[00:00.000 --> 00:00.880]  I've got to do a quick intro.
[00:01.120 --> 00:03.160]  We had two... I'm on the speaker selection committee.
[00:03.240 --> 00:04.320]  We had hundreds of submissions.
[00:04.660 --> 00:14.000]  Two of them were about biohacking, and when the other submitters heard the qualifications of these two folks here, they just bowed out.
[00:14.140 --> 00:17.720]  They're like, we can't come even close to their qualifications.
[00:18.340 --> 00:27.200]  So I'll let them introduce themselves, but they're, needless to say, Canadians, and they're going to talk about biohacking north of the 45th parallel.
[00:28.960 --> 00:29.920]  Yay, Canadians!
[00:34.390 --> 00:37.740]  Okay, so thanks for the intro, and you're really, you're totally correct.
[00:37.980 --> 00:40.700]  Our credentials are absolutely fantastic.
[00:40.700 --> 00:47.460]  I studied in school for 14 years, and I wound up getting a three-year film degree out of that.
[00:50.800 --> 00:59.100]  But at the same time, I also talked my way into being a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, doing a stint at NASA Ames as well.
[00:59.100 --> 01:06.960]  And actually, that's when I got started in biohacking, switching over from computing and human-computer interaction and things like that over to biohacking.
[01:07.080 --> 01:14.800]  And now, I guess maybe I'm a poster person for the fact that, hey, you don't need to be a biologist to get involved in biohacking.
[01:14.940 --> 01:20.340]  And also, before I pass the mic to Kev, biohacking is the newest, coolest thing.
[01:20.380 --> 01:26.240]  And if you're not convinced of that, by the end of our talk, come chat with us later on, and I can tell you more reasons why.
[01:26.240 --> 01:26.920]  Yeah.
[01:27.220 --> 01:27.620]  Cool.
[01:28.260 --> 01:29.800]  That's a very nice introduction.
[01:29.980 --> 01:30.340]  I'm Kevin.
[01:30.620 --> 01:32.500]  I'm a biologist, I guess, by trade.
[01:33.670 --> 01:40.780]  And my background in biohacking comes from the International Generically Engineered Machine Competition, or iGEM, in case you guys have heard of that.
[01:40.780 --> 01:45.500]  But I spent four years getting a four-year degree in biochemistry.
[01:46.200 --> 01:47.860]  So, yeah.
[01:48.700 --> 01:54.240]  And now, I guess, we co-founded the Montreal biohacking group called BricoBio.
[01:54.240 --> 02:03.680]  And currently, I'm coming from Cork, Ireland, actually, because I'm working on a company at the SynBio accelerator program over there.
[02:03.900 --> 02:05.780]  So, that's my story.
[02:06.780 --> 02:07.220]  Awesome.
[02:07.400 --> 02:07.720]  So, yeah.
[02:07.880 --> 02:09.950]  We're going to just basically dive into it.
[02:10.060 --> 02:11.350]  It's not going to be super rigorous.
[02:11.420 --> 02:12.440]  It's not going to be super long.
[02:12.440 --> 02:15.460]  If anyone has any questions, feel free to interrupt.
[02:16.460 --> 02:18.920]  But, you know, maybe at the end would be better.
[02:19.040 --> 02:19.240]  But, yeah.
[02:19.400 --> 02:21.640]  So, on the screen now, this is our Twitter stuff.
[02:21.780 --> 02:26.220]  You can write that down for later to tweet at us or to us and all that kind of stuff.
[02:26.680 --> 02:32.600]  But the first thing we're going to talk about is DIY Bio, and what exactly is it?
[02:33.520 --> 02:33.880]  Yeah.
[02:34.120 --> 02:42.290]  So, I'll start by just generally saying what we want to do with biology, which is, you know, we want to know about health, drugs, disease.
[02:42.560 --> 02:45.220]  We want to know about the environment, trees, and other living things.
[02:45.820 --> 02:48.660]  We want to know how to grow food and how to make beer.
[02:49.640 --> 02:50.980]  And this is all, like, yeah.
[02:51.180 --> 02:51.700]  Yeah, beer.
[02:52.100 --> 02:52.620]  One guy.
[02:52.800 --> 02:53.260]  I don't know.
[02:54.200 --> 02:55.440]  And we want to know about longevity.
[02:55.640 --> 02:56.480]  That's, like, huge.
[02:56.600 --> 02:57.980]  You know, we want to know how to live forever.
[02:58.820 --> 03:01.720]  And, you know, that's sort of just an ongoing thing.
[03:02.460 --> 03:18.180]  And then, I guess, in terms of the theme of dissent, if you think about the traditional training to become a biologist, you have to, you know, blow 100 grand and get some kind of degree and take, like, 10 years until you actually get some kind of job where you can do your own work kind of thing.
[03:18.800 --> 03:25.220]  And it's sort of like a very, like, you know, patent-driven, closed, private industry.
[03:27.000 --> 03:33.960]  So, right now, it's a bit of, like, an all-boys club where you can't really get in unless you have all the money and time to put into this.
[03:34.300 --> 03:41.720]  And so, there's a huge drive to take it out of the institution and, you know, start doing cool stuff now.
[03:44.100 --> 03:45.480]  So, yeah, for sure.
[03:45.660 --> 04:05.500]  So, the good news is that if any of you have been around for the sort of the age when computing changed from super expensive, super exclusive, locked up in university labs, military labs, corporate labs where a computer cost a million bucks, you had to be a PhD student to even get access to a computer.
[04:06.600 --> 04:11.760]  And then you look at, okay, well, what happened in the early 80s and definitely the 90s where computers became cheap.
[04:11.940 --> 04:12.920]  They went on your desktop.
[04:13.500 --> 04:15.420]  Early 90s, people started sharing code.
[04:15.440 --> 04:17.000]  You didn't have to write everything from scratch.
[04:17.270 --> 04:23.760]  And barrier to entry to get involved in computing whether you are a user or a programmer was lowered considerably.
[04:24.670 --> 04:28.460]  And right now, we're witnessing the same thing happening for biology.
[04:28.760 --> 04:35.850]  So, as Kevin said, you know, you might, you know, before, maybe a few years ago, you might need a $100,000 degree, 10 years of your life, et cetera, et cetera.
[04:36.030 --> 04:37.850]  That's totally not the case right now.
[04:38.700 --> 04:42.080]  And it's really, really an exciting time for biology.
[04:42.330 --> 04:45.230]  And we'll just talk a little bit more about why it's so exciting.
[04:45.410 --> 04:45.850]  Yeah.
[04:45.970 --> 04:52.210]  So, the next cool analogy between, you know, bio and computing is that, you know, genes are code.
[04:52.210 --> 04:55.050]  And some people don't like this analogy, but whatever, it works.
[04:55.790 --> 05:01.960]  And so, behind me, you can see this coding device which codes for something called a fluorescent protein.
[05:01.970 --> 05:05.230]  And this is a protein that comes from some jellyfish that somebody found.
[05:05.530 --> 05:09.020]  And it basically, you know, is a sequence of letters.
[05:09.050 --> 05:18.830]  And when you put the DNA into your bacteria, it changes the color of it and makes it so that it glows red under UV light.
[05:18.830 --> 05:21.090]  So, if you flip to the next, or you have something else?
[05:22.930 --> 05:23.290]  Right.
[05:23.850 --> 05:25.470]  So, this is sort of what it looks like.
[05:25.640 --> 05:30.280]  And this is very much like the hello world kind of experiment for DIY bio.
[05:30.490 --> 05:33.660]  You, you know, you transform your RFP and it's, oh my God, it glows, amazing.
[05:33.850 --> 05:35.430]  And it's like your LED board.
[05:35.580 --> 05:42.110]  So, I think I have another, one more picture, where you can literally just like paint pictures of, you know, really cool stuff.
[05:42.430 --> 05:42.920]  Thank you.
[05:43.100 --> 05:43.260]  Yeah.
[05:43.600 --> 05:45.790]  I didn't paint this, but it's cool anyways.
[05:47.980 --> 05:48.380]  Yeah.
[05:48.490 --> 05:49.230]  And something that's cool.
[05:49.280 --> 05:54.160]  So, if you, if you can sort of play with us and go along with the idea that DNA is code.
[05:54.560 --> 05:58.840]  And if we actually do have the kind of tools today to be able to edit DNA code.
[05:59.140 --> 06:03.080]  I mean, DNA is just four letters, A, C, G, and T, just text.
[06:03.350 --> 06:07.980]  And so, that means that with the computer, you can manipulate DNA code, which is exciting.
[06:08.160 --> 06:11.760]  And so, there are tools that are out there that allow people to do that.
[06:11.760 --> 06:16.080]  So, before in this slide here, we had a tool that showed a coding device.
[06:16.200 --> 06:17.550]  And this is part of the Biobricks database.
[06:18.100 --> 06:24.920]  But there are an exploding number of tools that are generally made by open-source community now that are available.
[06:25.020 --> 06:29.700]  So, you don't have to pay $10,000 for a DNA design tool like an IDE.
[06:29.980 --> 06:34.100]  You can go online and take a look at a free one.
[06:34.170 --> 06:35.260]  So, here's an example of one.
[06:35.350 --> 06:36.820]  It's like in a web browser.
[06:36.820 --> 06:38.520]  There's DNA code in here.
[06:38.700 --> 06:41.600]  It doesn't really mean too much to me to look at a glance.
[06:41.790 --> 06:52.020]  But if you can drill down and see these coding regions, which you can kind of think as functions, you can literally cut and paste those out as if you were cutting and pasting a function in a JavaScript program.
[06:52.350 --> 06:55.540]  And then paste that into a new DNA document.
[06:55.730 --> 07:04.850]  And with a bit of munging and thinking and learning, you'll actually be able to have that new organism express that piece of genetic code.
[07:07.100 --> 07:11.600]  Yeah, so next, just to mention a bit of like the hardware that you need to start doing biohacking.
[07:12.350 --> 07:16.040]  So, for one on the right, my right, your left, I guess.
