Look at your hand right now.
You’re sitting at your kitchen table having just made a breakfast of eggs and sour dough toast and a side of potatoes with a touch of hot sauce. A cooling cup of tea sits by the dish. What do you see when you look closely at your hand? Get your eyes as close as you can to your skin and really look at it. You likely see swirls, life lines, and fingerprints. Beneath the skin you can see the movement of muscles and tendons. On the surface you can see fine hairs. If you’re like me wrinkles, scars from past misadventures. But every second of every day there are other things we could see if we had better eyes.
Our other senses help extend our understanding of our selves and the world around us. Lick your fingers. You might taste a bit of the salt you used to season your eggs, or the clean taste of freshly washed hands. You might taste the zing of a lemon you used moments ago to spice up your tea. Or the rich taste of butter from when you prepared the toast. Taste is another sense that is quite rich and deep and is a hint at what might be going on that you can’t see at all, but that is ever present, hidden from view.
Marcel Proust, in his work Swann’s Way – Remembrance Of Things Past, Volume One, famously noted that the moment he tasted crumbs of a ‘petites Madeleine’ that he had soaked in his tea a burst of memories vividly flooded back into his mind. There is a belief that taste, is our oldest sense, and may trigger deeply buried memories the most directly because it was so fundamental from an evolutionary standpoint. Taste helped our earliest ancestors seek out and find sustenance and learn what was good or bad for us to consume.
Your dog comes up to you looking for a handout.
Smell their fur. What do you smell? With mine I smell home, and I think he’s been rolling in something in the backyard and is ready for a bath.
Smell, taste, sight, and sound, combine with another sense called “proprioception,” which makes us feel warm inside while we’re holding that cup of tea in our hands, to aid us in making sense of our world.
Other organisms have evolved entirely other ways of seeing. Bumble bees see into the ultraviolet spectrum of light. They can sense up around the 300 nanometer wavelengths of light versus human sight which can see starting around the 400 nanometer part of the spectrum. If we could see that far up in the ultraviolet we’d be able to see that all flowers show off little vibrant landing pads for bees to visit and find pollen (and delicious sugar). Pit Vipers on the other hand can see way over into the infrared part of the spectrum. Imagine the things you could see if you had Bumble Bee-PitViper vision.
We aren’t entirely blind to all the biological processes going on around us but we have very limited capacity to “see” the full spectrum of ways the natural world interacts every moment of every day.
Much of life communicates and regulates and disassembles and assembles itself using ions (atoms or collections of atoms that have a negative or a positive charge because they’ve gained or lost electrons) peptides (short chains of amino acids) and proteins (longer more complex chains of amino acids).
Life plays richly across the smallest to the largest of spaces. It operates at the very small with a molecular machine that spin at 30,000 RPM like F0 ATP Synthase that work as an electric motor using proton transfer to power itself in our cells. Biological processes also work all the way from atoms, ions, and protons up across scales seamlessly to the very large. Consider Pando, a quaking aspen that spans 106 acres and has been around for thousands of years. Life senses and signals and shifts and builds and takes apart the matter of the universe far differently than humankind has been able to figure out during our industrial revolutions. Just as our eyes sense photons but only in a small window of the electromagnetic spectrum, our sense of taste and smell gives us a just a bare glimpse through the window of ions, proteins, and protons (much bigger and messier than electrons but ultimately the essential building blocks of life.)
Ok here is part 1 of the big idea. What if we could trivially, at a very low cost add new senses to our repertoire?
The field of bio-engineering, biomimicry, and digital or synthetic biology is uncovering daily wonders about what might happen if we played with and learned from the hidden wonders evolved over 3 billion plus years of mother Nature’s R&D lab.
Techno-scientific advances happen when we make leaps across domains and disciplines, So Let’s take a leap or two. First we’ll visit the bioengineering focused silklab of Fiorenzo Omenetto at Tufts University. He and his team have discovered that a structural protein called Fibroin–that was evolved multiple times by various organisms from caterpillars, to spiders, to clams in the bottom of the ocean–can preserve delicate chemistries. Silk is made of 80% fibroin. That means blood cells suspended in a film of silk, or oncology drugs, or vitamins, or biological molecules–that can capture and sense other biological molecules–can be “stored” in a matrix of silk protein for many months at room temperature.
Nature figured out how to make the perfect stasis field.
Let’s leap over to David Baker’s lab at the University of Washington. The Baker lab has used AI to figure out how to design and fold proteins. He and the folks at Google Deepmind shared a Nobel Prize in 2024 in chemistry for computational methods of protein design. Fio’s team at the silk lab had a crazy idea, what if the folks at Baker lab could design de novo protein “sensors” and what if silk could stabilize them on a sheet of paper with a bit of adhesive so that these sensors could be placed on our body to let us see things that have always been hidden about what’s going on inside of us?
