Rachel Smith

Jack: Yes. So to begin this first chapter of our day, we’re just really looking forward to having everyone here to envision the future of biotech and biotech devices. But before we can launch into the future, we need to understand the present. And so we’re going to have speakers from a variety of disciplines and departments and places talk to us about their work in this field to inform and inspire the second half of the day where we will then begin prototyping and envisioning this really crazy future that you’ll be hearing about all day. Jack: So to begin this, the first chapter of the day is synthesize. And so this is using biological systems to produce things.

00:49 - And so there’s this subtle shift that we’ve been having in how we make things, actually going from making to harvesting. And we see this now even with 3D printers where we upload the file and then eight hours later we come back and we harvest our print. But we’re limited just to maybe a little bit of plastic or a laser cut piece of wood. And so we’re going to hear some really great speakers that are questioning or pushing forward, “Well, what if we can create things that can create anything?” Jack: And so to begin that, I would like to invite our first speaker up. This is Rachel Soo Hoo Smith. She is a PhD student in the media lab in Neri Oxman’s mediated manner group, and welcome. Rachel Soo Hoo…: Awesome. Thanks Jack. Let’s see, awesome. And here we go. Good morning guys. Yeah, so my name is Rachel. I’m a PhD student. I work here at the media lab.

02:01 - And one of my main goals today is to, in this short 10 minutes, tell you a little bit about a field that I belovedly called Hybrid Living Materials. This could also be known as engineered living materials, bio hybrids, wearable biotech. It fits snugly in this conference of what we’re talking about today. And one thing in this theme of synthesize that I want you to focus on in this is that in between all the exciting bio and digital, there’s also materials, which I think of as the underdog. But it’s there. It might seem boring and inert, but it’s something that we think about a lot on a daily basis when we’re synthesizing. Rachel Soo Hoo…

And so to start things off, I thought it would be morning and you 02:57 - guys could have a pop quiz and I could judge how nerdy the audience is. Does anybody know what we’re looking at here? You can scream it out. Speaker 3: 2001! Rachel Soo Hoo…: Yeah. So this is a Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is my favorite scene cause it’s the Dawn of humanity. This pro-human monkey has sat in this pile of bones for a long time and has just had this giant epiphany that this is not just a bone, this is also a tool. And this is the the cradle of humanity.

03:37 - It’s now utensil and a weapon and a signal and everything else. Rachel Soo Hoo…: And although that is fiction, I think that’s happened many times throughout history. We’ve gone, in the last hundreds and more years, through a bronze age and an iron age. We’ve found plastics and glass and we found more and more sophisticated processes through them. So, we’ve got these skyscrapers now and these tiny silicon chips. And even this new kind of black mirror of virtual material and virtual reality as well. Rachel Soo Hoo…: But I don’t think we’ve depleted our physical world yet. I think that if we were to ask someone what the next revolution of materials could be, it’s to think of a living cell as a material. And if we take this to actually break down what a cell is and what it has to offer us, you can see that cells, first of all, are extremely good at harvesting energy from their environment and then using that energy to be motile. They’re these little agents. They can also use that in energy to replicate and grow. Rachel Soo Hoo…

Their surfaces are jam packed with all these little signal receptors 05:00 - and things and sensors for their environment. And this module also has an interior that can produce all these metabolic agents. Pretty much we have programmability for making DNA, proteins, antibodies, and a lot of metabolic chemicals. And if you think of this one little agent as a material, we can go pretty far with it. Rachel Soo Hoo…: But what’s the catch? There’s always a catch.

05:27 - And our engineering requirements say that for engineerable materials, we need some level of control over these things. We need our material to be repeatable, designable, and standardizable. And that’s where we’re having our next big hurrah in the materials world, is trying to create some control over this. And luckily there’s a lot of people doing it. Rachel Soo Hoo…: So, in no particular order, I don’t mean to offend anyone, this should have been floating bubbles, but in the last 20 years we’ve had people in the world of synthetic biology start to relate these cells to computers and program with them.

06:11 - We’ve had people in regenerative medicine for the first time put cells into additive manufacturing platforms and print with them and really take that idea of them as a material to a next level and even let them grow emergently afterward. Rachel Soo Hoo…: And then we have what we now call these bio hybrid and hybrid living materials. And a few quick examples of these, some of them you’ll see today are bio bots, things that use cells to be motile. And there’s also large built structures, like the cellulose and mycelium structures that can be grown and if they’re still alive can begin to sense as part of the building. Some other of my favorites are bio textiles and this could be anything from Hiroshi’s group to embedded bacterias and threads. Rachel Soo Hoo…

And then I think it’s been over a decade since this has happened, 07:12 - but these biological photographs are using the logic gates in E. Coli so that each cell can act kind of like a pixel on a plate and decide whether or not, based on a rules, to produce ink or not. And not only can it do photographs but it can do edge detection and a lot of other levels of logic that we usually only see in digital. Rachel Soo Hoo…: So with that, I want to bring you to some of the work we do in the mediated matter group with a lot of collaborators as well. And that’s how we approach this idea of hybrid living materials.