[07:16.480 --> 07:26.020]  These are micropipetters, which are basically used to move small amounts of liquids between, you know, from one microliter to one milliliter, typically.
[07:26.460 --> 07:30.220]  And you can get these on AliExpress for pretty cheap.
[07:30.220 --> 07:33.990]  And you can feel that they are pretty cheap when you get them.
[07:34.110 --> 07:37.980]  But at least it's, you know, inexpensive and you can use it for a little while.
[07:38.170 --> 07:46.050]  And on the right side, I guess you have these incubators, which you would use, you know, to incubate your bacteria at 37 degrees.
[07:46.080 --> 07:48.260]  And then they would basically grow into a culture overnight.
[07:49.020 --> 07:51.550]  And then you have your typical chemistry sort of glassware stuff.
[07:53.290 --> 07:56.380]  And why would we want to incubate our bacteria overnight?
[07:56.610 --> 07:57.490]  What does that do?
[07:58.200 --> 08:00.050]  Well, it depends on what bacteria you're working with.
[08:00.160 --> 08:01.600]  I mean, yeast grows at 30 degrees Celsius.
[08:02.520 --> 08:05.610]  But the bacteria that is the lab strain E. coli, which is completely safe, comes from your gut.
[08:08.660 --> 08:11.670]  And your gut is at 37 degrees Celsius, which is your...
[08:11.670 --> 08:12.730]  You guys work in Fahrenheit, right?
[08:12.840 --> 08:13.260]  Something like that?
[08:13.350 --> 08:13.660]  I don't know.
[08:13.880 --> 08:14.260]  Sorry.
[08:16.050 --> 08:21.110]  Anyways, 37 degrees Celsius, which, yeah, is the temperature inside of your gut.
[08:21.340 --> 08:23.720]  And therefore, that's the ideal temperature for these bacteria to grow.
[08:24.400 --> 08:29.610]  So that's how you get them to basically double in population in like 20 minutes.
[08:30.260 --> 08:32.170]  And so they grow exponentially, right?
[08:32.320 --> 08:32.460]  Exactly.
[08:32.460 --> 08:34.900]  So it's like this link of computing is an exponential technology.
[08:35.290 --> 08:37.260]  Biology is also an exponential technology.
[08:37.380 --> 08:38.160]  Is that basically what you're saying?
[08:38.330 --> 08:38.450]  Yeah.
[08:38.900 --> 08:39.280]  Cool.
[08:42.820 --> 08:44.120]  We have another tool here.
[08:44.120 --> 08:49.820]  So this is an example of a DIY PCI or PCR machine.
[08:50.260 --> 08:53.760]  PCR aids in the help of basically creating more DNA.
[08:53.960 --> 08:59.440]  So if you get a piece of DNA and you want to get more of it, you can do this process called polymerase chain reaction.
[08:59.660 --> 09:09.820]  And if you were to buy one of these products that comes from a big corporation, you can easily spend $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, depending on how cool of an item you want.
[09:10.000 --> 09:13.540]  This one costs about $1,000, and you can just buy it online.
[09:13.540 --> 09:14.780]  And it works pretty good.
[09:15.480 --> 09:18.080]  I've used it once and it worked great.
[09:18.340 --> 09:18.540]  Yeah.
[09:18.540 --> 09:22.520]  So that's the open PCR project, which is...
[09:22.520 --> 09:23.680]  I think you can build it yourself even too.
[09:24.160 --> 09:25.740]  The instructions are online somewhere.
[09:25.960 --> 09:29.500]  And then the one on the top left is called the OpenFuge, which is a centrifuge.
[09:29.660 --> 09:33.020]  Also an essential tool in doing this kind of stuff.
[09:33.020 --> 09:35.760]  Because after you grow your bacteria, it's sort of in a liquid.
[09:36.780 --> 09:39.360]  And you want to get the bacteria out of the liquid.
[09:39.480 --> 09:40.840]  So you just spin it really fast.
[09:40.960 --> 09:43.480]  And then all the bacteria get shot down to the bottom of the tube.
[09:43.580 --> 09:45.720]  And you can dump up the liquid and they form like a dense pellet, basically.
[09:48.300 --> 09:48.620]  Yeah.
[09:50.280 --> 09:58.780]  And just to send a call out, these pipettes are one of the more annoying things that haven't been hacked yet for doing bio.
[09:58.980 --> 10:05.860]  So if anyone feels like hacking a pipette and figuring out a way to move small amounts of liquids, then that would be amazing.
[10:06.340 --> 10:12.800]  That actually brings up an interesting point in that the biohacking scene is necessarily multidisciplinary.
[10:13.280 --> 10:20.720]  So, for example, in our experience in Brico Bio, we have biologists like Kevin, who really know a lot about the biology.
[10:20.980 --> 10:23.160]  There's people like me who have a computing background.
[10:23.220 --> 10:28.440]  But there's also people that have engineering backgrounds, art backgrounds, law backgrounds.
[10:28.700 --> 10:36.900]  It's the kind of thing where, because it's so tactile compared to writing code, for example, it's really easy to get involved.
[10:37.000 --> 10:45.580]  So it's kind of like, you know, if you've been in a kitchen before, you're probably familiar with a good portion of the kind of things that happen in a bio lab.
[10:45.780 --> 10:49.300]  Bio labs are just far more precise and have more expensive spoons and cups.
[10:49.600 --> 10:49.960]  Yeah.
[10:50.880 --> 10:52.380]  But you get to make cooler things.
[10:52.580 --> 10:54.600]  You get to make things that make themselves.
[10:54.820 --> 11:01.940]  So if I'm in a kitchen and I make a cake, I don't put the cake into an incubator and then wake up the next morning with 80 cakes.
[11:03.740 --> 11:04.580]  Which would be neat.
[11:04.780 --> 11:10.920]  But the cool thing about biology is that, you know, you're making these living products that can do work on your behalf.
[11:11.160 --> 11:15.720]  So the pictures that Kevin showed before, the work that those microorganisms were doing were creating colors.
[11:15.880 --> 11:20.480]  It was almost like you could say, they're growing paint or they're growing ink or something like that.
[11:20.540 --> 11:30.380]  And if you think about the cost of printer ink by weight, I think it's something like the same price as gold or in the same kind of ballpark as something way more exactly.
[11:30.380 --> 11:31.200]  It's insane.
[11:31.840 --> 11:44.640]  And, you know, with biohacking, you know, there's a real possibility that somebody could develop a product that allows you to grow your printer ink at home for, you know, very low cost and it's totally sustainable.
[11:45.100 --> 11:47.820]  And there's people working on projects like this already, for example.
[11:47.820 --> 12:03.720]  And, of course, that takes, you know, people that know the biology, people that know chemistry, and also maybe artistic people that have a deep understanding of color and what makes a good blue a good blue, for example, which don't ask me because, I don't know,
[12:03.760 --> 12:04.900]  I'm colorblind or something.
[12:05.060 --> 12:07.560]  But anyways, next slide.
[12:07.780 --> 12:09.080]  So we have something really cool here.
[12:09.240 --> 12:16.100]  So, you know, in the lab, you know, you do have to use these tools like pipettes and Bunsen burners and glassware.
[12:16.100 --> 12:29.040]  And to somebody like me versus Kevin who is a real biologist who has had years of training in real labs in universities and companies versus me who I've only used DIY tools.
[12:29.680 --> 12:31.740]  And at that point, not very good.
[12:31.860 --> 12:40.240]  And one of the reasons why my background is in computing is because I can't hold a pen or a pencil and draw something on a piece of paper and have it look very good.
[12:40.420 --> 12:44.680]  I can type really well, but I'm not that kind of person that has that kind of dexterity.
[12:45.580 --> 12:49.340]  So I'm really poor at doing wet lab work, as it turns out, unfortunately.
[12:50.340 --> 12:55.040]  But those days are over for me because what I can do, and I can just download those lab skills.
[12:55.560 --> 12:55.860]  Yeah.
[12:56.520 --> 12:58.020]  And this is a real thing.
[12:58.140 --> 13:01.260]  So this is a project that's coming out of Genspace and Tisch.
[13:01.460 --> 13:02.560]  It's called Opentrons.
[13:02.740 --> 13:04.180]  It's less than a year old.
[13:05.580 --> 13:06.300]  You can...
[13:06.300 --> 13:11.620]  Well, they don't sell them anymore, but they used to sell these DIY kits, and they're working on something even better now.
[13:11.800 --> 13:11.940]  Yeah.
[13:12.000 --> 13:13.800]  But keep your eyes open for stuff like this.
[13:13.960 --> 13:16.340]  Not just Opentrons, but there's other people that are working in this space.
[13:16.920 --> 13:20.960]  It's kind of like it will decouple the skills needed to do this kind of work.
[13:20.960 --> 13:31.120]  And I'm hoping that that really accelerates not just the quality and quantity of projects, but more importantly, it gets more people involved.
[13:31.620 --> 13:33.380]  People in here, for example.
[13:34.320 --> 13:37.160]  Actually, who here is a biohacker?
[13:37.380 --> 13:38.200]  Or who here...
[13:38.200 --> 13:39.140]  Okay, so...
[13:39.620 --> 13:40.060]  Oh, wow.
[13:40.060 --> 13:41.120]  And I'm doing one of those.
[13:41.560 --> 13:42.300]  Are you really?
[13:42.480 --> 13:42.500]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[13:42.500 --> 13:42.740]  Awesome.
[13:43.340 --> 13:43.620]  Fantastic.
[13:44.040 --> 13:44.260]  Awesome.
[13:44.560 --> 13:53.720]  I think there was maybe 20 or 30 hands that came up here, and maybe at the next hope...
[13:54.360 --> 13:56.140]  Or no, the next hope was the last hope.
[13:58.160 --> 13:59.440]  The other hope.
[14:01.260 --> 14:05.920]  Maybe if Kevin and I are lucky enough to come back and come on a panel again, we'll ask the same question.
[14:05.920 --> 14:07.920]  Who self-identifies as a biohacker?
