[00:00.780 --> 00:05.820]  Today, my talk's titled, Working Towards a Sneaker Net for Libra Biotech Wetware.
[00:06.980 --> 00:11.980]  And this is the first hope that I've talked at, but actually I was invited to...
[00:11.980 --> 00:17.260]  I learned about the conference like two years ago, and I got to sneak into the end of somebody's presentation.
[00:17.260 --> 00:22.240]  So it's really nice to be in front of everyone now and talk about something that I'm interested in.
[00:22.360 --> 00:28.800]  So I want to introduce myself, and then I use a lot of jargon in my title, and so I want to try to explain that jargon.
[00:29.560 --> 00:34.500]  And then, like, why don't we have amazing biotech Libra open-source things?
[00:35.040 --> 00:49.240]  I want to just dive into some of those reasons and maybe point out a lot of examples along the way about just interesting projects that have been taken on in order to make some of this information and resources more freely accessible.
[00:49.460 --> 00:52.460]  And that includes community labs, which I'll just shout out right at the end.
[00:54.040 --> 00:55.920]  Okay, so who am I?
[00:57.000 --> 00:59.420]  I've been, like, a research tech for a long time.
[00:59.580 --> 01:02.960]  I started, like, in my undergraduate and, like, that went into grad school.
[01:03.220 --> 01:09.040]  Like, some of the fields that I've worked in is optimizing ethanol fermentation and yeast for, like, biofuel companies.
[01:10.040 --> 01:14.240]  And so, like, that's a picture of a big flask full of yeast, not one that I took.
[01:14.240 --> 01:15.380]  I just found it on the Internet.
[01:16.220 --> 01:18.700]  I also express proteins for crystallography.
[01:18.700 --> 01:21.040]  So, that is a picture that I took.
[01:21.240 --> 01:24.740]  It's just, like, it's a way of looking at how much protein you made.
[01:24.820 --> 01:27.720]  There's a big dark blot and that means I made a lot of protein.
[01:29.020 --> 01:36.260]  And crystallography is, like, they were using it to, they still use it to do drug screening outside of the body.
[01:36.380 --> 01:39.700]  It's also, like, a structural biology to see, like, the shape of a protein.
[01:41.760 --> 01:48.780]  And then I also did a lot of sacrificing mice in the span of cortical development research.
[01:49.640 --> 01:52.780]  So, animal work is tough, but also really necessary.
[01:53.020 --> 01:58.960]  It's, you know, it's a model body that we can actually use to see physiologic responses in.
[01:59.060 --> 02:01.180]  And it's not a human body.
[02:01.360 --> 02:05.440]  So, like, you know, we have a bit more liberties in sort of dealing with that.
[02:05.680 --> 02:07.160]  Not really my favorite work.
[02:07.160 --> 02:13.720]  But there are things that you can learn in vivo, as they say, that you can't learn in other systems.
[02:16.120 --> 02:20.980]  And then I also, like, looked at, like, protein domain function, chaperone function.
[02:21.200 --> 02:23.480]  So, like, that's, like, proteins do things, right?
[02:23.620 --> 02:31.340]  Proteins are, like, these essentially active biological molecules that our bodies make in order to perform all the functions of life.
[02:31.520 --> 02:34.260]  And they get split into different sections called domains.
[02:34.260 --> 02:39.100]  And one line of research is just, like, figuring out what those domains do.
[02:39.280 --> 02:42.020]  You know, tickle it a little bit in one direction, see what happens.
[02:42.820 --> 02:43.820]  And so forth.
[02:45.040 --> 02:48.300]  But what I really got interested in was, like, microbiology.
[02:49.620 --> 02:52.740]  Specifically, like, how organisms interact with each other.
[02:53.000 --> 02:59.740]  And so, like, this is just some conceptual diagram that I made during grad school saying that, like, you know, we have bacteria that live on our skin.
[02:59.740 --> 03:04.080]  And, like, that is normally a process that doesn't cause a lot of problems.
[03:04.080 --> 03:07.420]  But then, you know, something goes out of whack and then you get disease.
[03:07.780 --> 03:10.060]  And I think that's a really interesting way to conceptualize disease.
[03:10.160 --> 03:12.840]  That's sort of what brought me into this field in the first place.
[03:12.900 --> 03:16.840]  Just how those interactions breaking down cause really bad outcomes.
[03:16.840 --> 03:24.420]  So, I grew skin and I put bacteria on the surface of the skin and they grow into, like, colonies like you would see on a petri dish.
[03:24.560 --> 03:30.180]  But these are, like, much smaller than those because you had to use a scanning electron microscope to see something like this.
[03:30.440 --> 03:34.040]  And you can look up close and have those weird images that some people are uncomfortable with.
[03:35.600 --> 03:37.260]  Anyways, I dropped out of grad school.
[03:37.600 --> 03:43.120]  And a big question that, like, remained for me is, like, what sort of science could I even do as a dropout?
[03:43.120 --> 03:49.520]  And what was really nice to read was the words of this, you know, Nobel Prize winner, Cajal.
[03:49.880 --> 03:52.420]  Like, he said that translated from Spanish.
[03:52.560 --> 03:54.020]  So, I don't know actually what it was like in Spanish.
[03:54.060 --> 03:57.260]  But he said that, in scientific work, the means are virtually nothing.
[03:57.560 --> 03:58.880]  Where the person is almost everything.
[03:59.260 --> 04:00.640]  And I thought that was really cool.
[04:00.880 --> 04:02.080]  Like, it means that...
[04:02.080 --> 04:08.640]  I was like, that means that maybe this Nobel Prize winner is saying that I could be doing, like, groundbreaking science if I just put my mind to it, essentially.
[04:09.380 --> 04:10.860]  And that came from his experience.
[04:10.860 --> 04:15.300]  That his lab was essentially like this little room.
[04:15.420 --> 04:16.740]  That's him sitting at his lab.
[04:17.040 --> 04:19.020]  A desk with a bunch of vials and a microscope.
[04:19.780 --> 04:26.020]  And what he did day in and day out was cut up brains, stain them, and draw pictures of them.
[04:27.180 --> 04:34.100]  And then he would try to infer, based on those stains, how those neurons were attached, what's how the brain is working.
[04:35.180 --> 04:40.280]  And so, he produced amazing images of neurobiological development.
[04:40.640 --> 04:43.720]  And that was with very little tool sets.
[04:43.880 --> 04:47.520]  Like, microscopes, stains, a way to cut small slices of brains.
[04:48.120 --> 04:48.880]  That's not a lot.
[04:49.040 --> 04:50.860]  Like, if you wanted to...
[04:50.860 --> 04:53.700]  I'm trying to think of what's an easy source of brains out there in the world.
[04:53.920 --> 04:55.260]  I mean, insect brains, right?
[04:55.340 --> 04:57.600]  But like, you could go and capture a bunch of those objects.
[04:57.680 --> 04:59.240]  You could be doing this type of work.
[04:59.240 --> 05:02.140]  Of course, now, like, some tools are more complicated.
[05:02.500 --> 05:05.220]  You can't really find the same things as you could back then.
[05:05.280 --> 05:08.700]  But there are definitely still questions out there that you could use with the same tool set.
[05:09.920 --> 05:12.200]  So that got me really interested in DIY biology.
[05:13.740 --> 05:21.360]  And there's this book that was written by, like, a science and technology studies folks love looking at community biology labs.
[05:21.460 --> 05:23.540]  It's like, wow, it's a new social organization.
[05:23.760 --> 05:26.880]  Like, labs usually in the academia are now outside of it.
