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TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-07-20
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRYuN9GaN7I
I wasn't really sure who is going to fit in the types today but after listening to these topics you know I really think it's important that others perspective because like Andrew was talking about my technology is gonna change the way we interact with the natural world and after listening to Kenneth my technology is going to be turned on its head by big data and how all
that gets integrated and it's also a technology that really suffers from pre conceived so I hope you guys find this interesting and like the funds that I've had a very interesting journey I started out in the sun and that I was in the military and then I did it sarda a and not the that start up in Denver that with my own nonprofits and then my
own startups so it's been quite a journey it all started because I like beautiful thing so beauty I think it's critical to the way we communicate that's a very beautiful but that's where I work because I'm a scientist networking labs like that and I work with organisms that look like that now when you look at this place full of a microorganism it's difficult to just look
at it and say well I can see the future I can see the wonder and the promise of science right there in that white dot but there is wonder and there is promise in science especially in biotechnology which is why I got into it and I wanted to share that excitement that I feel about science in a much more tangible and accessible way that was easy
just to look at and see I wanted to make biotechnology beautiful so I started revolution bioengineering to make flowers that change color these are living flowers that change color throughout the day and our first design you can see it here it's a flower that grows from white to pink when you add that up ethanol to it so you can share a beer with your garden this
is a scientific laboratory collaborator in the Netherlands working on one of our live protected our second design is a flower that is level change color throughout the day from pink the blue and back again and you don't have to do anything with the fun you can just put it in the ground and it will follow the sun now there's a little bit of magic here it's
a little bit special the different kind of beauty that nobody seen before because I made it it's something new it's something we engineer something that we're building and just be really really clear about what that means I am genetically modified these flowers to incorporate the color change I am making it GMO and I'm making a beautiful chairman now those are two words you probably never thought
you'd hear in the same sentence together because we talk about GMOs we talk about something that looks like that isn't this an eloquent picture of the way we think about GMOs today and what the scripture says to me the three very distinct thing that the first the people that name but don't know what they're doing they just stable two pieces of fruit together that doesn't make
any sense at all the next thing it says is that biotechnology is unnecessary pairs are good apples are good why do you need to make this Frankenstein and the third thing it says if that biotechnology is unnatural pears and apples they just don't do that now scientific look at that this picture will often have their response that well it's just a misunderstanding we just need to
share more information about the science behind it about that principles about the technology and people will be totally cool Jim and he get on with building a better world but I don't think this is a misunderstanding I think that this this reflects the deep unease with a complex technology and I think it reflects a discomfort with the technology that has been largely the province of big
companies but I also think that this is an invitation for someone somewhere to stand up and say I make GMOs and this is why and that's why I'm here today because I make genetically modified organisms and I make them because I believe biotechnology but technology that is well designed and carefully engineered beautiful about technology can make a difference in the world so let's talk about beauty
how do you make a beautiful G. among now this has very little to do with the end product the microbe the plant that your engineering it's not going to look very different from its wild cousin in most cases but what can be strikingly beautiful is the way it is designed the way it is integrated and the processes that ends up replacing I will give two examples
here insulin and chemists and both essential for human life insulin regulate sugar uptake medicine for diabetics and kind person makes chief now these two proteins are produced in animal tissue and we used to grind out animal tissue after animal tissue to extract the protein that we need but these days using genetically modified bacteria we can grow the if enough broth of sugar and nutrient now about
technology hasn't made insulin and calmness and any prettier but it has made them have made the process of making them a lot less gruesome and I think that's beautiful so if we have the opportunity to work with nature to create with instead of destroying it I think we should take it and this isn't a new idea we've been doing this for thousands of years we've worked
with nature to engineer more more utility more food and more beauty we could get away with one pink to have but we don't we make many different kinds because he liked working with the natural world to meet our needs and biotechnology is the latest way to do that but like Kenneth mentioned earlier more is not always just more sometimes it comes with a little extra and
biotechnology allows us to streamline the conventional process of making new organisms so here's my recipe for beautiful biotechnology it starts by working with nature it starts by understanding and respecting the complexity of the living things that you are working with and integrating your goals into what those organisms RTG this is a comic that we made was most popular posts I think we've ever put up because
there's a tendency for people to highlight it a bio engineering as we can do it no problem everything if easily programmable but in reality vality looks a lot more like this this is a metabolic network of one single cell everything the film makes everything it consumes every single second of every single day all of these processes are going on at the same time now there's a
lot here and it's kind of a manageable select Zemin was it on the part does it help it's still pretty complicated there's still a lot going on but this is an accurate map this is a good description of what is happening in your cell and the reason we know that it is because thousands of scientists have devoted years of research to understanding every single one of