07:51 - And again, to go back to synthesis, we’ve played with that idea a lot and we often do not assign who is the maker. We let that drift between anything from a silkworm, a bacteria, the computer designer, or the biologist. And we like to break through what people assume can be made and how it is made. Rachel Soo Hoo…: And with that, the next pop quiz of the day is how do you think this was synthesized or what is it? Speaker 4: [inaudible] Rachel Soo Hoo…: Yes, yes. So, you probably already know some of you. But this was where our story starts.

08:41 - We do a lot of 3D printing in our group and this is a multi material inkjet 3D printer. So we’re working off the basis that we can use tiny drops of ink to have heterogeneous material distribution throughout an object, which is something that is fairly novel in our material history. And there’s a couple more example of these objects. Rachel Soo Hoo…: What’s beautiful about them is this printer has about 16 micron control in one dimension and it also allows you not only to have different materials in one unified object, but grade your material properties continuously throughout, which up to this one is something we’ve only really seen in natural constructs. And although this is biomimetic, we’re starting to wonder how can we make this not just mirror biology, but have some kind of functional interface with it.

09:34 - Can we use these things that look a lot like biology to actually communicate? Rachel Soo Hoo…: And that was the goal of Vespers, it was a group of death masks, if you’re wondering what these shapes are, and our idea was to take this a biotic material and by the end of the project have something where both the digital design platform and the abiotic materials we print with were having some kind of interface or active communication with the living cells. Rachel Soo Hoo…: And how he did this was threefold. We actually worked in the area of the software, the printer, and the cell to create the system as a whole that could be programmable. So, this is to start. Our software was a custom software made for the printer and the only thing you really do need to know about this is that what we’re able to do here, I’ll play that again, is create a bitmap where at every single point in 3D space we can say if a material does or does not exist there and how much of it. Before we were only using that for visual materials like a color or transparency or opacity, but our next idea was to use that for a chemical signal to say at any given point in this 3D object, we want a small chemical inducer, as we call it, and that’s something that synthetic biologists have used for a long time as a way to communicate with bacteria and turn on or off a gene. Rachel Soo Hoo…

And so what we’re doing now is putting that into a three dimensional 11:19 - object and giving it a spatial information set of where to turn on or off a gene. Then of course you have your programmable material. You need your programmable life. These are our E. Coli cells. They’re our trusty workhorses and for most of the visuals that you’re seeing, it’s actually a very simple circuit. Puck 19, which has a [inaudible] and produces of blue pigment when the gene turns on. There you go. And so, what’s beautiful about these biological circuits, as many of you know, is that right now we’re working on this huge library of biological and engineered gene circuits that different labs are producing.

12:06 - So, really once you have a platform where you can make both of these things, you can benefit from a library of colors, products, and even bioactive materials that you can make with cells. Rachel Soo Hoo…: So, this is Vespers 3. What we did here, this is a 3D print that came off the printer. It’s a time lapse of about 24 hours that this mask sat in a humidity controlled incubator. And you can start to see that the mask has embedded in it, the chemical signals necessary to tell the bacteria where to produce color. The bacteria are living across the entire mask.

12:54 - So, you just can’t see them in some areas where their genes aren’t on and they’re having this interaction with the material. So, let’s see. Rachel Soo Hoo…: So, that was pretty cool. So, what we actually think is cool about this is we’ve integrated it into a digital process. That means that the second we made this in the incubator, we ran back to the computer and we said, “Oh my gosh, we can iterate on this.” And the gene expression areas didn’t end up in exactly the right spot. So, we went back to our CAD program, we redesigned, and we realized we could make prediction models for where the genes would express.

13:37 - And that way we now have a CAD program where we can design what we want to make and press print. Rachel Soo Hoo…: And so we’ve made a lot of different experiments in this way and started to branch out into the geometries and the different materials properties that we can work with. And… I actually want to… Do I have one more slide? No. Okay. Rachel Soo Hoo…: And we’ve also used a lot of logic circuits in this. So, the same logic circuits that create the types of photographs you saw earlier we can use to combine the logic of multiple signals or inputs that those bacteria are getting and tell them if you’re getting these multiple things, you should produce a signal or a product here. So, this was one of our ideas. This is going 10, 100 years into the future for how this could possibly be seen in a real application. Rachel Soo Hoo…

And that was scoliosis back brace, which is already an area that 14:45 - we need to see a lot of custom made wear for different patients who have different kind of backs and different problems. And here we want to use bacteria to start to find the pain points and the inflammation points and produce different bioactive drugs for them in those areas. Rachel Soo Hoo…: So finally, I think this project was a huge mix of design, art, and engineering. One of the places it’s ended up is the London Design Museum and MoMA as well as Advanced Functional Materials, which is a publication. So we try to push on both ends. We realized that putting living cells into objects is going to take a lot of public exposure to get people to be comfortable with it.

15:42 - And first they’re going to have to be in these glass cases and completely pasteurized. And we may have to tell TSA that they were salad bowls, but eventually we can start to use them for these functional ideas that you’ll think of today. And I’m really excited to see it get there. Thank you. .