[05:26.880 --> 05:28.760]  So anyways, this guy wrote a book.
[05:29.260 --> 05:41.420]  And, yeah, I think he pointed out to us, or tries to elevate this point, that, you know, in order for science to continue, like, it really needs active relationships with economic, political, and social actors.
[05:42.580 --> 05:54.100]  And if science is going to have this, like, autonomy, sort of curiosity-driven research, like, it has to keep reforging those connections and making sure that those connections are strong.
[05:54.100 --> 06:02.140]  And I think maybe one of the limitations we have right now with industry and academia is, like, not enough good relations with community.
[06:02.280 --> 06:15.180]  And so, like, that's why I'm really happy to speak at a hacker conference, like, to maybe not an extremely technical scientific field about some of the ways that you could go out and maybe do some of this work, play around with DNA in your home labs or a community lab.
[06:17.000 --> 06:27.120]  So, in the span of trying to get involved with community biology, I have this vision for 100% member-funded lab, just like a hacker space, except we have a BSL-1 facility.
[06:27.860 --> 06:29.120]  People pay a monthly fee.
[06:29.340 --> 06:30.580]  They help maintain the lab.
[06:30.880 --> 06:32.360]  And then we teach classes.
[06:32.620 --> 06:35.320]  So that's what I've been doing in the last two years.
[06:36.660 --> 06:50.020]  And in doing that type of work, you really come up against a lot of different resource constraints that you wouldn't come up against if you were working in a typical academic or industrial lab.
[06:50.360 --> 06:55.940]  And that really gets you thinking creative ways to get the resources that you need.
[06:55.940 --> 06:58.480]  And it also constrains the problems that you can work on.
[06:59.740 --> 07:08.340]  And when I was trying to think of what I would talk about at HOPE, I thought, well, there's this concept of a sneaker net that maybe some hackers are familiar with.
[07:08.460 --> 07:10.480]  Also, people are talking about DNA as code.
[07:10.720 --> 07:15.340]  So, like, what would this, like, sneaker net for Libra Biotech Wetware look like?
[07:16.060 --> 07:22.020]  Because I think that is something that is maybe translatable in some ways to the audience.
[07:22.400 --> 07:25.920]  But, you know, in order to do that, actually, we have to do a bunch of translation.
[07:26.520 --> 07:29.560]  And so, this next section, I'm going to try to break down the jargon a bit.
[07:30.580 --> 07:31.680]  So, Biotech Wetware.
[07:33.220 --> 07:35.920]  There was a book that was written, not in 2007.
[07:36.040 --> 07:37.580]  It was further back.
[07:37.740 --> 07:43.000]  Oh, also, by the way, all these slides, like, I have a QR code at the end, and you'll be able to download them.
[07:44.040 --> 07:51.140]  And, like, because I come from that academic tradition, too, like, I think they're a good resource if you're interested in following up on any things that I say.
[07:51.140 --> 07:54.540]  Because, like, my hyperlinks and stuff, they're, like, little QR codes.
[07:54.720 --> 07:56.880]  There are QR codes, but they're hyperlinks.
[07:56.980 --> 07:59.780]  So, like, they'll go to the resource that I'm looking about, I'm talking about.
[08:00.220 --> 08:06.420]  So, anyways, this author, Rudy Rucker, in 2000, a long time ago, 84 or something like that.
[08:07.080 --> 08:08.960]  I was just, like, reading the Wikipedia article.
[08:09.120 --> 08:12.020]  Because when I think about wetware, I think about lab wetware.
[08:12.200 --> 08:14.860]  But actually, the term has been in sci-fi for a while.
[08:14.860 --> 08:18.560]  There are these robots called, like, meat bops or something like that.
[08:18.680 --> 08:23.800]  And, like, they were, like, trying to transmit their consciousness into human bodies so they could evade detection.
[08:24.580 --> 08:24.980]  Wetware.
[08:25.080 --> 08:26.980]  That was what the term was used for.
[08:27.080 --> 08:28.860]  And then, you know, it's got picked up in science fiction.
[08:29.000 --> 08:32.480]  Because it could also just be, like, a computer that's made of biology.
[08:32.800 --> 08:36.360]  So, like, you know, in the Starship Voyager, they got those bineural gel packs.
[08:36.540 --> 08:38.040]  Like, people say that is wetware.
[08:38.500 --> 08:44.100]  But the wetware I'm talking about today, as the MC alluded to, is DNA.
[08:45.840 --> 08:47.380]  DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid.
[08:47.780 --> 08:51.940]  We're going to, you know, biology sort of lesson now.
[08:52.140 --> 08:53.080]  It's a molecule.
[08:54.400 --> 08:57.780]  And that molecule contains a code, which we call the genome.
[08:58.060 --> 09:01.980]  And all living things on this planet use it to make their bodies.
[09:01.980 --> 09:04.380]  Or whatever constitutes their body.
[09:04.520 --> 09:06.840]  Because, like, body is a strange term sometimes.
[09:07.940 --> 09:10.020]  And there's so many ways to draw DNA.
[09:10.220 --> 09:12.340]  You know, like, here's a space-filling...
[09:12.340 --> 09:15.300]  Actually, not quite space-filling, but ball and stick model of DNA.
[09:15.820 --> 09:17.440]  This is a space-filling molecule model.
[09:18.400 --> 09:21.140]  And then on the other side, there's, like, a sort of a more cartoony diagram.
[09:21.980 --> 09:22.940]  And here's another one.
[09:23.060 --> 09:23.240]  Right?
[09:23.340 --> 09:26.100]  Everyone's very familiar, I think, with this, like, double helix.
[09:26.280 --> 09:29.660]  And it really just, like, what is the detail that you want to see about this molecule?
[09:30.640 --> 09:32.420]  But I think an important thing to always remember...
[09:32.420 --> 09:43.320]  And I think this is an important lesson for an audience that thinks about DNA as code, or, like, is used to using code, is that it has this strict physicality to it.
[09:43.680 --> 09:52.620]  And the ways in which that we design tools, like how proteins are in nature, really relies on that physicality.
[09:52.620 --> 09:53.280]  Right?
[09:53.420 --> 09:54.020]  I mean, yes.
[09:54.220 --> 09:54.340]  Okay.
[09:55.600 --> 09:56.440]  The sequence...
[09:56.440 --> 09:58.760]  Some proteins only recognize a specific sequence.
[09:58.920 --> 09:59.060]  Right?
[09:59.160 --> 10:03.700]  So you would say, oh, it's only recognizing A, T, C, G, G, G, A, whatever.
[10:05.180 --> 10:06.700]  But what that is...
[10:06.700 --> 10:10.940]  What the correlate of that is a physical shape that exists in the DNA.
[10:11.960 --> 10:17.180]  And that's really important when we're thinking about interacting with this molecule and making changes to it.
[10:18.460 --> 10:22.380]  And then all that DNA is typically packaged inside of a cell.
[10:22.640 --> 10:24.880]  And cells are the basic unit of life.
[10:25.080 --> 10:26.580]  This is a picture of, like...
[10:26.580 --> 10:27.440]  I think it's an onion.
[10:28.120 --> 10:29.220]  An onion slice.
[10:29.680 --> 10:31.000]  Because if you...
[10:31.000 --> 10:36.360]  If you slice onion skin, you know, some of those weird white flimsy tissue paper-like stuff.
[10:36.580 --> 10:38.060]  Like, that's a monolayer of cells.
[10:38.180 --> 10:41.060]  And you can place that on a slide and see cells.
[10:42.120 --> 10:44.440]  And so cells are the basic unit of life.