[14:07.920 --> 14:11.640]  And it should increase exponentially, I hope.
[14:12.140 --> 14:12.880]  But we'll see.
[14:12.980 --> 14:15.200]  Anyways, come back next time and we'll...
[14:15.200 --> 14:25.160]  And this kind of hacking is really cool just because, I guess from a professional standpoint, I was visiting a lab and they had one of these, the professional version of this machine, which is just like a liquid handling robot.
[14:26.580 --> 14:32.820]  And their complaint was that, sure, it works, but you have to keep an eye on it and make sure that it doesn't mess up.
[14:32.920 --> 14:36.460]  And these things are designed so that they fail and they have to get maintenance every couple months.
[14:36.460 --> 14:38.520]  And you have to pay 10 grand to get them and it's done.
[14:39.220 --> 14:43.600]  So it's a huge demand for like, you know, things that just work and that are easy to fix yourself kind of thing.
[14:43.820 --> 14:46.860]  And I would love to see this thing just do that.
[14:46.860 --> 14:49.940]  I own one as well and I'm in the process of assembling it.
[14:51.760 --> 14:54.240]  Come on over to Toronto and help me.
[14:55.920 --> 15:08.400]  But I'll definitely be able to assemble this robot long before I'm able to execute a lab protocol by hand myself without significant amounts of help from Kevin, for example.
[15:10.040 --> 15:12.560]  There's other hardware projects as well.
[15:12.840 --> 15:12.940]  Yeah.
[15:13.360 --> 15:25.060]  This is a bio printer, which is basically an inkjet printer that was hacked to print, you know, biological media, which are, yeah, there you go, just bacterial cells.
[15:25.520 --> 15:31.060]  And so this is from BioCurious, which is a DIY biospace in San Francisco.
[15:32.260 --> 15:37.160]  And this is really cool because I recently found out about another project at Duke University.
[15:37.160 --> 15:38.640]  And this was a purely academic one.
[15:39.460 --> 15:42.800]  And they were using a printer that could print on like CDs.
[15:43.160 --> 15:46.640]  So you would basically replace a CD with like a, you know, Petri dish.
[15:46.700 --> 15:49.420]  And then you would be able to print your cells that way.
[15:49.700 --> 15:51.360]  So, and that was completely independent.
[15:51.520 --> 15:52.640]  They had no idea that this existed.
[15:52.820 --> 15:54.460]  So I was talking with them being like, check it out.
[15:54.580 --> 15:55.180]  Whoa, amazing.
[15:55.940 --> 15:56.220]  Yeah.
[15:57.180 --> 16:05.260]  And I think, you know, one of the ultimate goals of these ideas of bioprinters, is not, so this was like a 2D print.
[16:05.420 --> 16:08.980]  It printed text on an agar plate and agar is just food for bacteria.
[16:09.360 --> 16:13.500]  But, you know, the ultimate goal of this kind of technology is to print 3D structures.
[16:13.820 --> 16:20.260]  So for example, print a liver, print a heart, print a leg bone or something like that.
[16:20.840 --> 16:27.380]  I mean, only people like Steve Jobs can get liver transplants in time to survive, you know, terrible diseases.
[16:27.840 --> 16:34.280]  And, you know, if we could build livers and hearts for people, that would be fantastic.
[16:34.780 --> 16:34.900]  Yeah.
[16:35.040 --> 16:37.340]  It's currently printed ears and noses, you know that?
[16:37.980 --> 16:38.360]  Yes.
[16:38.740 --> 16:39.340]  Ears and noses.
[16:39.440 --> 16:43.200]  But those aren't like organs, like a liver has to do function.
[16:43.340 --> 16:43.920]  But yeah, exactly.
[16:44.020 --> 16:45.360]  We're working towards that.
[16:45.480 --> 16:46.300]  And I think that...
[16:46.300 --> 16:51.520]  And another cool thing with the printing aspect is that, you know, you can just print text like in this picture.
[16:51.800 --> 16:53.280]  Or, you know, if you had...
[16:53.280 --> 16:58.880]  If you could imagine like a sort of grid of conditions where you're, you know, screening like a drug or something like that.
[16:58.960 --> 17:04.220]  And if you can, you know, hack your printer, which costs like 50 bucks to do this high throughput drug experiment, that's like...
[17:04.800 --> 17:05.780]  That's huge, you know?
[17:06.000 --> 17:07.080]  Like drug discovery is...
[17:07.080 --> 17:09.700]  They drop like 200 million dollars in doing that kind of thing.
[17:09.820 --> 17:10.660]  And so, yeah.
[17:11.360 --> 17:11.840]  Very cool.
[17:11.840 --> 17:19.020]  And when you think about it, you know, medicine, my dad told, tells me, don't call it drugs when you're talking to people because it sounds bad.
[17:19.020 --> 17:19.660]  So it's medicine.
[17:19.980 --> 17:29.680]  But, you know, early, you know, medicine, the drug industry is important because that's how we got a lot of our life saving medicine.
[17:29.940 --> 17:35.880]  But medicine has been around a lot longer than the industrial complex, a lot longer than big drug companies.
[17:36.080 --> 17:40.160]  And people, regular people have been discovering medicine from long, long time ago.
[17:40.160 --> 17:51.000]  And I don't see any reason why, you know, things could change again where we take back medical research in regards to medicine or other things back into the citizen realm where a lot more people are involved.
[17:51.000 --> 17:55.500]  We can get potentially life saving medicine faster or cheaper or better quality or whatever.
[17:55.720 --> 17:57.080]  So just think about that.
[17:59.360 --> 18:00.480]  This is a map of Canada.
[18:02.580 --> 18:03.020]  Woo!
[18:03.140 --> 18:03.380]  Yeah, right?
[18:05.980 --> 18:07.020]  Yeah, so...
[18:07.020 --> 18:08.460]  Oh, this is kind of cut off on the right.
[18:08.460 --> 18:11.980]  But basically, there are four spaces going on right now.
[18:12.520 --> 18:13.840]  The oldest one is BioSpace.
[18:14.860 --> 18:16.660]  And that's in Victoria, BC.
[18:18.320 --> 18:19.500]  And I'm not sure...
[18:19.500 --> 18:19.840]  Are they...
[18:19.840 --> 18:23.280]  They're out of a university-shared, like, space now.
[18:23.420 --> 18:25.460]  So they've got, like, a pretty nice space set up and they're expanding.
[18:26.260 --> 18:28.860]  DIY Bio Vancouver is...
[18:28.860 --> 18:32.840]  Also, they're doing their, like, workshops things and, like, borrowed space.
[18:32.840 --> 18:34.640]  They don't have, like, their own dedicated space yet.
[18:34.820 --> 18:37.000]  But they're, you know, getting involved in make affairs and things like that.
[18:38.240 --> 18:40.800]  And then, Brico Bio is probably the newest one.
[18:40.980 --> 18:43.620]  And we're also kind of similar to DOI Bio Vancouver.
[18:44.120 --> 18:50.060]  But a cool project that they're working on now is doing microfluidics fermentation.
[18:50.460 --> 18:54.700]  So, you know, you'd have your microfluidic device and then you'd do your fermentation reaction.
[18:54.900 --> 18:56.860]  And in the end, you'd have, like, a drop of beer or something like that.
[18:57.800 --> 18:59.080]  Which is hilarious.
[18:59.940 --> 19:07.740]  So, does that mean that we can expect in five or six years that iPhone 8 will be able to squeeze it and beer will drop out of it?
[19:08.100 --> 19:08.460]  Yeah.
[19:09.460 --> 19:12.500]  Or pre-your grain alcohol or medicine?
[19:12.940 --> 19:13.420]  I'd buy it.
[19:13.580 --> 19:14.280]  I'd buy it.
[19:14.960 --> 19:17.920]  And then, do you know... you can probably know more about Toronto.
[19:18.200 --> 19:21.420]  Yeah, so there's also DIY Bio Toronto, which is unique in Canada.
[19:22.200 --> 19:24.280]  In that, you know, they have been orphaned.
[19:24.360 --> 19:26.040]  They haven't had a space to call their own.
[19:26.040 --> 19:30.540]  They've been working out of a hack space there called hacklab.to.
[19:31.160 --> 19:37.040]  And because Toronto is Canada's largest city, people there, you know, words spread pretty fast.
[19:37.240 --> 19:44.760]  So, to put in context, like, Biospace Victoria, DIY Bio Vancouver, Brico Bio Montreal, have about 30 or 40 members.
[19:45.220 --> 19:48.440]  Whereas, DIY Bio Toronto has about 300 members.
[19:49.140 --> 19:50.500]  Which is really exciting.
[19:50.740 --> 19:58.900]  And there's a process now to try and find these people a real home so that they can get those numbers and start putting them to work and do cool things.
[19:59.300 --> 20:02.500]  And maybe, you know, do something cool.
[20:03.240 --> 20:04.000]  I don't know what.
[20:05.760 --> 20:08.780]  So, speaking of the ink for a printer.
[20:09.420 --> 20:12.320]  This is a project of a group called La Payesse.
[20:12.580 --> 20:13.580]  And they're in Paris.
[20:14.680 --> 20:16.160]  And they basically...
[20:16.160 --> 20:18.760]  This is like a non-genetically engineered thing at all.
[20:18.860 --> 20:22.860]  It's just a bacteria that can, you know, produce this blue ink.
[20:23.860 --> 20:28.560]  So, now they're building this up and they're going to do a release, I think, later this year.
[20:29.260 --> 20:33.680]  Where they'll basically sell this open bacteria and share this information.
[20:34.040 --> 20:39.000]  And, you know, they give you this kit where you can grow a bunch of ink and put it in your pen and write with it and stuff.
[20:39.200 --> 20:40.680]  So, it's very cool.
[20:40.680 --> 20:43.220]  So, that idea is happening then with growing your own ink?
[20:43.400 --> 20:43.880]  Yeah, exactly.
[20:43.880 --> 20:50.280]  So, you know, right now the thing is just mostly pens, but, you know, how long until somebody's just putting in their printers and then, boom, printer problem solved.