Think of de novo (something human-made that doesn’t exist in nature) protein sensors as basically little molecular velcro patches. If a molecule called CRP for instance (C-Reactive Protein) passes by the protein sensor “velcro patches” they catch it and grab ahold of the CRP. CRP is in our blood and in our sweat. It’s released by the liver in response to inflammation. So if you’ve got CRP in your sweat it likely means your body is dealing with inflammation. Imagine making those de novo protein sensors trigger a little bit of glow when it catches CRP. We could stabilize another protein called Luciferase (the protein that converts sugar into light in fireflies.) so you could have a patch on your arm and at a glance see that you’re dealing with inflammation when it starts to change colors or glow.
Of course once you open that doorway you start to see all sorts of potential. Imagine a paper patch that athletes could wear that not only sense CRP, but also lactate (what we release when are muscles burn sugar but don’t have enough oxygen and your body signals that you are moving into an anaerobic state.) What if it could also detect temperature and Ph, and IL-6 (which helps regulate inflammatory immune responses)? What if instead of having them glow we use a chromogenic substrate to change colors depending on the amount of a given biological element involved?
By correlating all these different biological and environmental signals together we can deeply understand new things about a person’s body. If we make them as low cost as paper bandages we could build a large dataset of never before detected insights. Think of what would happen if we had enough data to build an AI foundation model of our own body or my families or all of humanity’s responses to what we take in from our environment that impacts our bodies throughout our lives? We’d have a new sense of biology. It’s pretty easy to expand on this concept and think about all the different signals that surround us but are invisible coming off our bodies (breath, sweat, spit, blood, etc.) Consider all the biological flows we walk through when we step into a building or out into a forest. What could we learn if we had a way to see, to sense, these hidden signals?
On a more chilling note. A recent biological survey of food sold in the bay area of California found surprisingly large amounts of forever chemicals and microplastics (that sometimes mimic hormones in human bodies) in everything from boba tea to organic grass fed beef sold at a major healthy grocery chain.
While that survey was only for a single point in time and from only one local team of passionate advocates for better food, it hints at what’s going on out of sight, but can be seen if you put enough resources and time into sampling and testing rigorously. What if we could just see all of these subtle and not so subtle ripples propagating into our food system and flowing through our bodies? Biological process are continually working to survive and thrive even in the face of foreign incursions, yet today we have very few ways to detect, contextually, what’s going on short of expensive and exhaustive laboratory testing.
Did the eggs you had this morning have hidden growth hormones in them because some factory farms choose to plump up their hens with something other than fresh feed? Did the potatoes have traces of herbicide embodied deep in their cells?
Consider the microbiome in your mouth.
Silk is a curious substrate. It is entirely water soluble and edible yet can be turned into an organic polymer and made into something that looks and acts like a plastic film. It has been used for thousands of years to sew up wounds.
What if you could attach these de novo sensors, stabilized in silk as a sticker on your back tooth?
If you made that sticker with a conductive biocompatible material like gold and formed it into what’s called a split ring resonating antenna (if you’re tracking our jazz leaps this is a leap over to the world of electronics). Could you detect the bacteria that causes cavities or the acids produced by the good or bad bacteria in our mouths that causes gum disease and inflammation (and leads to bad breath too)?
How might that work? Take a split ring resonator sandwiched with a thin substrate separating it from another spiral of gold and use silk (our magic natural stasis field) to create a bio-responsive interlayer with some of those de novo protein sensors embedded within it.
Now bring your phone up to your mouth and your RFID system can detect how the signals change depending on what the sensor patches “capture” in your mouth. Suddenly at a glance on your phone you could have a new kind of super sense that can tell you exactly what’s going on in there, long before your dentist sends you a big bill.
We also don’t really have a sense of how new technologies, used regularly, impact our bodies in the long run. A recent Nature paper on vaping and how it impacts a person’s mouth microbiome is a sobering example.
Part 2 of the big idea. Ions meet electrons at scale.
As a society we have changed the world with our ability to shrink computation down to silicon microchips filled with millions and sometimes billions or hundreds of billions of transistors. But life doesn’t work only with electrons or photons. Life loves much bigger and more complex stuff. Things like ions, which are massive compared to electrons and are and made of one or more atoms that have a positive or negative charge. Life also loves those peptides and amino acids and proteins. Life uses the folding and unfolding, binding and unbinding, of molecules as a form of computation itself. The actual shape of the structures and the changing of those shapes is where a massive amount of information is stored and manipulated.
What if we could bridge the gap between ions and electrons and build a new Bio to Digital converter (a B2D transducer)? What if we could do it at the scale and cost effectiveness of microchip production?
