On June 12th, 2024 in San Francisco at SHACK15, cohosted by Matthew Kropp, CTO of BCG X, and Reinvent Futures founders Peter Leyden & Joe Boggio we had a chance to explore how AI is shaping and changing life sciences from drug discovery and healthcare to the massive potential of synthetic biology and bioengineering.
It was an inspiring line up of speakers (everyone had 5 minutes so and it was a fun speed drive) as well as a rich collection of participants for the after party discussion.
Peter asked me to share 5 minutes on why a product and experience designer like me, who has spent his life exploring the built world of places and things, would start a new chapter of his life deeply focused on biology. I thought I’d capture some of my thoughts and motivations as I prepared for my 5 minutes of sharing.
Step 1 Misunderstand, blur your eyes, and use analogy and metaphors to map the wonders of life to how we might do “biomimicry for information systems.”
In 2012 I cowrote Trillions, Thriving in the Information Ecology when I was the CEO of MAYA Design (now a foundational part of BCG X’s design and Deeptech offering). In the book we had a chapter on How Nature Does Things. We pointed out that to do something really hard, like build a tractable, scalable, comprehensible trillion-node world (or solar system or galaxy) of information devices–today some people call that the Internet of Things, tho that’s really under thinking what’s possible–go find someone else that has done something similar and learn from them.
Nature has been showing off how to capture phenomena in the Universe for use (the broadest definition of technology I can think of) for over 4 billion years in this crazy R&D lab called Earth.
Your body has 50 to 100 trillion cells, is a complex information system in it’s own right, will go for decades (and in some cases over a century) without a catastrophic reboot or failure), uses massive peer to peer replication as a way to confer bottom up resiliency (every cell in your body has a spare copy of you in the form of DNA except for mature red blood cells). Nature uses layered and modular approaches–if you cut yourself your skin on your leg doesn’t call the cloud and ask how to fix the cut– it enlists its neighbors first and begins to build scaffolding (basal intelligence), then further layers get in the act, there is a layer called the endocrine system, the circulatory system, the nervous system but if you waited for them all to get involved or for the big brain in the sky (the cloud in my analogy to the centralization of servers we have today) to get involved, you’d bleed to death.
Another example we explore? Pando is a stand of quaking aspen in Utah that is ~75,000 years old and uses a mycorrhizal network just below the surface of the soil to move water from areas of abundance to areas of drought, and confer resistance against diseases. It also seems to use a routing mechanism that looks shockingly like TCP/IP so in a way it’s the Internet of Plants.
But when we released the book it was really just using biology as a metaphor and collection of analogies to help business leaders and technologists think bigger about what we were all building together. Ultimately we may never really entirely understand how life works but good feats of imagination occur through this sort of leap across conceptual approaches and it served us well. In fact by using these patterns from Nature we shipped a platform that unseated a billion dollar program built by a large organization, six years ahead of schedule and were featured in DARPA’s 50th anniversary celebration as one of the fastest and most consequential tech transition from basic R&D to deployed system saving people’s lives in the organization’s history.
Step 2. Get recruited by Autodesk Research in 2014 to join them.
They didn’t have any computer aided design tools that understood what might happen when places and things “wake up.” So I helped initiate the Primordial research effort to help product designers and architects and engineers explore a world that has computation built into the fabric of the products and places they were building (today we call them edge devices). My first effort on that front was joining the Dream Catcher team to explore Generative Design. It was based on defining high dimensional goals, constraints, and obstacles (today you might call that “prompt engineering”). Since humans aren’t so red hot when it comes to making trade offs beyond a few dimensions of a given challenge and machines can help us explore high dimensions we enlisted AI, and agent based systems combined with multi-physic, multi-temporal simulation environments (today you’d call them digital twins). Some of our work is featured in this talk about Generative Design for products and architecture.
Step 3. Spend an afternoon white boarding with our resident rogue synthetic biologist.
The head of Strategy at Autodesk, Jon Pittman says, “Hey, Mickey. You should meet Andrew Hessel who’s also part of the office of the CTO. He’s exploring computer aided design tools to cure cancer and design organisms. So while you’re interested in trillions of computational things in the larger world around us, he’s exploring the trillions of things going on within a virus or a new kind of “programmable” biological microprocessor called an “e-coli.”
Andrew draws a USB stick and a cell. “A virus is about 50 Kilobits, smaller than a blank word document, and it’s like a USB stick that has an app on it. It’s not alive itself, but when it plugs into this cell the cell “boots up” the app and starts doing whatever the virus commands it to do.
Woah. So a cell is a sort of computational platform? What is this field called?
Synthetic biology.
His team succeeds in designing a virus with open wet ware components that can reach a particular cancer in a specific canine cell in a specific dog (N=1 cancer cures on the horizon?) They use remote dip and dunk fabrication labs to force the evolution of the virus and clone the cancer cells from a real dog until it can kill the cancer. They fabricate the virus and inject it in the dog and it cures their cancer.
He’s now co-lead of the Genesis project which is the Human Genome Write project. For context, the first human genome project dropped the cost of reading precipitously. We can read the human genome for a thousand dollars. Synthesizing or writing the genome is still orders of magnitude more costly. During the time that Autodesk was doing research into computer aided design tools for biology they do some other fun stuff, but we’ll leave that to Andrew and others to share (and Andrew is at this event and will spend his 5 minutes melting people’s brains about what he’s excited about 10 years after our first whiteboard session.)