[10:44.440 --> 10:49.460]  And, like, just extremely wonderful self-replicating little things.
[10:49.820 --> 10:51.520]  There's so many different types of cells.
[10:51.880 --> 10:54.560]  You know, we are collections of different types of cells.
[10:56.120 --> 11:03.740]  And the relationship between cells and DNA is that cells have to read and interpret the DNA that's inside of them in order to live.
[11:04.900 --> 11:07.020]  There's, like, a huge process.
[11:07.020 --> 11:09.820]  Actually, one of the steps is called translation.
[11:10.480 --> 11:13.600]  Also transcription is one of the terms people use in that.
[11:13.600 --> 11:18.060]  But, yeah, they have to do this big process on their DNA in order to live.
[11:18.300 --> 11:23.060]  In order to produce the proteins that build the cell wall, they have to read their DNA.
[11:23.960 --> 11:32.240]  And so a concept in biotechnology is let's edit that code and then the cell will do something different.
[11:32.760 --> 11:40.420]  So this is a diagram from Wikipedia where, on one side, we have, like, a pro... we have a prokaryotic cell.
[11:40.600 --> 11:41.120]  Oh, let's see.
[11:41.280 --> 11:43.780]  Do I have access to a... I should've...
[11:45.800 --> 11:47.120]  I have a tiny little cursor.
[11:47.460 --> 11:47.760]  All right.
[11:47.880 --> 11:49.380]  On one side, we have...
[11:50.900 --> 11:52.700]  On one side, we have a prokaryotic cell.
[11:52.840 --> 11:53.100]  That's E. coli.
[11:53.500 --> 11:55.320]  People sometimes call that the chassis.
[11:56.080 --> 12:03.740]  It's, like, the organism that is going to be engineered in order to have some specific functionality in biotech.
[12:03.880 --> 12:05.980]  And then on the other side, we have a eukaryotic cell.
[12:06.100 --> 12:07.620]  But really, this side could be anything.
[12:07.900 --> 12:12.340]  This side could be DNA that we get printed from some sort of DNA printer.
[12:12.640 --> 12:14.940]  You know, there's companies that just synthesize DNA out there.
[12:14.940 --> 12:18.120]  It could be any organism that you're interested in.
[12:18.380 --> 12:21.660]  So that could be another bacteria that just has an interesting functionality.
[12:21.660 --> 12:23.760]  You want to, like, get something out of there.
[12:24.920 --> 12:38.480]  And the idea is that if you can take the DNA from your source and you can take the DNA from your target and you can mash them up together and put them back into your target, that is the basis of genetic engineering.
[12:39.340 --> 12:48.700]  And so very important in this process is manipulating that molecule of DNA and putting it back inside a cell.
[12:48.960 --> 12:52.240]  Because DNA by itself isn't really doing much.
[12:52.440 --> 12:53.940]  It's just instructions.
[12:55.640 --> 12:57.580]  It's just the code, essentially.
[12:57.900 --> 13:00.340]  I mean, I was emphasizing it's a molecule.
[13:00.480 --> 13:01.680]  But, like, yeah, it's just that code.
[13:01.840 --> 13:07.260]  It has to be inside of the environment of a living object in order to execute those types of functions.
[13:08.540 --> 13:12.300]  And so here's, like, an example of that abstracted code, right?
[13:12.460 --> 13:13.520]  It might look this long.
[13:13.760 --> 13:15.380]  You know, it can look a lot longer than that.
[13:15.920 --> 13:19.960]  But within this, there are different patterns that emerge that have different functions.
[13:21.780 --> 13:25.260]  And as I said, it could be synthesized chemically.
[13:26.300 --> 13:29.300]  And this is an example of a chemical synthesis machine.
[13:29.820 --> 13:32.380]  Not many labs do this type of work.
[13:32.580 --> 13:37.950]  Like, for example, in academia, not every lab has a little synthesis machine in their space.
[13:38.540 --> 13:43.480]  They're not dreaming up a design, making it, and then pasting it into a cell.
[13:43.660 --> 13:45.440]  They're usually using a company to do that.
[13:45.580 --> 13:47.800]  And that's, like, economy of scale sort of things.
[13:48.460 --> 13:57.360]  These machines are typically at some sort of big facility that is taking orders online and printing out tons of little fragments of DNA.
[13:57.860 --> 14:00.880]  So there is an aspect of in-silico design here, right?
[14:01.000 --> 14:09.260]  You can, at your laptops, design something really cool based on different sequences that you found in nature and then say, I want to paste this in.
[14:09.600 --> 14:14.700]  But when it does, there's not a lot of prediction out there.
[14:15.900 --> 14:17.280]  You have to try it out.
[14:18.540 --> 14:33.080]  And if you want it to self-replicate, which one of the reasons I think biotech is just an amazing technology is that it's in living things, living things self-replicate, meaning that we should be able to share stuff all over the place because you just grow it by yourself.
[14:33.300 --> 14:37.360]  But if you want that functionality, that DNA has to be inside of a living organism.
[14:38.560 --> 14:43.120]  And so this picture here is from 2006.
[14:43.640 --> 14:48.440]  That's the first time somebody had made a whole synthetic chromosome.
[14:48.440 --> 14:55.980]  So they took all the DNA that's required for a living organism was fully synthesized and assembled in a lab.
[14:56.860 --> 15:04.660]  But in order to prove that it was a fully functional chromosome, and in order to have more of that chromosome, they had to put it inside of a cell.
[15:04.780 --> 15:15.000]  So you can see that one of the steps along this process, design, build, and test, synthesis, construction, cloning, isolation, and then transplantation.
[15:15.760 --> 15:17.000]  So you can't...
[15:17.520 --> 15:26.700]  Like, I think, at least in the circles that I run in where people are super excited about biotech, there's a lot of talk about how it's so great.
[15:26.920 --> 15:31.720]  Like, you can design this stuff, and you can rapid prototype, and you can make something and try it out.
[15:32.940 --> 15:38.740]  I think sometimes what gets lost in that sentence is that you still have to get it into the cell that you want to make it work in.
[15:38.740 --> 15:40.660]  And so that might be fine if you're working in E. coli.
[15:40.700 --> 15:46.480]  Which is, like, everyone knows how to get DNA... everyone, but, like, many people know how to work to get DNA into E. coli.
[15:46.980 --> 15:49.680]  It's a lot harder when you're trying to get DNA into something else.
[15:50.040 --> 16:03.900]  Like, for example, when I was going through grad school, there were these wizards of people who could get DNA into mouse embryos, because mice are a huge research tool, and getting DNA into them is a challenge.
[16:03.900 --> 16:05.900]  And they were wizards, right?
[16:06.160 --> 16:07.100]  Like, tactical and tactical.
[16:07.560 --> 16:11.540]  But, like, they had a lot of hands-on knowledge on, like, how to get the DNA in there, right?
[16:11.740 --> 16:13.380]  They had the fine motor skills.
[16:13.660 --> 16:15.500]  They had the experience of failure.
[16:16.740 --> 16:30.880]  Yeah, so that's a really important thing that I want people to think about when we're thinking about trading biotech or doing biotech outside of these, like, big industrial academic systems, is that there are these big challenges of skill.
[16:31.660 --> 16:33.360]  And you can learn it.
[16:33.360 --> 16:37.180]  It's just going to take a bit of time, and finding the right people to train you up.
[16:40.580 --> 16:42.120]  So, that's biotech wetware.
[16:42.500 --> 16:51.460]  So, all of that to say is, biotech wetware is DNA inside of cells that we're building and changing for our own purposes.
[16:53.200 --> 16:54.220]  Could be really cool.
