David Kong

David Kong: Hey, well thank you everyone. My name is David Kong. I am the last speaker between you and lunch. So this is a tough spot to be in, but I will move as quickly as I can. I’m going to talk fast, not as fast as Pat. That was like one of the fastest talks I’ve ever seen in my life. But I will try to be fast but not too fast.

00:22 - As we have a bio digital interface here between my computer and the screen, I just want to again, congratulate all the organizers. So Patty, the food interfaces group, and particularly Pat for really having the vision to pull together this wonderful community. Again, I think one of the strengths of the Media Lab is our ability to work across different disciplines. And I’m curious even here in this room, how many of you consider yourselves to be synthetic biologists are identify as synthetic biologists? David Kong: Fewer than I thought, okay, how about designers? Oh, lots of designers. Artists? Okay. And how about human computer interaction folks? Lots of HCI people. Very cool.

01:02 - So I mean already I think this in a way is history being together, folks from really disparate communities like that into one room for us to hopefully really formulate and think about what this new field could be. So it’s such an honor to be here with you all. This is just a photograph of some of the wonderful students in research that I get to work with. Some of you are in the room today, so thank you all for being here. I really loved this prompt of cultivate. I’ll talk a little bit about cultivation and the concept of those tools, interfaces, and communities, the next generation of innovators that will hopefully launch this whole field.

01:30 - David Kong: So quickly about tools, we heard earlier from Rachel about a project like Mushtari which has wearables for microbial systems. A project that I led a prior to coming to the Media Lab at MIT Lincoln Lab was on 3D printed artificial guts, right? So how could you leverage advanced digital fabrication tools and build sophisticated multi-material systems that could capitulate some of the features that we find in real guts? They could have a polymeric components that could squeeze and enable peristalsis. And then you could also have different types of gradients built into the structure as well. You can imagine now folding in technologies like what Deepak was describing with organoids, where you can have a system that was built using digital fabrication that’s integrating different types of biological materials. Again, one of my technical areas of expertise is in microfluidics or lab-on-a-chip based systems.

02:18 - So we’ve done a variety of work as well, trying to recapitulate and study how you could create these different physiological and biological gradients that you find in nature, but doing it in chips, again to try to develop some in vitro models for animal testing, for example. David Kong: One of the projects that we’re working on in the group right now is something called the ZappOre. So Berenice is here in the back. I think Tasia is not here, but Tasia is really the innovator and the visionary behind this tool. This is a $10 DNA electroporater. Okay, so electroporation I think for those of you that may not know is a foundational tool in a way we can get DNA into a cell. If you want to reprogram an organism, you have to get that DNA in there somehow and electroporation is one of the ways to do it.

02:57 - Tasia was really brilliant in thinking about different types of high voltage sources that are available around the world. One of them is a flyswatter less than $10, available almost everywhere on the planet. He figured out how to hack a fly swatter and turn it into a functioning DNA electroporater and has been figuring out how to workshop this tool and get it into the hands of different communities all around the world. David Kong: We’re also working right now on some very high throughput microbiome technologies using droplet microfluidics as a way to sample, isolate different types of microbial communities, and then systematically study how those strains can interact. We’ve seen some of the examples already today.

03:29 - If you want to have a community of organisms that could live in your gut and perform some type of sensing and actuation and function, you have to be able to study and characterize these strains somehow. So we’re working on different co-culture technologies to do that. Again, a big part of our initiative is all about sharing. How do we ultimately take all of this knowledge and wisdom that we have out there and put it out to many diverse communities around the world? In collaboration with Lincoln Laboratory and also Ron Weiss’s group, we developed a platform called Metafluidics, which is a large scale repository where you can find all of these design files to build artificial teeth and biofilms and all kinds of crazy systems so you can go check on Metafluidics to look there. David Kong: I’ll shift now and talk a little bit about how to cultivate communities.

04:10 - Again, I’m a community organizer in addition to being a technical synthetic biologist, so I do social justice work and community organizing. One framework that I think is really cool and interesting and very Media Lab is this idea of innovation at the edge. What happens when the cost of innovation goes down and so now more and more actors get involved in a field? We see this all the time in information technologies and computation, but what’s going to happen with the life sciences, right? And so connected to that idea is why is diversity important? Why is it important to get people from different technical and creative disciplines working in a field? Before synthetic biology, we had biology as a life science and the founders of synthetic biology included folks like this. This is Drew Endy, a dear friend and a mentor, a long time MIT guy as well. David Kong: Kit was talking earlier about Tom Knight, who’s shown here in the front and both Tom and Drew were engineers, right? Tom was a computer scientist, Drew was a civil engineer.

05:03 - And both of them asked themselves, why can’t I engineer a cell the same way I can engineer a computer or build a circuit or the built environment? And so this whole field in a way was born by non-biologists. A bunch of non-biologists came in and said, why can’t we engineer things just like we do in other disciplines? And so now I think synthetic biology has been an incredibly successful experiment. There’s now multibillion dollar industry around it. But now I think what’s happening in this room is a prime example of that, we’re seeing this influx of other creatives into this field, which I think is so critically important. David Kong: A number of years ago now, I taught a class on microfluidics and synthetic biology.