Ok, wait a minute. Let’s go back to when I was first met Andrew.
He encourages me to check out something called iGEM (a global genetically engineered machine olympics for high school, undergrad and overgrad student teams).
He also tells me I should take a class called “How To Grow Almost Anything” and connects me to some of the most mind expanding folks I’ve ever met in this new field of synthetic biology.
I learn that one iGEM team thought, “Hmm, can we take a rendering module, like the gene that encodes the production of a protein that makes the smell of a banana from a banana tree. Can we take a switch inside of a microbe (like e-coli) that flips one way when its eating and growing and flips the other way when it’s ready to harvest (something accomplished through a concept called quorum sensing).”
Then they thought. “Could we take the gene that makes the protein in a mint leaf that smells like mint and put this little biological circuit together and “boot it up” in the e-coli?”
They called it “Eu D’ecoli.” And sure enough it smelled like bananas when it was growing and like mint when it was ready to harvest. One of the team members from that effort is now the CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks.
Today because of those pioneers like Andrew Hessel and the brilliant folks at MIT and Berkeley and other synthetic biology researchers around the world you can find CAD design tools like Kernel from Asimov that let you design your own biological circuits the same way we used to go to Radio Shack when I was young to make fun electronics projects like a cigar box theremin (ok that’s another story).
Step 4. Join Tufts University as a visiting scholar and special advisor and begin to explore how to scale a global movement around living materials.
In 2023 I took the “How to Grow Almost Anything” class remotely. If you really want to understand the massive potential of a regenerative bio-economy and the wonders of biology it is THE masterclass. It was taught by David Kong and George Church and had a rotating cast of guest lecturers over the entire semester with homework that was sometimes too hard for me to figure out (should have paid more attention during high school science class) and sometimes was inspiring or provocative and mind-bending. Here is a link that explains the evolution of the course.
As a final project I explored the concept of a Spiderbot. The idea was basically, if we’re going to get product designers and architects to embrace regenerative bio-based “living materials” and move rapidly away from forever plastics/chemicals and extractive existing manufacturing and construction methods, they need a way to design using generative design CAD tools along with desktop prototyping methods to explore the performance characteristics and production potential of structural proteins. For context proteins are what the natural world is made of like silk cocoons, trees, our teeth, our bones, coral reefs, feathers, shrimp shells, etc.
During that final project David Kong recommended that I talk to the “Silklab” in Tufts Bioengineering department.
The head of the lab, Fio Omenetto, is a polymath and former J Robert Oppenheimer Fellow from Los Alamos who wandered into the world of biomaterial “surprise” when he was exploring the optical qualities of silk as a super protein. Fio had been a visiting lecturer one year for the HTGAA class. We became fast friends and when I got a chance to explore his lab I was blown away by what they were doing and shocked that almost nobody really knows what’s really going on or possible.
While there is so much more to come I thought I’d end with a great example of a successful startup coming out of the silk lab’s research that uses some of the hidden wonders of silk as a natural bio-protectant. The company is called, Mori.
As spinach or lettuce is coming off the fields of a farm it’s sprayed with a silk solution (a few microns thick, edible and water soluble and completely USDA approved). Using this magical technology the produce can be packed up to 3 times more densely without the need for refrigeration and you can already find it at Whole Foods and Trader Joes. Silk is just one of the many wondrous natural proteins nature makes and it’s particularly multifaceted as it requires the least energy and chemical inputs (heat it up in water and add some specific salts) to transform it into entirely new and novel forms. It can also create chimeric hybrid composite materials due to its unique atomic structure. While this is an older video, it hints at just a little bit of what’s to come as we begin to cocreate with nature and embrace the wonders of a coming bio revolution.
What I think is critical about what our team at Tufts is doing is that Fio has shaped it as a pragmatic collection of curious and generous polymaths working with the hidden polymeric wonders life has created that we often take for granted.
One of the grand challenges in synthetic biology has been convincing these natural “bio-processors” to produce a given protein at industrial scale. For us to really grow the future we’ll need to figure out how to scale up from a few milliliters in a lab to thousands and in some cases millions of kiloliters of material in the rough and tumble world of industry.
By being pragmatic Fio and team are flipping the story and tapping into how nature (and industry) already produces massive quantities of “raw material” either in the form of mulberry trees and silk worms (what we already use every day to make all of our lovely silk linings and dresses and saris and such) or in the form of clothing waste (there are over a million tons of silk waste created each year). The startups coming out of his lab are building the customers and the markets first to prove what’s possible and create the economic reality and proof that we can embrace living materials over forever plastics. They’re already producing metric tons of silk with industrial partners by tapping into existing supply and waste streams. As others in the community tackle the “bioreactor” problem, we’ll be out there creating pull and proof in the market.
Frankly given the complex scale and richness of biology humans alone won’t be able to entirely understand all that is possible without enlisting our machine learning brethren and harvesting vast new fields of data about the glorious mechanisms life has found to do the most incredible things. When I started I was excited and worried that we need to embrace metaphors from biology to understand how to design a trillion node world of computational devices. Now I think the horizon has expanded massively in terms of what’s possible and where a positive future lies ahead.
I’ll end with a quote from another teacher I learned from and was inspired by during the How to Grow Almost Anything class, Drew Endy.
“Trees don’t order leaves from a factory on the other side of the world and then have them shipped to the branches to have them stapled on. They grow them with the resources around them right where they are.”
That’s the real promise of life that could usher in an entirely different bio-economical Industrial Revolution,