[20:50.420 --> 21:04.920]  Well, I guess, like, I mean, as we said, if printer ink is so expensive, it seems like there's a market there for somebody to say, Okay, well, I'm going to grow ink at pennies per unit and sell it at, I don't know, half the price of printer ink and still make a killing.
[21:05.380 --> 21:07.660]  That sounds like a reasonable thing that could happen.
[21:07.920 --> 21:08.320]  Oh, yeah.
[21:09.680 --> 21:10.520]  Heard it here first.
[21:11.020 --> 21:11.320]  I hope so.
[21:14.700 --> 21:19.360]  And just to mention another product north of 45, this is from Genspace, which is here in New York.
[21:19.620 --> 21:25.260]  And so, this is Ellen Jorgensen and she went to Alaska to do some DNA barcoding.
[21:27.000 --> 21:33.460]  Which is essentially, you're looking for... I'm blanking on this right now.
[21:33.740 --> 21:35.820]  DNA, it's like a fingerprinting.
[21:36.040 --> 21:39.360]  So, you know, every organism has unique DNA.
[21:39.740 --> 21:41.940]  My DNA is different from that of a rose.
[21:42.600 --> 21:45.380]  That's because the genetic code tells my body how to grow.
[21:45.480 --> 21:50.240]  And when you think about it, a rose and a human are made out of generally the same materials.
[21:50.240 --> 21:55.680]  A lot of carbon, a lot of water, sugars, salts, various minerals and whatnot.
[21:55.880 --> 22:00.100]  But the DNA is a program that tells our cellular machinery how to configure itself.
[22:00.100 --> 22:02.440]  It's a self-replicating, self-growing machine.
[22:02.800 --> 22:14.400]  And it's interesting because, you know, there's been some stories where you go to a fancy restaurant and they're selling you, I don't know, some super expensive rare turtle or something like that for dinner.
[22:15.960 --> 22:19.340]  And you're like, oh, is this really that rare turtle?
[22:19.600 --> 22:21.360]  And I'm spending $200 for this.
[22:21.440 --> 22:22.580]  Am I getting my money's worth?
[22:22.740 --> 22:32.840]  And it's possible using DNA barcoding to take a little sample of that turtle and put it through a process where you extract the DNA.
[22:32.840 --> 22:41.840]  You use another process called PCR, which I meant before, polymerase chain reaction, to amplify the amount of DNA so that you have an amount of it that you can actually do some analysis on.
[22:42.020 --> 22:45.320]  And then what you do is you do, it's like a DNA chromatograph.
[22:45.460 --> 22:52.900]  It's like you do a process where at the end of it you have a picture of the DNA where it's like shows you these like a ladder.
[22:53.120 --> 23:00.740]  And you can basically compare that the same way that a person, a forensic officer comparing fingerprints would overlap the two.
[23:01.420 --> 23:03.460]  And you would do this with this DNA graph.
[23:03.620 --> 23:07.320]  And if the if they match reasonably well, then OK, yeah, that's the turtle.
[23:07.460 --> 23:12.420]  If they don't match, then you can go back to that restaurant and say, listen, you guys are ripping people off.
[23:12.540 --> 23:13.420]  I'm going to call a newspaper.
[23:13.980 --> 23:15.540]  And people have actually been doing this.
[23:15.660 --> 23:18.320]  There is a story a while ago of somebody testing fish.
[23:18.460 --> 23:25.380]  And it turned out that the fish wasn't like tons of fish that people buy at restaurants isn't the fish that they tell you it is because people can't really tell.
[23:25.540 --> 23:28.480]  And so, like, I buy cheap fish now because I guess people can't tell the difference.
[23:29.620 --> 23:30.360]  Something like that.
[23:30.460 --> 23:33.660]  And, you know, stuff like is this really like, you know, beef or is this horse kind of thing.
[23:33.780 --> 23:36.880]  There's some interest in these, you know, weird stories.
[23:37.580 --> 23:45.060]  And so, yeah, the same idea except you're going into the wildlife and taking these barcodes and then logging them so that you know what sort of lives there and you can compare it between different places.
[23:48.730 --> 23:53.070]  And so, what we have here is a thing that a few things that we're involved in.
[23:53.310 --> 23:56.230]  So, Symbiota is some tools I can get into.
[23:56.410 --> 24:01.070]  But what's really exciting is this thing called the Violation Factory.
[24:01.070 --> 24:04.410]  And it is a wetware product, a wetware kit.
[24:04.770 --> 24:08.550]  So, you know, computers are hardware and hardware runs software.
[24:08.550 --> 24:16.670]  Well, if we continue in talking to, you know, computing terms and IT terms in biotech, well, then there's wetware.
[24:16.790 --> 24:18.250]  And we call it wetware because it's actually wet.
[24:18.370 --> 24:19.270]  There's liquids in there.
[24:19.650 --> 24:26.630]  And this is a really interesting product that's come out through a partnership with Genomicon and Symbiota.
[24:26.770 --> 24:29.190]  And I'm here with Symbiota as I work with them.
[24:30.310 --> 24:37.210]  But what it is, it's a... it's... I guess you could think about it like an Arduino for biotech in that it is a...
[24:37.210 --> 24:45.670]  like an R&D platform that is extensible that you can build up custom organisms, custom microbes that will do things for you.
[24:45.850 --> 24:55.590]  And this one is a kit that comes with everything you need, all these DNA parts and an assembly protocol that allows you to create a microbe, a type of E. coli that produces a product called violacin.
[24:58.010 --> 25:00.210]  And anyone heard of violacin before?
[25:01.370 --> 25:02.050]  Yeah, no.
[25:02.170 --> 25:03.310]  No one knows about this.
[25:03.570 --> 25:06.490]  Probably one of the reasons no one knows about it is no one talks about it.
[25:06.570 --> 25:11.170]  And the reason no one talks about it is it costs... it costs $350 million per kilo.
[25:12.470 --> 25:15.210]  And it's sold by a company called Sigma Aldrich.
[25:15.870 --> 25:24.290]  And it's purchased by researchers who are working, trying to find cures, therapies for cancer.
[25:24.290 --> 25:26.890]  And so this is... it's not a drug.
[25:26.890 --> 25:27.710]  It's not a medicine.
[25:27.870 --> 25:34.930]  It's a research compound that is under the process of figuring out, okay, is this something that we can use for cancer therapeutics?
[25:35.050 --> 25:40.430]  But the problem is researchers, it's very difficult for them to get their hands on it because it's just so darn expensive.
[25:40.430 --> 25:57.590]  And so what we did at Symbiata and with Genomicon, we decided to take their wetware kit platform called the Genomicon kit, which they originally had that allowed you to create these pictures that we showed before very similar to this where you can have your hello world and program your E. coli to express different proteins that are different colors.
[26:00.630 --> 26:03.130]  And we thought, okay, well, that's cool, but what's the next step?
[26:03.310 --> 26:07.350]  Are people building modules like Arduino shields for this product?
[26:07.350 --> 26:09.530]  And they said, no, no one's done this yet.
[26:09.550 --> 26:12.810]  I'm like, okay, well, we want to build the first one and we want to do this violation thing.
[26:13.190 --> 26:15.790]  And so what we've done is created this kit.
[26:17.790 --> 26:21.030]  It sells for $550 Canadian.
[26:21.770 --> 26:28.430]  And we've sold about 20 of them to people in the States, people in Canada, people in Europe.
[26:28.990 --> 26:31.550]  And what they're doing is they are building this kit.
[26:31.710 --> 26:41.210]  And because it's modular, they are putting the kit together in unique ways to see if they can come up with the design that produces the most violation.
[26:41.510 --> 26:43.750]  So to get the most bang for your buck out of this product.
[26:44.150 --> 26:48.390]  And there was a student, maybe I can find it here.
[26:48.390 --> 26:53.250]  There's a student from Canada named Alejandro Satone.
[26:53.970 --> 26:55.350]  And he bought one of these kits.
[26:55.470 --> 26:57.430]  He was a grad student working in biology.
[26:58.130 --> 27:02.110]  And his PI had him working on a product that he wasn't super keen on.
[27:02.550 --> 27:04.310]  But he got wind of this product.
[27:04.350 --> 27:04.990]  He bought it.
[27:06.510 --> 27:07.750]  Let's see if I can find it here.
[27:07.810 --> 27:08.690]  I'll show you some examples.
[27:10.750 --> 27:16.410]  And he built the kit multiple times in changing the design of the DNA.
[27:17.350 --> 27:18.310]  Here we go.
[27:20.370 --> 27:25.050]  And he actually came up with a design that was very, very good.
[27:25.470 --> 27:30.870]  And so this is basically his lab book that he's made open to the world.
[27:30.870 --> 27:34.370]  So anyone can go in there and look at his DNA designs.
[27:34.790 --> 27:37.410]  And also give them access to the tools that he used to do it.
[27:37.410 --> 27:42.330]  Which is totally not how big pharma does things at all.
[27:43.390 --> 27:45.650]  But let's see if we can look at his data here.
[27:45.850 --> 27:46.970]  So transformation results.
[27:47.810 --> 27:49.490]  I think this one has some cool pictures.
[27:49.810 --> 27:50.590]  So here we go.
[27:50.830 --> 27:52.450]  So here was a control.
[27:52.930 --> 27:53.910]  These ones didn't work.
[27:54.010 --> 27:54.430]  They're not purple.
[27:54.550 --> 27:55.370]  And these ones are green.
[27:55.530 --> 27:56.290]  Or yellow, rather.
[27:56.450 --> 27:57.330]  These ones didn't work.
[27:57.770 --> 27:58.750]  These ones didn't work.
[27:58.890 --> 27:59.610]  Those ones didn't work.
[27:59.710 --> 28:02.430]  Oh, here's some purple and blue.
[28:02.590 --> 28:04.030]  Purple violacin is purple.
[28:04.070 --> 28:05.550]  That's why it's called violet violacin.
[28:05.550 --> 28:09.110]  If it's purple, then you know the medical compound is there.