Let’s leap back over to silklab. These three papers hint at a breakthrough waiting to be scaled, Reconfigurable microwave meta devices based on organic electrochemical transistors, Bimodal Gating Mechanisms in Hybrid Thin-Film Transistors Based on Dynamically Reconfigurable Nanoscale Biopolymer Interfaces & Silk fibroin as a surfactant for water-based nanofabrication.
A biologist by themselves might not see what these papers hint at, an electrical engineer (EE) may look at the wet and messy biological stuff and think, “we make semiconductors in clean rooms and any sort of humidity or water or impurities would break our beautifully built system.”
Someone deeply versed in physics, physical chemistry, and the realm of quantum mechanics would look at all this and be both intrigued and inspired by the wonders of biology. There are strong hints that quantum entanglement is happening all the time in the leaves of plants for photosynthesis. But that scientist might want to stay in the realm of theory and not get their hands dirty with the messy world of bioengineering.
Consider the convergence of electrical engineering, physics, and biomedical engineering and map one discipline on the other and you see new things.
What will you see?
Strategic surprise, where you create surprise–rather than being surprised–by moving the impossible or nearly impossible towards the improbable and sometimes to the inevitable. That is how true techno-scientific disruptions happen. Savants who can do this regularly exhibit something called “deep craft” and are exceedingly rare. But where they emerge you find them leaping from one domain to another and seeing hidden patterns and then matching those in their minds, through analogy and metaphor, to an idea they’ve figured out in another chapter of their own experience.
The challenge is that the work across different fields at silklab looks at accepted dogma continually under different points of views. They are, in a sense, anti-disciplinary. The traditional techno-scientific establishment doesn’t know what to do with this kind of broad intersectional work. Yet, when those polymaths–and their leaps of imagination–are nurtured consistently, over a long enough period of time to validate they aren’t just coincidence or random chance, they suddenly unlock a new whole field of possibilities.
Microchips use silicon as a semiconductor. That means it can be both a conductor of electrons as well as an insulator to stop electrons depending on how the crystals are formed and how they’re activated. A field effect transistor (FET) uses an electrical field to switch the states on and off. that makes them idea binary switches. They can go from 1 to 0 quickly and repeatably. But Fio and team had seen what happens when you have a magic stasis field for biological sensors. Conventional FET’s use a thin insulating layer of silicon dioxide (SiO₂) so that the switches work well (it creates a high input impedance). At silklab, a question was asked: “What if we replace the silicon dioxide with a layer of silk and that silk actually has biological sensors embedded within it?”
Wait, what?
There was a path not taken at the dawn of computing, we could build computers with lots and lots of on/off switches that could go from 1 to 0 and back again (digital bits), or we could build computers that were analog instead of digital. They’d use an infinite range of values between 0 and 1. That is where life lives. We are not made of binary switches. We are all tuned from cells to cephalopods to children as analog computing superstars. But when electronic computers where first being developed on/off switches were the path society took, if you put enough of them together at scale you could do wonders. We walked away from the other pathway.
Biological systems are the most powerful known processors of information: massively parallel, adaptive, asynchronous, and self-organizing. In contrast, modern computation is founded on deterministic, binary logic implemented in rigid, silicon-based architectures. While each paradigm has achieved extraordinary feats on its own, their integration has remained elusive.
The breakthroughs that have come out of the silk lab hint that we could leap over to that other path while taking advantage of the decades of investment and lessons learned during the rise of digital computing.
So let’s go back to semiconductor chip making. Today the semiconductor industry makes more transistors than grains of rice, cheaper. What if those transistors could sense living processes, and in the space of time that the ions and and other rich organic brew is folding at the few atoms level we could compute organically an answer about what we’ve found and then use that B2D transducer to convert those ions to electrons?
That means your phone could have a chip (or a touch screen filled with those bio-transistors) and give you a new way to see and understand your own personal biosphere. Or that speaker on the table or the seats you sit in, or the clothes you wear, or little paper stickers on the plants in your garden could all wake up and tell you what’s happening over their lifetimes. The hidden world of biology that we are awash within–from the air we breathe, to the places we visit, to the food we eat, to the way we process that food, to the chemicals that end up in our water–would suddenly be visible to us. Recently a new grand challenge initiative has gotten underway to understand the human immunome. Our immune system is continually learning how to mitigate emerging threats to our health and yet we have very little understanding of how our immune system evolves, collectively or individually over our lives. A study of identical twins demonstrated that while they had the same genetic code, over their lives their immune system was molded very differently by the environments they lived within, the viruses and diseases they were exposed to, and the foods they ate. Our immune system is implicated in an untold number of health challenges. The Human Immunome Project has a daunting challenge ahead. But what if we could enlist B2D chips, patches, and other new forms of senses to help measure and predict a person’s immune system health?
When we gain a new sense it gives us a new awareness and expanded knowledge. Your turn. I’ll pose the question from the beginning of this piece in a different way…
“What happens when Ions meet Electrons meet Minds?”