these processes from a wide variety of angles we have a lot of knowledge about what happens in the file and maybe the most important part that of the most important discovery that's come out of this is that most of these processes are the result of protein molecular machines inside the fence that perform specific functions and interact in complex networks now the designs for these machines the
instructions for them are contained in the code known as DNA and this is at the heart of biotechnology the idea that if we can make new instruction we can build new she or we can use existing instructions and combine them in new ways for a new purpose we don't have to just look at the map we can build new roads on now the process a building
these roads the process of developing new instructions of genetically modifying an organism this goes by many names genetic engineering is old school metabolic engineering is also there synthetic biology is the new one but I prefer the term applied biology because that's exactly what we are doing we're using our accumulated knowledge and applying it to find solutions the entity and discover this is Howard digital technology is
going to change everything that's why should you had a lot of information that everyone of those lines had a lot of other information associated with that one map only tell half the story it's more than anyone person can hold in their head but computers Peters can hold a lot more in the can integrate a lot more Watson you may know him from jeopardy well they put
them to work doing research they fed him seventy thousand papers that had been published around one single pretty and once it was not only able to go through all of those papers and integrate all that data he came up with this man of interaction just like the one we are he had but he added seven new proteins and protein interactions that people later discovered independently and
he's also added two more that we have not yet a not yet discovered experimentally so Watson is not only able to build us maps he can fill in the gaps we didn't know it there that's incredible this data driven discovery is going to broaden our base of knowledge not only will we be able to integrate more data will be able to test it more quickly because
digital technology is advancing to the point where robots can do experiments for us and once you are able to outsource the experimentation process the how to the tool building the tedious things that kind of get in the way of actually answering questions science becomes the creative discovery and it becomes it comes out of those backroom in industry and it comes out of academia and it makes
it so anyone so that you could come up with a question and have it analyze and look at the results and you may need some expertise to figure out exactly what experiments you have to run but you can discover something with the help of digital technology the second element of this recipe is to think big picture how is biotechnology going to fit in to whatever situation
you're trying to solve up I'm going to give an example of as in the end you spoke about earlier he was talking about vision problems one at source of vision problems in the world is vitamin a deficiency the fax at six hundred thousand people across the world and many of them are children now vitamin a deficiency and Michael Newton nutritive fish and see if well to
fix them you need to provide the nutrients but pedals can often be too expensive for poor families and as a you've got to be too expensive for poor families and they often are taken either so the best way to do this is to incorporate it into the diet not there are two options here one to find a plant that RT gives you the nutrients you need
and that's what happened in Africa Africa a little at a sweet potatoes and groups came in and said we are going to fix this problem the white sweet potatoes which you know and love it are part of your culture those don't help your vision but the orange sweet potatoes those those are good for you does a supplement or vitamin a but they didn't just hand them
to the community if they sing songs about them they put on plays about them they had a healthy baby competitions and they did recipes and they engage the community in an active discussion of this new foods because it takes a lot for people to incorporate new ideas on a topic like food it takes a lot for you to change your culture and change your attitude toward
something that is as close to home as for now it also has a problem with vitamin a deficiency but race is a major starts there and rice doesn't have a good alternative that can help supplement these the vitamin a deficiency six scientists decided to provide one and now there is a choice between a white race in an orange right just like there is a choice between
a white sweet potato and or NC potato but the problem is the scientist didn't sing songs about their race and they didn't have healthy baby competitions and as a result the label GMO and the cultural bias that attends that has really colored the picture here it is like people to burn field trials and its lead people not only in the community that need it but also
in the communities that don't to protest the introduction of of a plant like this now the last bit of beautiful biotechnology is I think to answer the questions that the culture really wants to know and for my project in particular I'm working with plants they're part of an ecosystem we need to understand how they relate pollinators how they relate how they could relate to the wild
cousins that are out there this night we talked with experts who study in facts and how they interact with flowers that change color it meant that we spoke with a hypervisors and floriculture people and we realize that over at hundreds of years of hybridizing petunias there is no gene flow back to the wild type so we picked an organism that would minimize our our impact on
the environment these are things that we take into consideration and I think every project should take into court into consideration and answer honestly now one of the most interesting things about this has been the fact that the people that are most excited about what we do are the artists we have had artists from England and all over the world could contact us about the color changing
flowers because they want to get involved they can imagine a New World we're not constrained by fear over considering how we can build the world we want to see with this technology and we're thrilled to be working with a doctor Helen story on a dress that features the flowers that change color do you yeah giddy as a way to communicate and science that are have a
lot more in common than I ever expected we both ask questions we both find answers we have to creatively approach the world and determine new things about it sometimes our work runs headlong into uncomfortable truths and sometimes it directly challenges the status quo and I know that's what I'm doing with my project challenging the status quo I'm calling Freda think twice about what a GMO is