[28:09.830 --> 28:11.530]  And so he wound up...
[28:11.530 --> 28:12.570]  There's some other ones in here.
[28:12.710 --> 28:18.350]  But anyways, he wound up designing a genetic circuit that did a very good job at this.
[28:18.470 --> 28:24.730]  And he's now in the process of figuring out how he can extract the violacin and distill it and sell it.
[28:25.450 --> 28:26.390]  He's a young guy.
[28:26.610 --> 28:27.670]  I think he's like 28.
[28:27.830 --> 28:28.470]  He has two kids.
[28:28.710 --> 28:31.430]  He's in school and he needs some cash.
[28:31.590 --> 28:36.410]  And he's really motivated to be like, hey, why is Sigma Aldrich the only company that can sell this?
[28:36.570 --> 28:37.590]  I'm going to go ahead and do it.
[28:37.930 --> 28:45.550]  And we're really excited about this because it's sort of a proof of concept where it's like, you know, there's a huge boom in computing because people were like, hey, wait a minute.
[28:45.550 --> 28:46.350]  This is accessible.
[28:46.530 --> 28:48.310]  And I can make a ton of cash doing this.
[28:48.390 --> 28:49.710]  And I can do a lot of good.
[28:49.850 --> 28:52.170]  I can make a valuable product for people.
[28:52.710 --> 28:56.270]  And life science, biotech, we're there.
[28:56.490 --> 28:57.810]  Like this is totally happening now.
[28:58.310 --> 29:10.650]  And certainly by the next hope, there's going to be people up here showing off their vials of THC or Viagra or Dynamite.
[29:11.890 --> 29:12.330]  Awesome.
[29:12.330 --> 29:12.630]  Yeah.
[29:12.770 --> 29:21.050]  And the Genomicon kit is actually really impressive just with the RGB, which lets you make, you know, red, green and blue bacteria that glow with the fluorescent protein.
[29:22.110 --> 29:28.990]  It's like designed in such a way that it's not at all like the traditional, you know, biochemistry, molecular biology techniques of doing it.
[29:29.750 --> 29:30.970]  The ligation and the assembly.
[29:32.470 --> 29:39.190]  I don't know if you have a picture, but either way, the whole point is this is very, you know, user friendly kind of thing of doing the assembly of the DNA.
[29:39.930 --> 29:41.910]  And you can look up the details on how it works.
[29:42.050 --> 29:45.150]  And I could go through it, but then it would just like fly over your heads maybe.
[29:47.350 --> 29:54.050]  But yeah, I would say, yeah, you know, get like 10 friends and each pitching like 20 bucks and buy one of these kits and have some fun.
[29:54.790 --> 29:57.850]  And you can go on and look at other people's work.
[29:57.970 --> 30:03.530]  And if you just like flat out want to make violation, you don't want to do experiments, just follow the other person's protocol.
[30:03.850 --> 30:10.450]  And you'll, you know, by the end of two weeks, you'll probably have like 20 grand worth of violation in your fridge.
[30:10.450 --> 30:16.030]  You're going to have to find a way to extract it and legally sell it.
[30:17.630 --> 30:19.070]  But you know, those are cool.
[30:19.350 --> 30:20.210]  I mean, we're hackers, right?
[30:20.310 --> 30:24.250]  You guys got to figure out these, you got to figure out these problems because they're the opportunities there.
[30:26.510 --> 30:31.650]  And so this is the project I'm working on in the symbiote accelerator, speaking of THC, as we just mentioned.
[30:33.710 --> 30:36.810]  Yeah, so we're going to try and make this yeast that can produce THC.
[30:39.470 --> 30:41.710]  And yeah, I don't know, we're going to do something with it.
[30:41.930 --> 30:44.410]  And we'll probably extract it and sell it.
[30:49.430 --> 30:50.330]  But yeah, it's super fun.
[30:50.390 --> 30:53.170]  You can think about like, you know, where your imagination can go with this kind of thing.
[30:53.310 --> 30:58.930]  Like, you know, is this, you know, ideally, this is pharmaceutical products, but you know, it's baker's yeast at the same time, so.
[30:59.750 --> 31:13.730]  And what's really cool about using yeast and thinking about yeast as a microbial factory, like when you think of factories, there are huge multimillion dollar, hundred million dollar, billion dollar machines that are architectural, that are owned by big companies.
[31:14.550 --> 31:16.870]  And they're doing similar things that biology does.
[31:17.030 --> 31:19.530]  Biology are machines that grow things and make things, right?
[31:19.710 --> 31:30.250]  And so if we can find a way to program or hijack yeast to produce other valuable products, aside from puffy bread and beer, then that's really exciting, right?
[31:30.410 --> 31:34.450]  Because think about it, you know, how long have humans been making beer and wine?
[31:34.790 --> 31:35.830]  10,000 years?
[31:36.030 --> 31:36.850]  15,000 years?
[31:37.430 --> 31:38.130]  20,000 years?
[31:38.270 --> 31:38.590]  I don't know.
[31:38.790 --> 31:39.430]  A long time.
[31:39.590 --> 31:41.330]  Definitely thousands of years, for sure.
[31:41.610 --> 31:55.410]  People have been using yeast as a tool to turn an inexpensive product, like sugary water, grape juice, into a high-value, fantastically exciting product, like wine.
[31:55.630 --> 31:58.810]  You know, some wine is hundreds of dollars for a bottle, right?
[31:58.910 --> 32:00.430]  But it's just all grape juice to start.
[32:00.570 --> 32:07.990]  And it's these microbes that eat the sugar, pee out wine, and then we drink it, right?
[32:08.270 --> 32:10.950]  And so, but it's cool, but when you think about it, like think about how they make beer.
[32:11.150 --> 32:12.390]  Beer is made in small batches.
[32:12.470 --> 32:15.130]  Anyone here made beer in a small batch in their garage or basement or whatever?
[32:15.130 --> 32:15.370]  Cool.
[32:15.550 --> 32:15.770]  Awesome.
[32:15.910 --> 32:16.270]  Me too.
[32:16.830 --> 32:20.410]  Anyone here made beer in a huge large factory owned by Labatz or Molson?
[32:21.290 --> 32:23.170]  Whoa, we have a brewmaster in the house.
[32:24.210 --> 32:24.650]  Cool.
[32:24.950 --> 32:25.110]  Awesome.
[32:25.370 --> 32:31.750]  But those machines cost millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, but you get to make beer at scale and sell it and make big bucks.
[32:31.910 --> 32:34.950]  But when it comes down to it, the process is exactly the same, right?
[32:35.170 --> 32:37.870]  You can, it's a totally scalable technology.
[32:37.930 --> 32:53.850]  And if we can use that idea and that thinking to produce other products in addition to THC, like any other kind of biological product that we can do it that way, that's a real, to me is a really exciting idea and a really potentially super duper lucrative idea.
[32:54.450 --> 32:54.670]  Yeah.
[32:54.910 --> 33:00.690]  And if you just think about plants themselves as like, you know, being able to produce these compounds on their own, a plant takes like a couple of years to grow.
[33:00.870 --> 33:08.190]  But if you think about yeast being this exponentially growing thing, you can get the same amount of biomass in like a week compared to two years of plant growth.
[33:10.330 --> 33:10.770]  So...
[33:10.770 --> 33:12.610]  And so this is the end of the beginning.
[33:13.430 --> 33:14.910]  We're going to put a challenge out.
[33:15.050 --> 33:20.030]  So I've been reading 2600 The Hacker Quarterly since I was 12 or 13 or something like that.
[33:21.090 --> 33:25.670]  And in this whole time, I mean, I've missed a few issues here and then, here and there.
[33:26.070 --> 33:29.510]  But I've never seen a biohacking article in 2600.
[33:29.790 --> 33:32.330]  Has there been a biohacking article in 2600?
[33:32.470 --> 33:32.630]  Anyone?
[33:33.030 --> 33:33.470]  Yes?
[33:33.470 --> 33:35.150]  Well, there needs to be more.
[33:36.870 --> 33:37.750]  There needs to be more.
[33:37.870 --> 33:41.450]  So for example, is anyone familiar with O'Reilly's BioCoder?
[33:42.130 --> 33:43.190]  Yeah, it's pretty cool.
[33:43.450 --> 33:44.490]  It's a brand new thing.
[33:44.870 --> 33:47.110]  They've had four or five issues now.
[33:47.770 --> 33:50.070]  And basically, you can download it for free.
[33:51.350 --> 33:59.190]  These guys are clearly fans of 2600 because if you look at the layout and the kind of content, it's very similar to 2600 The Hacker Quarterly, but it's for bio.
[33:59.530 --> 34:06.090]  And if you read their masthead, it says, We're at the start of a revolution that will transform our lives as radically as the computer revolution of the 70s.
[34:06.210 --> 34:14.290]  The biological revolution will touch every aspect of our lives, food and health, certainly, but also art, recreation, law, business, and much more.
[34:14.450 --> 34:18.230]  And so to me, that sounds like a really cool way to stoke some fire.
[34:18.370 --> 34:28.150]  So I'm hoping that we can sort of, you know, make sure that the 2600 community also kind of participates in this as well and doesn't let O'Reilly own the whole space.
[34:28.150 --> 34:28.510]  Yeah.
[34:29.170 --> 34:43.550]  And I guess expanding on the idea of the end of the beginning in, you know, the hackers, the biohacker spaces that started out a few years ago were more aware of, you know, what they were doing and how this might appear to, like, security agencies, things like that.
[34:43.730 --> 34:50.350]  But we're sort of past that point where now all the security agencies know that this exists and they are, you know, aware of it and they're not, you know...
[34:50.830 --> 34:52.690]  No one's afraid of being targeted anymore, basically.
[34:53.070 --> 34:53.350]  Yeah.
[34:55.070 --> 35:02.790]  And now people are getting a lot of support from, like, crowdfunding and even municipal governments are, like, you know, seeing this as, like, a really good thing.
[35:02.910 --> 35:04.750]  They're like, oh, my God, this is going to generate lots of capital.