05:39 - Just as an anecdote, there were two students in this class. I’ll highlight Will Patrick and Julie Legault. Some of you may know them. They were former Media Lab students. Both Will and Julie were designers. They had never been in a wet lab before and never picked up a pipetter before taking this class. And now just a short few years later, both of them are CEOs of their own biotech companies, very successful biotech companies. So Julie has founded a company called Amino, many of you may know it, it’s a desktop biology lab that does microbial cell culture for education and learning purposes.

06:07 - Will Patrick leads one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, he’s like, don’t give me more money. I have too much money. People are trying to throw so much money at him. But culture bio-sciences, incredibly successful and I think Will’s skills as a designer have really helped bring a new level of innovation into engineering fermentation systems, which has been something the field has really needed. David Kong: So synthetic biology and exploration of how engineering can be mapped to biological systems. Something that happened around 10 years after the founding of synthetic biology was something called do it yourself biology, right? So a bunch of people said, why does synthetic biology have to be just for the fancy academics or the industrialist or the people in government labs? Why can’t everyday people start getting involved in synthetic biology? A field that I had been trying to push and crystallize and frame might be something called community bio.

06:53 - It might be something about not just individual actors or individual laboratories, but networks of labs, communities that are actually working together in concert. When I joined the Media Lab in 2017, the first thing we did was organize the global community bio summit. In a way, you can think about these community laboratories, they’re like maker spaces or computer clubhouses or Fab Labs except for the life sciences. David Kong: This first event that we had in 2017 was like a family reunion with a family you didn’t know you had. Folks from all around the world that really cared about bio coming from totally different cultures, geographic regions, and really had a really incredible meeting right here on the sixth floor.

07:29 - We had folks like George Church commenting on the historic nature of the 2017 meeting. Since then, we’ve had a two more bio summits. In 2018 we nearly doubled in size. Actually, this photograph was taken right here in this room, which is pretty cool. Pat, I think is still a dinosaur in this photo, as you can see in the front. Then last year, just this past fall, we had bio summit 3.0. We could barely fit everybody into this room now. More than 500 people were accepted to participate, and again, incredible global representation. David Kong: One of the things about the bio summit, I think that is so, so powerful. We really had this be a really experiential event. We had more than 170 participant-led talks, breakout sessions, and workshops.

08:08 - This is a whole field that’s about co-creation. It’s about participation. Everybody getting involved in science and synthetic biology. And so as we’ve been doing this work, there’s a whole key research and scholarship aspect to this. So how do we ultimately structure these global communities? Right? David Kong: One thing that for me has been a new field that I’ve been getting into, been really excited about is this idea of collective intelligence. What does this network look like? How do we ultimately create a system and a global community that can do synthetic biology and bio-design and bio art in a more powerful way? Tom Malone, he’s a close collaborator at the Center for Collective Intelligence at Sloan School, has this framework that I really like a lot called Superminds, right? You can imagine this room could be a supermind.

08:46 - This whole field of wearable biotechnology and global interfaces could be a supermind. So in the case of community bio, how do we ultimately activate this supermind? David Kong: So what brings a global community together? It’s not a hierarchy. There’s no CEO, there’s no dictator. You have to have some way to bring communities together. And so there are a couple of things that we think are really important. Having a certain set of values, a shared vision, a shared sense of ethics, all really important.

09:08 - I really appreciated the talk earlier from the Design Lab, talking about values and how that connects with design. So one thing we did at the second bio summit, we actually did a large scale exercise where we measured the values of our global community. So you can see a few of them here, self-actualization, pioneers and progress. But these were the measured values that we found from our global community. David Kong: We also had a really powerful co-creation exercise where we designed a statement of shared purpose.

09:33 - Why are we all here together? I actually think that might be a really valuable exercise for this group to even think about. Why are we here together? What is our shared purpose? Right? So this is something that we did it in collaboration with Harvard Kennedy School and Marshall Ganz, who’s a legendary community organizer. I’m going to read to you the statement of shared purpose. I think it’s really cool. I hope you like it too. It goes, our shared purpose is to fundamentally transform the life sciences and democratize biotechnology to inspire creativity and improve lives by organizing life science change makers and bio enthusiasts to build an inclusive global network, cultivate an accessible commons of knowledge and resources, launch community labs and projects, and enable local educators. David Kong: What do you guys think of that statement? Yes. I loved it too.

10:12 - It’s something I was really proud of when we released that, and again, it’s co-created so people could see, oh, we contributed that word, we contributed that phrase. In order to scale this thing, it’s a big global movement, one thing that we launched last year was a global community bio fellowship program. We identified 36 leaders from all around the world with a strong emphasis in Africa and Latin America. We had them go through a leadership development program. They all came to the bio summit right here last October and they had a whole bunch of awesome projects.

