownst to me, a small quartz pebble had actually gotten lodged into my knee. Sorry, this is like, people who are like squeamish, I promise you, this will be the most squeamish thing in the talk. So a small quartz pebble, but now you're really squeamish, you might want to leave now. So a small quartz pebble got lodged into my knee. And I realized this a week later when it basically got pushed out by my body. And when it got pushed out, it was actually more or less perfectly clean, because all of the dust in particulate matter on it had been removed by my body, but they couldn't do anything with a quartz pebble, so the response was to actually push it out. And so both the cleaning and the pushing out part was part of the immune response for things that cannot be pushed out, like implants that are deliberately placed, they're sort of virtually pushed out by creating typically a fibrous capsule around them. And so you might be familiar with these for breast implants. There are some exceptions, but it's a really common response. This, of course, is why we don't yet have sensors for glucose in the bloodstream, why you don't have implantable sensors for diabetics, why they start to prick their fingers, because if you put something in the body, the sensor surface is more or less immediately covered first with protein from the bloodstream, and then eventually it's actually blocked off, and it means that it can't accurately measure the glucose content. People are working on this, as you might imagine, but we are not there yet. This is scratching the surface. If you are deeply interested in this, I highly encourage this book by KD and other authors. It's actually the book I use in my biomedical materials class. I met the author once, and I thought she'd be excited that my tattoo was based on an illustration of this book. She turned it to be much more excited that I use it for my course, which is telling you that she's definitely an academic. So the next thing I want to talk about is materials and design. And so I'm a material scientist. I care a lot about materials, but there's another reason why I want to talk about this. This is a Burina IUD design. It looks like a physical object. It is a design. It was designed by someone named Ronan Kudushan, as what he describes as sort of a provocative design thing. It is intended to be an inexpensive IUD. It's a lovely design. You can download the pictures, the design, so you can 3D print it yourself. He clearly cares a lot about the actual design, right? What it looks like at the cute little bear. You can use this one-year ascent. He, I look at this and I see that he has no understanding of the role of materials in implants. So the choice of what plastic it's made of makes a huge difference. The choice of what the copper coin is made of. I have no idea what one-year ascent coins are made of. I'm not sure that's publicly available would make a huge difference to how this responds. That string, that particular string makes me cringe because it's remarkably like because the Dalcon Shield IUD used a polyfilament string and it led to people getting very bad infections and led to as well as pain things like infertility. So materials really matter and people think a lot about design. They think about documenting the design, but they don't necessarily think about what material things are made out of. So here's another example. This is this is the opposite side. So this is not, you know, that was a sort of conceptual design thing with someone who didn't think about materials. This is an actual product where people thought very hard about the materials that they're going to make it out of. It's a heart valve. Goes into your heart. The disc opens and closes to let blood flow go through. It's made the black disc is made of pyrolytic carbon. The struts are made of titanium. The sewing room I believe in this one is Dacron. So carefully designed, carefully processed, went through the regulatory process, was implanted. See what the little two errors are? So the titanium struts were spot welded into place. And it turns out that spot welding titanium under these circumstances made just enough change to their physical properties that they became susceptible to corrosion. So when they were implanted in the body, which is an incredibly harsh environment, it's warm, it's salty. It has, as I said, lots of cells whose job is particularly to attack foreign objects. Some of the struts broke until the disc basically came free and it led, as you might imagine, to people dying. The problem, of course, is you can't generally just do heart surgery to replace these, right? So there's people who have them and then it's like, well, we're not going to just do open heart surgery to pop that one out and put a new one back to put a new one in. So how do you make the decision about what are you going to do once you've implanted these and these. So the actual heart valve itself was redesigned so now the struts are actually milled out of, they're basically 3D milled, CNC routed out of a single piece of titanium. So that's just no joints anymore. So the history of biomedical materials and medical device design is littered with cases like this where very subtle differences in the materials had profound consequences on the function of the device. So if you're documenting things, so as well as documenting the design, which I said people do, it's really important to use and to think about using well characterized material. So know what you're implanting to understand something about the provenance of the source, where do they come from and to think about quality control because how you how you change the processing, how you change, how these materials are made can affect what the results are going to be in the body. The last thing I'm going to talk about