[16:54.440 --> 16:56.160]  Like, we could be making things like...
[16:56.160 --> 16:57.460]  People do DNA circuits.
[16:57.620 --> 16:58.680]  I don't know if you've heard of that before.
[16:59.060 --> 17:01.760]  Like, those circuits, some of them exist outside of cells.
[17:01.760 --> 17:05.240]  Of course, if you want self-replicating ones, they have to exist inside of cells.
[17:05.780 --> 17:07.180]  So, like, you could make those things.
[17:07.300 --> 17:12.580]  You could be playing around with that in your home, ordering DNA from companies, playing around with this DNA circuit, so to speak.
[17:14.100 --> 17:20.900]  The best way to share it would be inside of a cell, because then you could give that cell to someone else, they could grow those cells up, and then they would have their own copies of it.
[17:21.940 --> 17:24.100]  So, what do I mean when I say Libra?
[17:24.240 --> 17:27.380]  I think this audience probably has some conception of that, right?
[17:27.600 --> 17:29.660]  Free Libra open-source software.
[17:29.940 --> 17:31.580]  It's about choosing a license, right?
[17:31.920 --> 17:33.700]  Some sort of permissive...
[17:34.400 --> 17:42.140]  A permissive legal structure that allows you to view the code that's going in, adapt that code, modify it, and distribute it.
[17:42.500 --> 17:49.240]  And so, this is just some crazy flowchart that was probably made for academics or folks to be able to understand.
[17:49.480 --> 18:00.300]  Like, when you have an output, a creative cultural code, you know, this presentation, for example, output, how do you license it properly so people know they can use it afterwards?
[18:02.060 --> 18:04.940]  And a lot... scientists love that as well.
[18:05.100 --> 18:07.140]  You know, they want freely accessible information.
[18:08.540 --> 18:19.720]  It all gets kind of boiled down to this, like, open science publishing realm, which, when I was in grad school, I was like, yeah, I'm going to publish everything openly, and then you find out, oh, there's reasons why people don't publish everything openly,
[18:19.820 --> 18:24.320]  financial reasons, reasons that go to a career advancement.
[18:24.940 --> 18:28.040]  So anyways, all of that really can be traced back...
[18:28.040 --> 18:38.520]  All of this open science stuff could even be traced back to the Human Genome Project, where, I don't know if people are aware, there was a big government effort to sequence the first human genome.
[18:38.880 --> 18:52.280]  There was a scientist in that team who saw a lot of value from potentially patenting pieces of that code so that they could make royalties when people wanted to use pieces of that code.
[18:52.700 --> 19:04.440]  That scientist splintered off from the group and eventually founded their own company and started to compete with the scientists at the Human Genome Project in order to sequence all of that code.
[19:05.320 --> 19:08.180]  And through that company, attempted to patent it.
[19:08.560 --> 19:17.100]  But despite all of that, I think the scientific community was very focused on making sure that this data was more open, more freely accessible for people to use.
[19:17.600 --> 19:23.560]  And ultimately, it really served as a template for a lot of bioinformaticians.
[19:23.620 --> 19:28.120]  So I wasn't around at that time, but I got all of this from this Contrius 2010 paper.
[19:29.840 --> 19:48.100]  A lot of scientists working at that time, a lot of the bioinformaticians, it really emphasized the workflows of sharing that data to show that analysis gets so much faster when everyone can access that data set, when all of those analysis algorithms are also being shared amongst the different labs.
[19:49.280 --> 20:00.480]  Because I won't get into it, but the Human Genome Project at its very beginning, it was hampered by a lot of technological limitations of how we can manipulate that molecule.
[20:00.860 --> 20:10.920]  So that molecule of DNA, that physicality, nowadays we have great technology that it's much easier to manipulate the molecule, but back then, it was so much harder.
[20:11.100 --> 20:23.100]  And they actually relied a lot on computational methods in order to do the assembly, because they could only work with very short pieces, and so they had this big computational problem of if we only have a bunch of short pieces, how do we make sure they all puzzle,
[20:23.240 --> 20:24.840]  jigsaw together into the long piece?
[20:25.400 --> 20:37.980]  Okay, so anyways, right at the beginning, Human Genome Project really embedded, I think, like the, or sort of focused the scientific community on the value of working with open data.
[20:38.300 --> 20:47.040]  And so now, I mean, at its core, most scientists will agree that they want attribution for the work that they do, but otherwise they want it to be freely accessible.
[20:47.280 --> 20:56.460]  And you can add on to that, like, you know, copy left licensing, and a lot of like, a lot of scientific articles like sort of fall under creative commons licensing.
[20:57.540 --> 21:01.240]  And this is also where we see like the proliferation of websites like open wetware.
[21:01.460 --> 21:05.600]  And so that's a website where you could go and you could look up protocols on how to do some of this work.
[21:05.780 --> 21:06.580]  They'll tell you what to order.
[21:06.680 --> 21:15.960]  It's other labs that are sharing their protocols with each other, the ways in which they physically interact with that DNA, what salt to use, what protein to use to do the cutting.
[21:16.640 --> 21:17.780]  That's all there.
[21:17.920 --> 21:18.300]  It's a wiki.
[21:18.740 --> 21:40.180]  And it's a really great resource that has also recently been sort of under corporate capture because a big publishing company created an alternative called protocols.io, which has great user features in it, but at the same time like is now feeding these protocols into the scientific publishing
[21:40.180 --> 21:40.620]  system.
[21:40.820 --> 21:57.000]  And as folks may know, there are still many challenges that exist with publishing, specifically with the incentives that go into publishing, both from the public, the individual content creators, let's say scientists, as well as like the business models of those companies.
[21:57.640 --> 22:04.020]  So yeah, the librarians that spoke last time up here, someone had the relics, don't do it.
[22:04.660 --> 22:10.320]  You know, there are these multinational conglomerates, but a lot of work has been done to try to open up some of that.
[22:11.060 --> 22:20.600]  And thinking about how we share our research results, especially as a DIY community, is actually like a really important problem that isn't fully solved, I would say.
[22:23.860 --> 22:36.400]  Sort of going back to like the physical objects though, like the DNA molecules that we want to share with each other, the cells that we want to share with each other, they typically are governed by something called a material transfer agreement.
[22:36.400 --> 22:45.720]  And so these are legal agreements that typically like the university tech transfer office is the holder of all these material transfer agreements.
[22:45.980 --> 22:56.360]  And they say like, if one lab wants to send something to another lab, right, what are the allowed usages of that object that we're transmitting between labs?
[22:56.360 --> 23:02.980]  And so MTAs typically from a tech transfer office are, you can only use it for research.
[23:03.040 --> 23:10.380]  If you can't commercialize anything, you have to like talk to the university because they want to own the intellectual property on everything that their researchers are making.
[23:10.380 --> 23:23.140]  There are some universities that I think do a better job about letting their investigators hold on to the intellectual property rights or decide how the investigators in that institution use their intellectual property rights.
[23:23.860 --> 23:29.580]  But typically you have to fight an uphill battle if you're going to license things in a more open way.
[23:29.980 --> 23:32.360]  And so there is an organization that created this open MTA.
[23:32.780 --> 23:36.000]  You know, part of the battle would just be saying, I want to use this one.
[23:36.000 --> 23:50.680]  And this one does have a little bit more essentially condenses like the information about freely accessibility, freedom to reuse and distribute inside of this document.
[23:52.320 --> 23:58.220]  But one thing that I've learned is that typically MTAs aren't enforced that much.
[23:59.980 --> 24:06.840]  There's no... well, first of all, it's an issue of like... it's an issue of who's checking up on you, right?