[35:04.870 --> 35:06.990]  Let's throw some money at them and, you know, get these spaces going.
[35:07.850 --> 35:12.230]  So, in that sense, there's a lot more support going for it now than there was before.
[35:13.090 --> 35:15.170]  And a couple other cool ideas.
[35:15.830 --> 35:17.070]  Everyone's talking about encryption today.
[35:17.850 --> 35:20.290]  Encryption for... there's no encryption on biological devices yet.
[35:21.010 --> 35:25.210]  You know, if you have a bacteria, you can sequence it and find out exactly how it works on the genetic level.
[35:26.230 --> 35:30.910]  And another cool idea on the encryption thing, as we just saw, something about DNA testing people.
[35:31.110 --> 35:38.730]  And so now there's maybe a demand for a way to encrypt your own DNA so that people can't scan you or something like that.
[35:38.910 --> 35:44.010]  Or spam, like, basically just get everyone's DNA and just put it all over the place.
[35:44.170 --> 35:44.790]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[35:44.870 --> 35:49.490]  So you can imagine, like, a weird spray thing that you just take a bunch of people's saliva and you just...
[35:49.490 --> 35:51.930]  And then they swab you and it's like a dozen different people.
[35:52.070 --> 35:52.370]  I don't know.
[35:53.650 --> 35:54.670]  No, that's coming, though.
[35:54.730 --> 36:00.430]  So I... two weeks ago, I was at MIT and I was chatting with some people, talking about, you know, some stuff.
[36:00.550 --> 36:01.770]  And we're actually doing a science hack there.
[36:02.370 --> 36:04.250]  And a guy said, oh, this is awesome.
[36:04.290 --> 36:05.310]  Let me show you what I'm working on.
[36:05.310 --> 36:06.710]  He's just about to finish his PhD.
[36:07.030 --> 36:08.830]  And he's working on a...
[36:08.830 --> 36:13.990]  Basically, it's a device that's about this size, you know, the size of an iPhone or whatever.
[36:14.250 --> 36:19.430]  And it's a DNA synthesizer, meaning it's a tool that actually creates DNA.
[36:19.530 --> 36:23.210]  And that's actually one thing we didn't talk about quite yet, is DNA synthesis.
[36:23.710 --> 36:26.150]  But so it's the opposite of DNA sequencing.
[36:26.390 --> 36:33.150]  Everyone's heard of DNA sequencing where you read in your genetic code and at the end of the day, you've got a text file with your genetic code on it.
[36:33.150 --> 36:40.470]  But we have the technology today to actually print out that text file into a real piece of DNA that you can then put into an organism.
[36:40.990 --> 36:46.190]  And these are big machines, you know, the size of a fridge or a bar fridge, and they're getting smaller and smaller.
[36:46.310 --> 36:52.090]  And I actually saw a guy holding his hand a microfluidic array that was about the size of an iPhone.
[36:52.090 --> 36:56.430]  It works, you can print DNA on it, it runs off a 9-volt battery.
[36:58.250 --> 37:01.770]  And it, like, I don't know how much, like, that's the prototype, it's probably priceless.
[37:02.090 --> 37:06.230]  But it was just made out of acrylic, probably five bucks worth of stuff.
[37:07.190 --> 37:09.490]  So it's coming and looking totally cool.
[37:09.750 --> 37:10.710]  Yeah, it's super cool.
[37:13.910 --> 37:15.850]  You can make viruses, yeah.
[37:16.290 --> 37:19.090]  It won't be as easy as anyone can imagine.
[37:20.430 --> 37:24.310]  You know, like, this is, like, the, you know, fear stuff that people are getting over now.
[37:24.430 --> 37:26.370]  It's like, wait a second, you know, oh my god, people can make viruses.
[37:26.550 --> 37:27.850]  But, like, really, no.
[37:28.690 --> 37:29.510]  Like, you'd...
[37:30.170 --> 37:32.730]  A, you'd probably die before you actually got to that point, kind of thing.
[37:33.430 --> 37:36.370]  You know, you're putting yourself at risk more than anyone else.
[37:36.370 --> 37:41.370]  And so, as far as that, that's, like, biosafety, basically.
[37:42.630 --> 37:46.430]  And just doing the science itself of, like, you know, just producing this virus isn't...
[37:46.430 --> 37:48.810]  It's not even there yet in the leading edge of science.
[37:49.550 --> 37:59.310]  One thing that was, you know, when we started setting up our DIY biogroups, one of the hurdles that we had was that we didn't know what the law was about biosafety and biosecurity.
[37:59.310 --> 38:03.910]  We just knew that, you know, we did have to take some steps to make sure that things were safe.
[38:03.990 --> 38:05.730]  But we didn't know what that was.
[38:05.730 --> 38:11.670]  And it was difficult to connect with, you know, people in government or whoever that actually had that.
[38:12.270 --> 38:15.570]  And so, you know, years later today, now we do know.
[38:15.730 --> 38:23.330]  And what's interesting is the kind of stuff that's coming out of virtually all DIY biolabs isn't even on the radar of biosecurity people.
[38:23.550 --> 38:25.390]  No one is working with human pathogens.
[38:25.670 --> 38:27.130]  No one is working with viruses.
[38:27.590 --> 38:31.170]  The kind of stuff that people are doing are with lab E. coli, yeast, those kind of things that are specifically designed to work in a very specific environment.
[38:37.690 --> 38:42.690]  If those microbes were to leave the petri dish, they would not survive.
[38:42.890 --> 38:55.710]  So it's kind of like there's actually this scene in Jurassic Park that probably everyone's seen, where, you know, they've engineered the dinosaurs to lack a certain enzyme so that they can't exist without eating their special feed.
[38:55.930 --> 39:00.150]  That's basically exactly how lab microorganisms work.
[39:00.290 --> 39:02.530]  They've been engineered to be weak.
[39:04.530 --> 39:05.270]  Yeah, but that was...
[39:05.270 --> 39:05.870]  Yeah, exactly, right?
[39:06.190 --> 39:07.190]  But that's TV.
[39:07.690 --> 39:08.310]  Yeah, yeah.
[39:08.490 --> 39:09.130]  That's a movie.
[39:09.410 --> 39:10.590]  But, you know...
[39:12.270 --> 39:13.750]  It's a fantastic movie.
[39:14.610 --> 39:15.950]  We should all watch it.
[39:16.110 --> 39:16.850]  We should all watch it.
[39:17.110 --> 39:17.170]  We should all watch it.
[39:17.550 --> 39:19.230]  Yeah, we didn't show anything for Jasper at all.
[39:19.730 --> 39:20.030]  Yeah.
[39:20.330 --> 39:21.010]  Taco Bell's bio.
[39:21.590 --> 39:28.570]  But, yeah, instead of a dinosaur, you're getting, like, you know, a baker's yeast that's just gonna die on your... in the wild.
[39:29.010 --> 39:29.770]  Do you want to use the mic?
[39:30.270 --> 39:30.570]  Question?
[39:31.010 --> 39:32.430]  We can take questions now, I guess.
[39:33.950 --> 39:34.630]  Yeah, go for it.
[39:34.910 --> 39:36.250]  I don't know if...
[39:36.250 --> 39:36.730]  A few more things.
[39:36.810 --> 39:41.890]  I had a couple... just a couple ideas of, like, you know, hopefully you can inspire you guys to start working on this kind of thing.
[39:43.830 --> 39:44.510]  There's, like...
[39:46.030 --> 39:48.130]  You guys are all way smarter than most biologists that I know.
[39:48.470 --> 39:49.050]  For one.
[39:49.250 --> 39:51.210]  Like, I've watched all your presentations and talks today.
[39:51.390 --> 39:53.870]  And, like, you guys should really start, like, hacking some of this stuff.
[39:54.610 --> 39:55.750]  And, you know, get involved.
[39:55.890 --> 40:00.110]  Find your local biohacker space or, you know, start one if there isn't one.
[40:01.550 --> 40:03.690]  And, you know, feel free to reach out to the community.
[40:03.830 --> 40:05.250]  Go to DIYbio.org.
[40:05.290 --> 40:09.910]  There's a huge community out there that's just, you know, really inspiring as far as getting this stuff going.
[40:09.910 --> 40:16.370]  And so a couple things, ideas that I want to see happen are, one, there needs to be a programmer's guide to coding in bio.
[40:17.670 --> 40:20.950]  And I was inspired by the non-programmer's guide to coding in Python.
[40:21.230 --> 40:23.970]  And I did that and got an A-plus in my introductory computer science course.
[40:24.150 --> 40:24.230]  Yeah.
[40:26.510 --> 40:27.430]  So that's awesome.
[40:27.470 --> 40:29.090]  And I want to see something like that for doing bio.
[40:29.390 --> 40:34.210]  And another thing that I want to see happen is that your computer controls its own temperature.
[40:34.370 --> 40:36.670]  It regulates, you know, keeps it from overheating, things like that.
[40:36.670 --> 40:43.870]  I want to see somebody put bacteria in your computer and turn it into a bioreactor where you can maintain this consistent temperature and you can grow some bacteria on it.
[40:44.390 --> 40:46.190]  So, somebody, you know, do these things.
[40:46.470 --> 40:50.650]  And take lots of pictures and send them to me and I'll post them online or something like that.
[40:50.690 --> 40:50.930]  I don't know.
[40:52.930 --> 40:55.610]  But yeah, that's, that's, I guess, what I want to say.
[40:55.690 --> 40:56.210]  Anything else?
[40:57.010 --> 40:59.770]  Yeah, I think, I think that's a good introduction.
[41:00.190 --> 41:02.490]  I don't want to blow your minds too much to get started.
[41:02.630 --> 41:04.530]  But yeah, the resources are all there online.
[41:04.850 --> 41:08.990]  Connect with us if you have any questions, comments, or whatever.
[41:09.370 --> 41:12.650]  But I guess maybe we can start taking some questions now, I suppose.
[41:13.110 --> 41:13.230]  Yeah.