10:38 - I don’t have time to talk about them, but just trust me when I say they’re awesome. So I’ll skip through these. But they are really, really powerful projects that I really appreciated. David Kong: The other thing we did last year, we did a co-design of a community ethics document. What are our norms? What do we want to think about when we design these technologies? In contrast to computers, right? Living systems, they replicate, right? If you release it out into the wild, there are serious consequences around this. So we did a whole co-design of a co-created ethics document, which I think was really wonderful as well.

11:06 - So we had 11 ethical principles that we identified, and again, you can look at this on the bio summit website. David Kong: In closing, I’m wrapping up now, education and knowledge, getting this know-how out to the world, very important. There’s a course that I teach called, How to Grow Almost Anything with George Church, Joe Jacobson, and others. It’s a biotech class across scales. We’ve taught it as an MIT class. Pat was one our students last year. I think there are a few students in the class here right now. From bio-design to protein design and so on.

11:33 - David Kong: So we’ve taught this as an MIT course, but also critically, we’ve taught it in a global context to the network of Fab Labs and also community bio labs that are out there. So that’s been a really powerful thing. David Kong: iGEM, many of you may be aware of the international genetically engineered machines competition. Also a really valuable educational institution. I’ve been involved with iGEM since the start back when it was founded here at MIT. My most important role probably is that I’m the official iGEM DJ. So my favorite thing to do is to rock parties for nerds. If you have a nerd function, please let me know. I’ll DJ it for you. I’m also the official Media Lab DJ. I’ve been deejaying parties here at 99 Fridays for about eight years. So let me know if you have a nerd function. That’s what I’m here for. David Kong: And finally, my final project I’ll talk about is on the interface side, right? So this project I think hopefully will give a sense of what can happen when you bring together artists, designers, technologists, musicians, et cetera.

12:24 - So we asked this question, we’re looking at the human microbiome, an incredible area of scientific research, but what does your microbiota sound like? What if we could create a new interface that would allow you to look at the microbiome from a musical perspective? So we created something called Biota Beats. Biota. Biota Beats is a microbial record player that translates data about the microbiome into sound and music. David Kong: So again, I’m a DJ, we like to scratch vinyl records. What if you could scratch biota records? Right? Notice the gloves and the good sterile technique. So what we did was, we built a system, a whole bunch of hardware, a bunch of imaging as well.

12:58 - We used a retrofit record player, turned it into an incubator. We had biota records that you could swap different body parts from, inoculate them inside this incubator, the microbes get imaged, we collect data from them over time, and use algorithms to convert that data into music. So here’s an example of some of our biota records. This is Annie Vu, one of our students, sampling her toe bacteria. And then we image the microbes over time, and then we get this cool data.

13:21 - And I’m going to share some music just to wrap up. So, okay, so here’s some microbial music. So maybe we can turn up the sound now. David Kong: All right, so this is a feed bacteria. No more needs to be said here. The belly button, armpit bacteria, the oral microbiome. And when you put it all together, it sounds like this. David Kong: This is my favorite part, this is the mouth and foot duet. What do you guys think? Pretty cool? Awesome. So incredible, cross-disciplinary team that’s required to make a project like this happen. We thought to ourselves, cool, you’ve got vinyl records, what if you could sample the bacteria of really cool artists and make beats out of their bacteria? So again, I’m a big hip hop guy. These are photographs, I’d say this is Q-tip, Questlove, some of my favorite DJs. Anyone know who this is? Speaker 2: Jazzy Jeff. David Kong: Yes, yes. So you might know him better from this. We’re getting old here. So this is DJ Jazzy Jeff.

15:21 - I was at this event speaking with Jazzy Jeff two years ago, and I set up a little DIY lab in the green room and I was like, Jeff, at this project Biota Beats, we make music out of microbes. Can I sample some of your bacteria? And Jeff looked at me and was like, this is the weirdest question anybody’s ever asked me. But yes, you can. So, so this is DJ Jazzy Jeff sampling some of his oral microbiome. So this is the favorite picture I’ve ever taken of all time. Look at how happy DJ Jazzy Jeff is. He’s inoculating some of his oral microbiome onto one of our biota records. It’s also good branding.

15:52 - You see the Media Lab logo reflected in his sunglasses. David Kong: Anyways, so Jeff, it was a super great project. We made beats out of his bacteria and then we made beats out of iGEM. So we went to iGEM, we sampled the microbes of about hundreds of students in a project called Uni-Verse. Anyways, so you get the idea. This looks like a coronavirus map, but it’s not.

16:13 - This is the different teams that we sampled the organisms from, so each continent represented a different musical sound and a different body part. David Kong: And then we created this really cool composition. You can look it up on YouTube. I won’t play the whole thing because I’m out of time, but we had hundreds of students participate in this project, which again, I think is a really great example of an intersection between art, design, technology, and so on. David Kong: So with that, just thank everybody for all of their time. And again, this meeting, again, I think what we’re doing here hopefully is a historic moment for all of us as a community.

16:46 - So I really hope that we can bring these the features together and do some really great brainstorming. And I’ll leave you with this meme. So thank you all very much. Okay. .