[24:06.940 --> 24:10.020]  Like who's seeing if you're using this strain in a way that wasn't allowed?
[24:10.300 --> 24:18.220]  Like when you get a microbiology stab and you streak it out and then you start doing your own research on it, know who's watching, right?
[24:18.340 --> 24:22.680]  Who's watching that day-to-day thing to say that all those uses that you're doing are allowed?
[24:23.400 --> 24:26.300]  In the research world, that's like through grants, right?
[24:26.300 --> 24:28.840]  Grant money might be tied up with like legal usage.
[24:29.080 --> 24:32.540]  But in the DIY community, it really isn't tied in the same way.
[24:33.080 --> 24:35.680]  Where it will get enforced is alongside patents.
[24:36.020 --> 24:45.840]  So once a company like develops something, a really interesting piece, a really interesting cell, let's say, and they're starting to build a business around that, around selling that cell.
[24:46.160 --> 25:00.320]  If you took a streak of that cell and you started growing it yourself and then sending it to your friends and then maybe trying to sell it to your friends, that's where you might hit a patent infringement and then the MTA will be used as sort of like corroborating documents that you're like,
[25:00.400 --> 25:05.380]  oh, you've broken these laws and these laws in the distribution of this particular object.
[25:07.020 --> 25:09.760]  Yeah, and as I said, there's better options out there.
[25:09.920 --> 25:13.540]  So when you're working, if you are trying to make things open, you can license openly.
[25:14.940 --> 25:15.500]  Okay.
[25:15.700 --> 25:16.460]  And so then sneaker net.
[25:17.000 --> 25:17.060]  Okay.
[25:17.300 --> 25:17.580]  All of this.
[25:17.920 --> 25:21.820]  I'm like halfway through talking but like we're only getting through the introduction.
[25:22.420 --> 25:26.000]  Like sneaker net is something where code gets...
[25:26.000 --> 25:36.980]  Before we had good networks to send data around, like you could just download everything in a physical drive and you could walk that physical drive over to another system and load it up there.
[25:37.380 --> 25:40.420]  And everything I've described really is a sneaker net, right?
[25:40.420 --> 25:51.540]  Like besides sending DNA sequences around through the Internet and doing those designs all in silico, all of biology has this very firm physical representation to it.
[25:51.820 --> 25:59.420]  And so I would say that the sneaker net for biotech is already in place in the mail system between universities, right?
[25:59.660 --> 26:06.500]  There is... everyone is physically moving their biotech wetware around and plugging it into new systems, new labs.
[26:07.560 --> 26:09.200]  Yeah, everything is that.
[26:09.200 --> 26:20.400]  But what I'd like to speak to about in this section is like that extends not to these like highly engineered, you know, research strains that are being made, let's say, edited pieces of DNA.
[26:20.680 --> 26:25.200]  But like also plant clippings and like kombucha cultures.
[26:25.500 --> 26:31.540]  Sharing biology, that modality is physical and there are long traditions of sharing all sorts of biology.
[26:31.940 --> 26:34.180]  How did the first kombucha get made?
[26:34.180 --> 26:39.820]  If you... if people know kombucha, it's like this fermented tea drink and then, you know, put sugar in it.
[26:39.960 --> 26:47.980]  And then typically you ask your friend for a SCOBY, which is a disc of cellulose that has yeast and bacteria that live on it.
[26:48.060 --> 26:53.580]  And they give it to you and then you put it in your pot of tea that has sugar in it and it grows another SCOBY.
[26:53.580 --> 26:58.940]  And you can see in this picture, there's like layers and you just peel one off and you just like send it to your friend.
[26:59.220 --> 27:00.760]  Or, you know, there are businesses online.
[27:00.940 --> 27:02.240]  You can order them online.
[27:02.360 --> 27:03.700]  I mean, this picture is from Etsy, right?
[27:03.760 --> 27:04.740]  They're sending them through Etsy.
[27:06.000 --> 27:17.000]  And these long traditions of sharing biology, like we should be thinking about it as like the state of tech that most people have around sharing biotech wetware, right?
[27:17.200 --> 27:19.040]  Different kombuchas taste different.
[27:19.320 --> 27:23.460]  And knowing like which is the best kombucha out there, right?
[27:23.580 --> 27:32.060]  Maybe even engineering a better kombucha and sharing that with your friends, like that may be like our state-of-the-art sort of DIY biotech wetware.
[27:33.360 --> 27:37.200]  Of course, there are DIY biologists out there that are also sharing things.
[27:37.360 --> 27:46.260]  And so here's a great example of a scientist, Sebastian Koscioba, who like made a suite of plasmids that made different colors.
[27:46.620 --> 27:48.600]  So plasmids are little short pieces of DNA.
[27:48.600 --> 27:49.680]  They're inside of cells.
[27:49.920 --> 27:51.200]  They made a whole bunch of different colors.
[27:51.200 --> 27:55.300]  And then we can use those colored bacteria to make some bio art, let's say.
[27:55.620 --> 27:57.060]  And how did I get these strains?
[27:57.360 --> 28:01.700]  Well, I messaged Sebastian online on Twitter at that time.
[28:01.700 --> 28:06.620]  And then I went down to the concierge of his building and I picked up some vials of this bacteria.
[28:08.000 --> 28:11.280]  And yeah, that's really as easy as it can be.
[28:12.200 --> 28:16.180]  But it does require knowing people and it requires being able to move these objects around.
[28:17.760 --> 28:19.520]  I'll also point out... oh yeah, sorry.
[28:19.660 --> 28:25.820]  Researchers, they have like established biological repositories that facilitate the sharing for them.
[28:26.000 --> 28:30.500]  And actually, you too can have access to those repositories if you create a count on them.
[28:30.500 --> 28:34.960]  Sometimes what happens is those accounts get limited to business addresses.
[28:35.240 --> 28:38.780]  And so like you'd have to have your own business address or like you'd have to form...
[28:38.780 --> 28:40.820]  Yeah, they won't just send it to your home.
[28:41.520 --> 28:47.880]  But here are some great resources too, tapping into how the academic system does shares their biotech wetware.
[28:48.500 --> 28:50.940]  AdGene is a non-profit company that does those distributions.
[28:52.100 --> 28:55.080]  ATCC is like a big company that does that as well.
[28:55.980 --> 29:03.580]  One thing about this though is that they're servicing the researcher community who have huge amounts of funding from grants and so forth.
[29:03.720 --> 29:10.420]  And so it's expensive because they're not concerned about cost in the same way that a DIY biologist may be concerned about.
[29:11.400 --> 29:17.120]  So all that to say biology and thus theoretically biotech is just this extremely shareable tech.
[29:18.180 --> 29:25.260]  And indeed we have been sharing it freely for ages, just not the highly engineered version that you might make in the lab.
[29:27.160 --> 29:29.920]  So where is my jet pack so to speak?
[29:30.060 --> 29:37.220]  Where is the biotech network that's sharing like new advances in DNA engineering with each other?
[29:37.220 --> 29:37.260]  Sure.
[29:38.040 --> 29:45.220]  Well, one problem is, as I said before, like typically all this research and development is done like with budgets that are highly...
[29:45.780 --> 29:47.300]  Okay, I might say inflated.
[29:47.940 --> 29:52.560]  There's reasons sometimes for how expensive things are, but like there's definitely a lot of inflation around that as well.
[29:53.300 --> 29:56.480]  Here's someone with a dead mouse that's $4 million down the drain.