[41:14.450 --> 41:17.010]  So, one question I had was...
[41:17.010 --> 41:17.110]  Nope.
[41:17.150 --> 41:17.930]  Can we turn his mic on?
[41:19.210 --> 41:20.270]  Or is there a button on there?
[41:24.150 --> 41:24.910]  There it is.
[41:25.670 --> 41:36.770]  So, my question was around the sequencing of various life forms, genetic sequences, and just the identification potentially of functional components of those.
[41:37.030 --> 41:44.530]  So, kind of trying to take, you know, the raw data and then saying, okay, well, then this piece is actually doing this and so forth.
[41:44.670 --> 41:51.470]  And, you know, kind of, I guess in a way, you know, developing an open-source toolkit of those genetic building blocks, right?
[41:51.470 --> 41:57.690]  Because it's one thing to say, all right, well, we can take, you know, the complete sequence from this glowing thing and put it into this E. coli and now it glows and that's cool.
[41:59.550 --> 42:04.570]  But, you know, can you take just a subset of that and, you know, transfer...
[42:04.570 --> 42:13.250]  I guess the question is around, have there been any efforts to compile, set that kind of data and make it available in an open-source fashion?
[42:14.330 --> 42:14.610]  Yeah.
[42:14.950 --> 42:15.230]  Yeah.
[42:15.330 --> 42:16.050]  The answer to that is yes.
[42:17.230 --> 42:18.070]  I'm not sure which ones...
[42:18.730 --> 42:18.990]  Yeah, yeah.
[42:19.090 --> 42:19.910]  I mean, there's...
[42:19.910 --> 42:20.270]  There's a bunch.
[42:21.730 --> 42:22.690]  Biobricks is a huge one.
[42:22.850 --> 42:24.030]  Biobricks is probably the most popular one.
[42:24.070 --> 42:25.730]  I think there was another one that I saw a headline on today.
[42:25.850 --> 42:26.210]  I can't remember.
[42:26.290 --> 42:26.730]  I didn't read it.
[42:28.230 --> 42:34.510]  But, yeah, it's parts.igem.org is the one that's run by the international genetically engineered machine competition.
[42:35.570 --> 42:36.010]  iGEM.
[42:36.290 --> 42:36.570]  Yeah.
[42:38.430 --> 42:43.830]  So, this is cool and you can just surf around and look at what parts have been submitted and these are some...
[42:43.830 --> 42:53.930]  So, the way iGEM works is that it's undergraduate research teams that just work on a product for the summer and, you know, code some DNA, put it in a bacteria and see if it works and then submit that DNA to the registry.
[42:54.870 --> 43:06.850]  And so, right now, I think they just... they opened up this year to DOI BioLabs and the way it works is that you can just... they'll send you first, like, a stack of parts that you can use and then you can request any parts from their registry and just say,
[43:06.950 --> 43:10.590]  like, hey, send me this thing that codes, you know, for THC and they'll send you it.
[43:11.670 --> 43:12.530]  THC isn't in there yet.
[43:13.470 --> 43:14.010]  But, anyways.
[43:15.110 --> 43:28.970]  But, yeah, there's other... there's other repositories like the NCBI, which is an open database that you can go and search for various organisms and there's a difference where, you know, some organisms that are... research organisms are very highly characterized.
[43:29.210 --> 43:30.170]  People know a lot about it.
[43:30.390 --> 43:36.110]  You can go to the database and find an organism where we have the genetic sequence but no one knows what the parts do.
[43:36.550 --> 43:38.750]  No one knows what the parts are or whatever.
[43:38.750 --> 43:44.870]  Sometimes people, what they do is they compare known parts to an unknown organism to see if there are similarities.
[43:45.550 --> 43:49.350]  And so, like, okay, this rose is red and here's this other flower and it's red.
[43:49.470 --> 43:50.930]  Okay, well, maybe it's similar.
[43:52.030 --> 43:56.050]  But a lot of... what's interesting about genetic code is that, like, software is written by people.
[43:56.690 --> 44:00.050]  We've... we invented computers and we invented software.
[44:00.930 --> 44:04.470]  Whereas DNA is... or life is pre-existing.
[44:04.590 --> 44:05.490]  We did not invent it.
[44:05.490 --> 44:09.430]  And so, it's not really a process of engineering it.
[44:09.530 --> 44:12.930]  It's a process of discovery, which is a little bit different.
[44:13.030 --> 44:21.890]  Which is interesting because it's... I think maybe that could be a reason as to why we see such a different audience of people that are involved in biohacking versus straight-up computing.
[44:22.150 --> 44:28.190]  I don't know if anyone would argue with me, but when I was in studying computer science, 90% of the people in my class were guys.
[44:29.490 --> 44:31.230]  But that's not the case with bio.
[44:31.230 --> 44:43.210]  So, when I was in bio classes, it was 50-50 or maybe even swayed more towards female side, which is going to be interesting opportunity for a whole new group of people to get involved in this type of engineering.
[44:43.470 --> 44:43.750]  Yeah.
[44:45.570 --> 44:46.150]  Four minutes?
[44:46.310 --> 44:46.370]  Okay.
[44:46.530 --> 44:46.810]  Four minutes.
[44:46.810 --> 44:47.190]  Next question.
[44:48.250 --> 44:51.230]  So, I'm interested with the...
[44:53.230 --> 45:06.550]  talking about decreasing the cost of production for drugs and how that relates to patents because I know that one of the frequently raised arguments for sort of maintaining a patent system at all is that it's such a high cost.
[45:06.770 --> 45:06.890]  Yeah.
[45:06.970 --> 45:13.130]  And I'm also interested... you say that a lot of these sort of tools are becoming small and open-source.
[45:13.410 --> 45:22.490]  And I know that with 3D printing, one of the things was that it just happened to sort of bloom as these patents were falling out of their timeline.
[45:22.490 --> 45:27.610]  Do you know if the current round of bio tools are actually coming out of patent right now?
[45:27.810 --> 45:30.810]  Or is this going to be an issue where the patent...
[45:30.810 --> 45:33.350]  Like anything, there's always issues with IP.
[45:33.690 --> 45:41.830]  One of the reasons why we chose to target violacin for our wet wear kit was that violacin is a naturally occurring compound.
[45:42.030 --> 45:45.990]  It's not something that was invented by somebody that would be under IP constraints.
[45:47.210 --> 45:48.670]  That, yeah, that is a problem.
[45:49.270 --> 45:51.190]  And really, no one knows what to do.
[45:51.190 --> 45:57.850]  There's a couple... there's an issue of a tool called Genome Compiler, which is a DNA design tool.
[45:58.270 --> 46:03.430]  And they had a GUI that allowed you to organize your genetic code.
[46:03.770 --> 46:15.230]  And they actually were hit with a patent infringement case from DNA 2.0, saying that we owned the patent on using a GUI to manipulate a text file.
[46:15.230 --> 46:19.690]  And, I mean, somebody gave them that patent and they had to come to an agreement.
[46:20.030 --> 46:21.650]  And that's unfortunate.
[46:22.030 --> 46:23.870]  But the good news is patents don't last forever.
[46:24.030 --> 46:26.330]  And there's... there's... I think there's a key patent...
[46:26.330 --> 46:28.750]  There's a key patent for DNA synthesis, I believe.
[46:28.850 --> 46:29.030]  Oh, yeah.
[46:29.270 --> 46:32.510]  That... so DNA synthesis is a patented process right now.
[46:32.510 --> 46:37.030]  But one of the key patents in this space is set to expire in 2014 or 2015.
[46:37.790 --> 46:47.890]  So it's going to be exciting to see some of these smaller groups that maybe have the technology available, but, you know, can't bring it out for IP fears.
[46:48.350 --> 46:49.490]  Soon we'll be able to.
[46:49.490 --> 46:51.330]  So keep... keep your eye on that.
[46:52.090 --> 46:55.070]  I wouldn't be too careful there about the possibility of misuse.
[46:55.250 --> 46:59.450]  I mean, a bad guy could kidnap you too and take you to an evil lab somewhere.
[46:59.630 --> 47:01.690]  But what I really want to ask you about is the...
[47:01.690 --> 47:04.750]  There was a piece on As It Happens, Go Canada, about the...
[47:04.750 --> 47:05.310]  Yeah.
[47:05.310 --> 47:10.050]  The new genetic alphabet letters where, you know, they've gone between C, A, T, G.
[47:10.290 --> 47:13.410]  How important do you think that X and Y in that concept is going to be?
[47:13.630 --> 47:14.850]  Will that really change things?
[47:15.270 --> 47:16.030]  I think it will.
[47:16.130 --> 47:19.190]  I think it's... and it's an example of how malleable life is.
[47:19.190 --> 47:23.430]  And how malleable these self-replicating bio nano robots are.
[47:23.810 --> 47:26.690]  If we can add extra pieces to it and have them still work.
[47:26.890 --> 47:30.170]  Maybe, does it make the codes more expressive to have two extra characters?
[47:30.550 --> 47:31.010]  I don't know.
[47:31.150 --> 47:32.170]  Are you going to try that?
[47:32.290 --> 47:33.450]  Are you going down that road at all?
[47:33.650 --> 47:34.230]  Sorry, say again.
[47:34.250 --> 47:36.330]  Are you going to go down that road at all and try that?
[47:36.670 --> 47:37.250]  Try to figure it out.
[47:37.390 --> 47:37.450]  Yeah.
[47:37.650 --> 47:40.330]  I mean, part of like synthetic biology in itself is to...
[47:40.910 --> 47:44.870]  learn how these fundamental organisms work by rebuilding them from scratch kind of thing.
[47:45.250 --> 47:47.950]  So, you know, that's a very good example of, you know, maybe...
[47:48.610 --> 47:51.870]  eons ago when the first organisms, they had like a dozen different kinds of bases.
[47:52.170 --> 47:54.310]  And these are two of them that were there.
[47:54.450 --> 47:55.670]  And now they're not there or something like that.
[47:56.170 --> 47:57.790]  It's all really, really cool.