in terms of what's useful to document is location and function. So you if you heard people talk about putting things in their body, you've probably heard them describe, oh, these materials are inert. There is no such thing as an inert material in the body. You cannot implant something and have it have no response. I think actually I think basically unless you're a cadaver, there will be a response. And I think I think even a cadaver, there would still be by like basically like residual chemical processes that would affect it really knows this thing as a nerd. This is the definition that's kind of the working definition that's used by people in biomedical materials. So it was David Williams and he said, and this is this is the product of a better 20 year process of thinking about what biocompatible or biocompatibility means. And he says the biocompatibility of a long term implantable medical device. So anything that's in the body for more than sort of hours to days refers to the ability of the device to perform its intended function. So it's doing something specific, even if that's cosmetic, right, it's doing that specific thing with the desired degree of incorporation into the host. So again, controlling what, how exactly gets incorporated without eliciting any undesirable local or systemic effects in that host. So we're not talking about eliciting no effects, right? We're talking about eliciting effects that are undesirable. So put another way. It's not enough to say, oh, I designed this thing and it works. It's very specific about where you put it, what environment it's in, what its function is. And again, sticking with heart valves, there's four different heart valves, four different valves in your heart and they are not interchangeable, right? You can't, even the ones that are, there's a pair that are similar and a second pair that are similar, but you can't, even the ones that are similar, you can't swap between. Things behave very differently in those two positions. Actually, so how many people here have like earrings or other piercings? Other implants, tattoos, keep your hands up, tattoos, any other implants, any other things in your bodies? So yeah, so most of us, right? So it's only, but certainly the majority have things basically placed in their body. So bringing this back to where I started, if you're thinking about all of this activity that's happening and all of this knowledge that's being constructed, it only sort of becomes a community or a body of knowledge if there's sort of a framework and a way of looking at it. And so if you're going to sort of observe this and document and share the data, this is sort of a set of things that I think it's important to think about in that. And the things I talked about is like what it actually is and what it's made out of, where it's being put and how it's functioning and then to observe the biological response. So these are the things that I think as a sort of a baseline are useful things to document when you do implantations. And not coincidentally, these are not dissimilar to the ones that are used by the general medical community. And in particular, medical devices have very serious audit trails now so that when things go wrong, it's possible to backtrack and figure out where things happen, figure out what other patients are affected and the like. And then, of course, the second part of this. So on one side, citizen science is about observing and documenting. And of course, the other side of it is about sharing. So this is an unconference. I really intended this not to be like, this is what you should do, but a way of sort of starting a conversation around constructing knowledge and sharing this knowledge. So I'd be happy to continue it over the rest of today. Thank you. And Willow, how are we doing for time for questions? Yes. I found it's really interesting in everything you said. But one thing that maybe could be a debate on its own, it's about ethics. Even today, people are reject biological things being planted. Like, I could not have a third arm, for example. But then you were talking about mechanical and electronics being planted. For example, people who are born with six fingers. Perfectly functional extra finger, they remove it just because it's abnormally. So how do you see, like, oh, the woman who implanted the third bulb, third breast. The hoax, I believe. Yeah, it was a hoax. But the internet went crazy because that's just me. In my mind, it could be a perfectly normal thing. I mean, it's just something that you could just, it's body modification for improving for whatever reason. But it's still seen as abnormality and not ethical. So what do you think? So almost by definition, neither you nor I alone can talk about ethics. So it is something that is absolutely, as ethics are contextually and societally determined, what is appropriate and what is not appropriate. And that's part of the reason why the medical community focuses on restoration. And not augmentation. And cosmetic is actually kind of a really messy thing. Right? If you, I mean, I did, I did a bunch of work around silicone breast implants in the 90s when there were issues about the possibility of autoimmune diseases resulting from them. And it's just like the, there are solid arguments on both sides about breast implants. Are they just cosmetic? Are they just restorative? What are the ethics? Is it unethical to have cosmetic breast implants that might have medical issues? So none of these, I mean, even today, so breast implants are an excellent example. Even today, these are open questions. What is the ethics around reconstruction versus augmentation? What is normal? What is, what is sort of allowable? And I suspect that these will all be questions that will be addressed in the Uncomfort Session this afternoon.