[29:56.480 --> 30:14.860]  And of course, like the academic research system knows the cost of this and in the attempt to recoup costs has created these tech transfer offices as ways to capitalize on the intellectual property being made by those research and development investments from large federal research grants.
[30:15.480 --> 30:15.560]  Right?
[30:15.740 --> 30:18.440]  So Hobbes says, like, do you want to play God?
[30:18.560 --> 30:19.040]  Not exactly.
[30:19.160 --> 30:20.860]  God never bothered to patent his stuff.
[30:23.320 --> 30:25.100]  So maybe we just pirate it.
[30:25.100 --> 30:26.320]  Maybe that's the solution.
[30:26.480 --> 30:27.820]  We can like take it out of that system.
[30:28.040 --> 30:32.320]  We can find, you know, make a personal connection somewhere along the road and ask for something.
[30:32.580 --> 30:34.320]  And indeed, that's something that has happened.
[30:34.560 --> 30:46.640]  I'm pretty sure like it's being presented here at HOPE before, but I found the presentation on Defcon where you just like call up the researcher and say, oh, I found this really cool bacteria that like outcompetes other bacteria similar in the mouth.
[30:46.920 --> 30:48.580]  Like, could you send me a sample of that?
[30:48.740 --> 30:49.980]  And then sometimes you'll get it.
[30:49.980 --> 30:56.560]  I mean, I've had success trying to get plasmids that make proteins that replicate DNA.
[30:56.820 --> 30:56.980]  Right?
[30:57.080 --> 30:58.140]  Because that's a tool that I need.
[30:58.300 --> 30:59.740]  So I'll just like call up a professor.
[30:59.860 --> 31:02.900]  Maybe I found their research information on open wetware.org.
[31:03.400 --> 31:07.220]  Say that I'm trying to do a project, make a little connection and then ask for it.
[31:07.360 --> 31:08.700]  They'll just send it to you in the mail.
[31:08.700 --> 31:13.620]  Or they'll ask you to contact their tech transfer office, maybe, and then you'll have to go through that mechanism.
[31:14.680 --> 31:16.920]  The issue is, is that they're not products.
[31:17.160 --> 31:17.320]  Oops.
[31:17.520 --> 31:18.340]  One of the...
[31:18.340 --> 31:19.440]  Anyways, they're not products.
[31:19.780 --> 31:19.860]  Right?
[31:20.160 --> 31:21.760]  These are research objects.
[31:21.980 --> 31:24.100]  And so there might not be exactly what you need.
[31:24.320 --> 31:27.440]  So like in this case, Michael did not get like...
[31:27.440 --> 31:32.420]  Or the Forthies Vinner Collector did not get the object that was being used in clinical trials.
[31:32.540 --> 31:33.720]  They got a precursor to that.
[31:33.960 --> 31:34.220]  Right?
[31:34.320 --> 31:35.880]  And so it's not going to be...
[31:36.360 --> 31:37.860]  It's not going to work perfectly.
[31:37.860 --> 31:40.180]  You're not going to be able to ask for everything that you need in this space.
[31:40.900 --> 31:43.240]  Furthermore, it might not work at the home scale.
[31:43.540 --> 31:45.660]  So there are these researchers that...
[31:46.360 --> 31:48.220]  It's a pre-print from 2015.
[31:48.520 --> 31:51.360]  They were like, oh, I think there was a...
[31:51.360 --> 31:53.020]  They were actually doing this in a reactionary way.
[31:53.180 --> 32:01.120]  They were like, oh, there's all this press saying that like, now that we can make opioids and yeast, there's going to be an epidemic of opioid production at the DIY scale.
[32:01.420 --> 32:01.640]  Right?
[32:01.700 --> 32:04.060]  What if someone gets their hands on the yeast that makes opioids?
[32:04.660 --> 32:06.180]  Well, some researchers tried it.
[32:06.180 --> 32:08.720]  They like asked for the strain that made opioids.
[32:09.240 --> 32:12.200]  And then they tried to make it in this homebrew setup in the lab bench.
[32:12.360 --> 32:14.120]  And what they found was it didn't work.
[32:14.560 --> 32:15.040]  Right?
[32:15.300 --> 32:19.340]  You might not get something that works because the way that these strains are made is...
[32:19.340 --> 32:28.880]  I mean, this is a super difficult to understand graph, but essentially it shows like there's a big spike in the black trace that is the standard.
[32:28.880 --> 32:31.580]  And then when you look at the red trace, that's the test trace.
[32:31.740 --> 32:34.360]  You would want to see a spike there if it was made, but it wasn't.
[32:34.940 --> 32:37.320]  And so like, whoa, it didn't work.
[32:37.580 --> 32:44.760]  Because these strains are being made for large pharmaceutical companies that are working with fermenters at the 10,000 liter scale, let's say.
[32:44.960 --> 32:48.980]  They are working with equipment that we don't have access to really in the home sense.
[32:48.980 --> 32:57.680]  So all of this biotech development, right, that's happening there, it's not translatable into the context that a DIY biologist might be working in.
[32:58.320 --> 33:00.220]  And that's super unfortunate, I think.
[33:00.620 --> 33:06.340]  Well, okay, I guess it's fortunate in one sense because, okay, we don't have this huge epidemic of like bad actors or whatever.
[33:06.520 --> 33:22.520]  But like, it's also really unfortunate because all of that investment in research, like it's going to prop up a system that we ultimately will have to, you know, we'll have to work with those larger companies in order to get the product out instead of thinking about like a place that we could fork from and make something like at our scale.
[33:29.340 --> 33:32.980]  So, just want to tie in a bit of like feminist critique into this.
[33:33.240 --> 33:40.960]  Like, Jubelina Roy is a molecular biologist who spoke a little bit about how like, you know, the limitations of science itself.
[33:40.960 --> 33:49.060]  And very importantly, that she pointed out that scientists formulate their hypotheses with all their ideological assumptions intact, right?
[33:49.120 --> 33:58.840]  They're able to cut out all of the things like that might be deemed unnecessary at the moment in order to pursue that like pure line of thought towards the technology development.
[33:58.840 --> 34:11.140]  And that means that if we don't have stakeholders at the level of doing this research, asking for things like home use, decentralized, you know, supporting a DIY open-source community.
[34:11.460 --> 34:14.240]  Like, we're not going to get those products.
[34:14.460 --> 34:19.080]  We're not going to get those research intermediates that can plug into the system in the same way.
[34:19.820 --> 34:27.060]  So, we need biotech development outside of traditional academia industry that considers a more human scale and decentralized use case.
[34:28.800 --> 34:33.360]  So, what is out there that actually fits this criteria, right?
[34:33.460 --> 34:34.900]  Where is the Libra biotech?
[34:35.060 --> 34:37.980]  I can point to a defunct project called Free Genes.
[34:38.640 --> 34:54.060]  It turned out it was really the efforts of just one independent biologist who found himself in an academic research lab, who pitched a project to say, let's make distributions of IP free genes, as well as a bunch of other genes, and let's just send them to people.
[34:54.060 --> 35:00.840]  The cost is minimal when we think about grant money to send plates of bacteria or plates of dried down DNA pellets to others.
[35:02.000 --> 35:03.400]  Again, defunct.
[35:03.760 --> 35:06.140]  So, you can go to the websites there, free genes.org.
[35:06.280 --> 35:07.960]  Actually, it's like stanford.freegenes.org.
[35:08.280 --> 35:10.120]  But, like, you can't order those anymore.
[35:10.720 --> 35:21.180]  There are still some organizations, like the open science network, like reclone.org, like biotech without borders, that have the distributions that they got from free genes, and they may send you something.