[47:57.990 --> 48:01.330]  And yeah, you know, you can think of tons of coding applications or whatever.
[48:01.430 --> 48:03.010]  It's the same as...
[48:03.010 --> 48:05.130]  Hey, don't let anybody kidnap you, okay?
[48:09.370 --> 48:09.930]  Hi.
[48:10.830 --> 48:17.430]  I was wondering, how difficult do you think it would be to sort of create like an arbitrary pathway?
[48:17.810 --> 48:32.170]  So, like an arbitrary metabolic pathway instead of discovering one in nature, you find some product, some protein product that you want to synthesize and you just sort of get the sequence from that and then you inject the sequence in one of these sort of tabletop systems.
[48:32.170 --> 48:33.670]  Like, is that possible?
[48:34.090 --> 48:34.390]  Yep.
[48:34.730 --> 48:35.030]  Exactly.
[48:35.610 --> 48:36.330]  Pretty much...
[48:36.330 --> 48:37.270]  Yeah, exactly as you described.
[48:37.370 --> 48:42.650]  You find the sequences and then you can express them and they could be, you know, they could just fluorescent proteins which just glow.
[48:42.890 --> 48:48.070]  Or they could be enzymes that, you know, convert sugar into some biolacin.
[48:48.250 --> 48:48.450]  Sure.
[48:49.170 --> 48:50.830]  That's what the biolacin kit is exactly.
[48:50.830 --> 48:52.710]  So, I guess I phrased that the wrong way.
[48:52.770 --> 48:55.370]  I mean, what are the restrictions on like arbitrary pathways?
[48:55.530 --> 48:59.630]  Like for example, there's some bacteria that do electron transport, right?
[48:59.630 --> 49:00.990]  They just process electrons.
[49:01.430 --> 49:01.850]  Yeah.
[49:02.350 --> 49:05.330]  So, presumably like you could use that to make a sort of classic computer, right?
[49:05.450 --> 49:12.150]  By growing bacteria and adding pathways to them that worked that way.
[49:12.850 --> 49:13.250]  Right.
[49:13.490 --> 49:16.430]  So, you're talking about manipulating the electron transport chain?
[49:16.750 --> 49:23.350]  So, like creating an alternative chain so that you can actually create logic gates within cultures of bacteria.
[49:23.750 --> 49:24.330]  Yeah, exactly.
[49:24.530 --> 49:25.290]  Yeah, logic gates totally.
[49:25.630 --> 49:26.290]  That's like a...
[49:26.290 --> 49:31.630]  That's synthetic biology is creating these sort of systems that can do these kinds of things.
[49:32.310 --> 49:33.950]  And as far as...
[49:34.570 --> 49:35.570]  Yeah, I'm not sure.
[49:35.970 --> 49:37.670]  Maybe I didn't quite get your question still.
[49:37.810 --> 49:40.610]  But creating arbitrary systems like that is, yeah.
[49:40.950 --> 49:45.170]  You can definitely do that and manipulate, you know, where things go in the cell.
[49:45.310 --> 49:46.890]  And they have their own system set up.
[49:47.010 --> 49:51.390]  And so, ideally when you're trying to produce a drug, you want to tap into that system and pull a bunch of resources from it.
[49:51.390 --> 49:58.830]  And, you know, even on that level then you can manipulate it to enhance its metabolism in the direction of your drug pathway basically.
[49:59.990 --> 50:00.730]  Thank you.
[50:06.160 --> 50:14.780]  So, I was wondering how good the current state of the art is for flexibility in creating weird sorts of organisms and genes.
[50:15.100 --> 50:18.160]  Like, do you need the gene to be in somebody's catalogue?
[50:18.340 --> 50:21.300]  Or could you use a truly arbitrary sequence or something in between or what?
[50:21.760 --> 50:22.740]  Either or.
[50:22.740 --> 50:24.080]  I mean, you can...
[50:24.080 --> 50:29.240]  Right now, if you just, like, wrote a bunch of letters and, like, said, like, order on, like, you know, IDT, just get it synthesized.
[50:29.840 --> 50:30.780]  It might not do anything.
[50:32.120 --> 50:33.840]  But, you know, there's a good chance that it wouldn't do anything.
[50:34.840 --> 50:35.480]  Well, sure.
[50:35.800 --> 50:39.920]  But, actually, like, can you get the arbitrary synthesis and put it into a life form?
[50:40.300 --> 50:40.680]  Yeah, yeah.
[50:40.680 --> 50:44.700]  I mean, you can look up online and find, like, I want the sequence for RFP and then say, like, order.
[50:45.160 --> 50:48.020]  And it'll get sent to you in the mail and you put it in your bacteria and it'll glow.
[50:48.020 --> 50:50.660]  And there's one thing that we didn't discuss yet.
[50:50.780 --> 50:54.700]  So, we've been talking about, you know, purely, like, coding for purely biological functions.
[50:54.900 --> 50:56.880]  But you can code for logical functions as well.
[50:56.960 --> 51:09.720]  Because if DNA is an information storage medium, you could translate a poem into a DNA code representation and put that DNA code into an organism and then have that organism live.
[51:09.720 --> 51:12.600]  I mean, if you've put it in the right place so it doesn't kill it.
[51:12.900 --> 51:14.920]  But it would live and replicate and grow.
[51:15.100 --> 51:18.700]  And then, basically, what you've got is a machine that makes copies of that poem.
[51:19.060 --> 51:21.600]  And it exponentially increases the number of poems.
[51:21.740 --> 51:25.740]  This has been something that's already done by a Canadian poet a number of years ago.
[51:25.980 --> 51:28.360]  But that's something, again, it's something we didn't touch on.
[51:28.420 --> 51:34.340]  That there are logical uses for DNA as an information storage medium that has nothing to do with life.
[51:34.340 --> 51:38.000]  Yeah, DNA is, like, really, really stable, just at room temperature.
[51:38.220 --> 51:43.400]  So, people are putting stuff like Shakespeare and Mozart and coding them into DNA just for long-term storage kind of thing.
[51:43.560 --> 51:45.180]  And that's super cool.
[51:45.580 --> 51:47.620]  That should drive the next round of sensors crazy.
[51:47.860 --> 51:48.420]  Thank you.
[51:52.880 --> 51:58.460]  So, you all made the pretty common analogy that both genomes and computer programs are code.
[51:59.020 --> 52:04.580]  But computer programs are usually written in a high-level language that's readable by humans with a well-defined semantics.
[52:05.180 --> 52:10.000]  So, is there anything like that for the code of a genome?
[52:10.160 --> 52:12.100]  Or is that a misleading analogy there?
[52:12.420 --> 52:15.500]  Or could it be possible, in your opinion, to develop something like that?
[52:15.660 --> 52:17.180]  I think it's definitely possible.
[52:17.880 --> 52:19.740]  A lot of work needs to be done.
[52:20.080 --> 52:23.440]  So, again, in biology, we're not working from first principles.
[52:23.620 --> 52:24.360]  In computing, we are.
[52:24.520 --> 52:25.920]  We made computers.
[52:25.940 --> 52:28.160]  We know exactly what the microcode is.
[52:28.480 --> 52:29.400]  We build up.
[52:29.560 --> 52:31.680]  Whereas, we're digging down with bio.
[52:31.680 --> 52:35.860]  And so, we're not at the point where we really know exactly the first principles.
[52:36.180 --> 52:37.920]  And I don't know if we ever will.
[52:38.660 --> 52:43.780]  But that, you know, to be actual bioengineering, we're going to have to get down to that level.
[52:43.960 --> 52:45.800]  And we're not there yet.
[52:45.800 --> 52:46.180]  Yeah.
[52:46.440 --> 52:49.600]  So, I think maybe you're talking about the annotating genomes.
[52:49.860 --> 52:52.100]  And, you know, you can see what parts do what kind of thing.
[52:52.200 --> 52:52.780]  And that exists.
[52:54.380 --> 52:58.780]  It's not a very, you know, user-friendly, people-readable kind of thing.
[52:58.900 --> 53:00.880]  Like, you can go to NCBI and say, like, I want to look at this genome.
[53:01.060 --> 53:02.320]  And it'll show you all the sequences.
[53:03.940 --> 53:06.700]  But, you know, it needs to be a better interface.
[53:06.700 --> 53:09.060]  And, you know, hopefully somebody's going to do that.
[53:10.420 --> 53:15.980]  And also, when, you know, when you're writing software in a computer and you want to test your code, you run it.
[53:16.080 --> 53:16.960]  You execute it.
[53:17.080 --> 53:17.180]  Right?
[53:17.380 --> 53:18.140]  You make it go.
[53:18.200 --> 53:23.320]  Whereas, if you're testing your biological code, you have to get the DNA synthesized, which costs money.
[53:23.460 --> 53:25.800]  You have to transfect the organism, which takes time.
[53:25.940 --> 53:27.820]  You have to grow the organism, which takes time.
[53:27.820 --> 53:32.040]  And then you have to be able to look and characterize to see what's actually happening.
[53:32.200 --> 53:39.780]  So, the iteration process in biocoding is right now a lot longer than software.
[53:40.040 --> 53:41.440]  That's compiling to DNA.
[53:42.000 --> 53:42.400]  Yes.
[53:42.780 --> 53:42.900]  Yeah.
[53:43.160 --> 53:47.020]  That's actually why formal methods is one of the oldest fields of computer science that what you just described.
[53:48.180 --> 53:48.660]  So...
[53:48.660 --> 53:49.000]  Awesome.
[53:49.120 --> 53:49.340]  All right.
[53:49.400 --> 53:49.640]  Great.
[53:49.880 --> 53:51.360]  And I think we're out of time.
[53:51.620 --> 53:54.860]  So, we'll head to the lobby or something and then we'll talk more.
[53:55.220 --> 53:55.700]  Thank you.
[53:55.960 --> 53:56.440]  Awesome.
[53:56.680 --> 53:57.060]  Thank you all.
[54:07.840 --> 54:08.440]  Thank you.
[54:08.440 --> 54:08.460]  Thank you.