[35:21.480 --> 35:24.560]  But these organizations are largely volunteer-based.
[35:24.780 --> 35:29.500]  They're not funded by some funding stream that's helping to prop up this type of DIY system.
[35:29.900 --> 35:37.420]  And so, contact them if you want something, but also recognize that there's limitations on labor and resources in those organizations.
[35:38.620 --> 35:44.720]  And, of course, there are projects that have spun out from all of this, like Open Insulin or the iGEM distributions.
[35:45.180 --> 35:56.200]  They're making really cool tools, and often the people that are making them have these Libra open-source sort of philosophies behind them, and they want to share their stuff.
[35:56.440 --> 36:00.640]  Of course, sometimes, because they're working in the academic system, they're going to have limitations on that.
[36:00.640 --> 36:10.880]  But one thing that I've also learned about working academia is when you know a professor, and they know you, and they know that what their biotech is, is like safe for the home, like maybe they'll give you something?
[36:11.220 --> 36:12.620]  Like, I've... it happens.
[36:15.460 --> 36:22.220]  I wanted to highlight one project, also a little bit defunct now, run by that independent biologist who was working with the free genes project.
[36:22.840 --> 36:24.240]  It's called the Spornet Protocol.
[36:24.580 --> 36:27.180]  You can listen to Keone talk about it on YouTube.
[36:27.180 --> 36:29.780]  It was in a bio summit from some years past.
[36:29.780 --> 36:32.300]  But there's this really great object, B. subtilis.
[36:33.020 --> 36:34.980]  It's a bacteria that makes spores.
[36:35.520 --> 36:38.380]  And spores are really great because...
[36:38.380 --> 36:43.120]  One issue about sharing cells around is that they die.
[36:43.680 --> 36:48.920]  And the best way to keep a cell is in the freezer, typically a minus 80 freezer that we don't have access to.
[36:49.180 --> 36:54.960]  So if you want access to cells, you have to have some piece of equipment that you might not have.
[36:55.780 --> 36:59.040]  Spores, however, they don't need that type of storage requirement.
[36:59.040 --> 37:05.160]  They're sort of dormant little pellets of cells that live inside of this particular bacteria.
[37:05.820 --> 37:18.380]  And if we move our Libra biotech construct into a spore, then we can have that dried down on a piece of paper, let's say, and store that indefinitely.
[37:18.840 --> 37:22.600]  And then when you want it, you just have to wake it up with a little bit of media.
[37:24.340 --> 37:25.840]  So I think this is a really good project.
[37:26.840 --> 37:38.380]  I think that it is getting around an issue where a lot of biotech is being shared assuming that the infrastructure behind you is like a fully functional lab.
[37:38.380 --> 37:43.280]  But maybe the only thing you have access to is an incubator and a shaker, right?
[37:43.480 --> 37:44.540]  And that's not...
[37:44.540 --> 37:49.420]  That might sound difficult for some people, but it's actually a pretty simple sort of set of things to build.
[37:49.780 --> 37:57.840]  If we rely on sharing our constructs through spores, we don't have to worry about keeping the cells alive in a freezer.
[38:02.300 --> 38:10.880]  There's also, like, academic projects that are trying to leverage, like, a different model of looking at how to put IP on their outputs.
[38:11.360 --> 38:25.860]  So the open plant project, I think, did a really good job of outlining that there are some things that, okay, specific applications where people are trying to make money, that stuff might be eligible for IP protection.
[38:25.860 --> 38:29.940]  Because, like, we're not going to get all that recent development if we didn't incentivize in some way.
[38:30.140 --> 38:36.840]  But there are things that should be in the public domain, like working on the basic plant chassis, right, in this case.
[38:37.120 --> 38:43.560]  Like working on core laboratories, working on engineering the DNA itself, like the circuit that does something.
[38:43.800 --> 38:51.380]  Those things should remain in the public domain because that allows us to access, as the Human Genome Project learned, right?
[38:51.380 --> 38:58.020]  All of this worldwide expertise network in order to push that technology forward.
[39:01.140 --> 39:02.580]  And, okay.
[39:03.180 --> 39:07.800]  So, all that to say, biotech wetware is this very broad category.
[39:08.900 --> 39:18.100]  I describe DNA as the object, but I also try to point out that it's as simple as, like, sharing starter cultures of different ferments.
[39:18.100 --> 39:22.760]  Like, these are all self... if it's in a cell, it's a self-replicating object.
[39:23.040 --> 39:25.840]  And we can just pass them around whenever we want.
[39:28.280 --> 39:33.720]  Academia and industry aren't really incentivized to make things on this decentralized human scale.
[39:34.280 --> 39:38.260]  There are investigators out there that might be allies in this.
[39:38.520 --> 39:47.520]  Indeed, they may even just pass you some of the things that they've made as, like, your way of forking that development, right, into a more open system.
[39:47.520 --> 39:47.980]  Right?
[39:48.100 --> 39:53.820]  Maybe you ask for something, and then you put it into SporeNet, and then we can distribute it by a Spores, let's say.
[39:56.500 --> 39:58.660]  Libra licensing is, like, super important, right?
[39:58.740 --> 40:06.140]  It gives us a chance of innovating equitable biotech, because we have more eyes on these problems.
[40:06.140 --> 40:18.740]  We have more minds thinking about how to use this stuff, instead of being restricted to thinking about how it fits in to the existing infrastructure of scaling up biotech production.
[40:21.180 --> 40:28.340]  And depending on your infrastructure access, there are sort of different levels of what is going to be easier to access for you.
[40:30.120 --> 40:34.160]  I think the easiest one is, like, something that is cells.
[40:34.460 --> 40:37.320]  But, like, because cells are just... you can grow them.
[40:37.440 --> 40:39.600]  If you can grow cells, then you can share cells.
[40:39.800 --> 40:42.760]  But the issue is that what do you do to store those cells?
[40:43.460 --> 40:45.740]  And so, anyways, that's one of the barriers.
[40:47.600 --> 40:51.660]  Okay, so, I mentioned Biotech Without Borders.
[40:51.900 --> 40:55.200]  That's a community biology lab that I'm a part of here in New York City.
[40:56.360 --> 41:01.120]  It's a member-led organization, and this is a snapshot of some of the equipment that we have.
[41:01.420 --> 41:04.040]  In your jurisdictions, you might have a community lab.
[41:04.040 --> 41:08.060]  So this would be a great way to get access to some of that infrastructure that you need.
[41:08.060 --> 41:14.260]  And then from that standpoint, then start calling up people and asking for the strain that you want to work on, let's say.
[41:15.980 --> 41:21.140]  I said earlier that we are trying to distribute some of those free genes things.
[41:21.320 --> 41:26.680]  We're doing that kind of as, like, an educational program where students can come and learn how to clone DNA.
[41:26.940 --> 41:32.700]  But in doing so, they're cloning the IP-free DNA so that we can sort of accept some requests for people that might want that stuff.
[41:33.320 --> 41:38.620]  Similarly, I point out the Open Science Network is following the same workflow.
[41:38.980 --> 41:39.760]  And they're in Vancouver.
[41:42.380 --> 41:47.160]  And also, if you become a member of the Biotech Without Borders Lab, you can also just participate in that project.
[41:47.560 --> 41:47.640]  Right?
[41:47.740 --> 41:51.820]  Like, it's kind of the way that we're trying to get some community involvement around these sorts of things.
[41:53.160 --> 42:03.400]  If you need to find me to talk about this sort of stuff or to maybe think about, like, one of the things I'm super interested in, I mentioned kombucha for a reason.
[42:03.860 --> 42:13.220]  Because I think that there are, because these traditions already exist for sharing wetware, we should be thinking about how to put our biotech into those formats.
[42:13.220 --> 42:16.840]  Because those are the formats that people are comfortable with sharing and comfortable with using.
[42:17.260 --> 42:22.880]  And so, if we're going to, like, extend the capabilities of something, we should be extending the capabilities of stuff people are already using.
[42:23.100 --> 42:27.360]  Instead of trying to create something new that might cause some issues down the line.
[42:28.800 --> 42:32.160]  And if you're interested in talking about that stuff, then send me an email, please.
[42:32.420 --> 42:33.700]  Or connect with me on the Fediverse.
[42:34.040 --> 42:42.280]  If you're interested in stuff like using a community lab, getting the free genes distributions or so forth, then check out Biotech Without Borders and contact that organization.
[42:43.540 --> 42:49.600]  As I mentioned, this presentation is a resource for you, and I want it to be freely open and remixable and so forth.
[42:49.840 --> 42:52.960]  So happy that the AV folks are recording this.
[42:53.300 --> 42:54.440]  Like, it's just a great resource.
[42:54.700 --> 42:55.960]  So here's a QR code.
[42:56.060 --> 42:56.880]  So you can do that.
[42:57.060 --> 42:59.860]  And I'll make sure it gets up on the wiki maybe.
[42:59.960 --> 43:01.620]  I think that's probably the right place to put things.
[43:06.730 --> 43:09.730]  So yeah, that's what I got for you guys.
[43:10.590 --> 43:19.590]  I tried not to make it so technical, but I want to also describe enough of the biology that you understand where I'm coming from in terms of sharing this stuff.
[43:20.150 --> 43:23.050]  And if anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to take them.
[43:32.580 --> 43:34.100]  This is great talk, by the way.
[43:34.180 --> 43:36.280]  This is a kind of specific question.
[43:36.560 --> 43:41.060]  You said spores are a better alternative to distributing cells.
[43:41.760 --> 43:45.120]  Is it not possible to just distribute the DNA on its own?
[43:45.300 --> 43:48.520]  Like, why is distributing the spore better than distributing just the DNA?
[43:48.560 --> 43:50.940]  Yes, it is possible to distribute the DNA by itself.
[43:50.960 --> 43:52.100]  You can dry down DNA.
[43:52.300 --> 43:54.260]  It's also very resistant to things.
[43:54.400 --> 43:57.280]  And people also dry down DNA specifically on paper.
[43:57.420 --> 43:58.460]  They use, like, filter paper.
[43:59.440 --> 44:03.220]  And later on, the phrygianist distribution would change to just sending DNA.
[44:03.520 --> 44:07.920]  The issue is, is that you have to be able to put that DNA into a cell.
[44:08.480 --> 44:12.920]  And that's not going to be... that's sort of a step that introduces a potential error.
[44:13.100 --> 44:20.620]  So what if you run out of the... you don't get that one procedure to work, and then you run out of your starting DNA, you're sort of out of luck.
[44:21.280 --> 44:26.720]  It's like the self-replicating part of spores that makes it a really good format to share things in.
[44:27.100 --> 44:30.760]  Because once you get the spore, you can just give it some, like, media, right?
[44:30.920 --> 44:32.920]  Some LB is something that people use.
[44:33.180 --> 44:36.520]  It'll grow into cells that are already making tons of copies of that DNA.
[44:36.680 --> 44:37.240]  I see.
[44:37.320 --> 44:38.180]  Just follow up.
[44:38.340 --> 44:43.080]  But it's not that you necessarily care about the cell of the spore grows into itself.
[44:43.080 --> 44:45.660]  It's just because it's like a self-replicating medium.
[44:46.060 --> 44:46.060]  Yeah.
[44:46.060 --> 44:46.400]  Yeah.
[44:46.760 --> 44:55.780]  But I mean, this is the challenge, I think, for thinking about, like, developing very, like, different things that aren't just in bacillus, right?
[44:56.000 --> 45:00.700]  You'd say, oh, now you have to build the tool to get it out of that system and into the system you want.
[45:01.060 --> 45:05.800]  Or you can think about developing bacillus itself to be the object that's really useful.
[45:06.100 --> 45:09.360]  And that would be actually the thought process that I go down.
[45:09.560 --> 45:13.100]  Because kombucha is already a mixture of yeast and bacteria.
[45:13.380 --> 45:21.120]  So why can't we also, like, hitchhike on another organism in that community so that we can send around, like, those edited versions as well?
[45:21.900 --> 45:28.840]  I was just saying, I was going to ask whether or not there are... I think it's Gregory Church, I think he's made these... George Church.
[45:29.140 --> 45:30.320]  Or George Church, that's what it was.
[45:30.540 --> 45:35.720]  He's made, like, a CRISPR do-it-yourself-at-home kit that you can get.
[45:36.120 --> 45:42.840]  I was wondering if there's anything very similar to that, where you can kind of go get the tools you need for yourself to do it at home.
[45:42.840 --> 45:51.120]  Yeah, they're, like, so I think a very... I think that got very popular was the Odin did, like, a kit that they sent to people.
[45:51.260 --> 45:51.680]  Odin, that's what it was.
[45:52.120 --> 45:57.380]  They weren't, like, set up necessary to make, like, the business wasn't set up to make sure, like, it worked in everybody's hands.
[45:57.520 --> 46:00.940]  And so I heard that not everyone had good results with that kit.
[46:01.820 --> 46:06.960]  There are education companies that make kits to get bacteria into cells that you can use in classrooms.
[46:07.280 --> 46:11.280]  That would also give you everything that you need to sort of get started in that space as well.
[46:11.560 --> 46:20.540]  So I would say educational supply is a really great place to start if you're looking for, like, businesses that were formed around specifically, like, having some of these tools.
[46:21.900 --> 46:22.740]  Oh, thank you.
[46:24.120 --> 46:27.380]  I'm the MC, so I was here to tell you you'll only have two minutes, but I have a question about it.
[46:27.480 --> 46:42.700]  So in the university, I worked in the university environment a long time, and one thing that I would do was, in my grant proposals, I would indicate my intention to open-source the results, and that the reviewers like it.
[46:43.660 --> 46:49.640]  But I feel, but I wasn't in biology, and I feel like in biology, the intellectual property arm of the university might have some restrictions.
[46:49.880 --> 46:53.620]  So I wonder whether what I mentioned might be a winning strategy for university grants.
[46:53.820 --> 46:53.860]  Yeah, yeah.
[46:54.100 --> 47:07.880]  It's definitely be in a place where, so, like, from the community lab side, right, having an organization that's trying to build a hacker space around DIY biotech stuff, right, it really helps to have industry academic partners that have that line in their grants,
[47:08.040 --> 47:15.580]  that they say they're going to do some sort of outreach to make sure their results are being distributed into the local community biology lab network, let's say.
[47:15.800 --> 47:17.840]  So I think that is, like, a really great way.
[47:18.100 --> 47:30.420]  Like, if you're, if you are an investigator, right, if you are a community lab, someone who runs those labs, you want to make that connection, right, and try to get some of those results that are coming from grant work, like, to disseminate into this, into this, into our world, into the DIY world.
[47:32.820 --> 47:32.960]  Yeah.
[47:33.080 --> 47:33.480]  Thank you.
[47:33.540 --> 47:34.300]  Thank you for that comment.
[47:34.580 --> 47:36.560]  And I think we're at the end of the time, but thanks very much.
[47:36.660 --> 47:37.860]  Let's thank our presenter once again.
[47:38.560 --> 47:39.000]  Thank you.