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A briefcase full of poop changed my life.
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Ten years ago, I was a graduate student
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and I was helping judge
a generic engineering competition
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for undergrads.
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There, I met a British artist and designer
named Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.
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She was wearing the white
embroidered polo shirt
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of the University of Cambridge team,
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and holding a silver briefcase,
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like the kind that you would imagine
is handcuffed to your wrist.
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She gestured over from a quiet corner
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and asked me if I wanted to see something.
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With a sneaky look,
she opened up the suitcase,
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and inside were six
glorious, multicolored turds.
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The Cambridge team, she explained,
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had spent their summer
engineering the bacteria E. coli
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to be able to sense different things
in the environment
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and produce a rainbow
of different colors in response.
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Arsenic in your drinking water?
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This strain would turn green.
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She and her collaborator,
the designer James King,
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worked with the students and imagined
different possible scenarios
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of how you might use these bacteria.
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What if, they asked, you could use them
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as a living probiotic drink
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and health monitor, all in one?
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You could drink the bacteria
and it would live in your gut
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sensing what's going on,
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and then in response to something,
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it would be able to produce
a colored output.
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Holy shit!
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The Cambridge team went on to win
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the International Genetically Engineered
Machine competition,
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or iGEM for short.
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And as for me,
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those turds were a turning point.
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I am a synthetic biologist,
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which is probably a weird term
that most people aren't familiar with.
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It definitely sounds like an oxymoron.
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How can biology, something natural,
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be synthetic?
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How can something artificial be alive?
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Synthetic biologists sort of, poke holes
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in that boundary that we draw between
what is natural and what's technological.
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And every year, iGEM students
from all over the world
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spend their summer
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trying to engineer biology
to be technology.
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They teach bacteria how to play Sudoku,
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they make multicolored spider silk,
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they make self-healing concrete
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and tissue printers
and plastic-eating bacteria.
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Up until that moment, though,
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I was a little bit more concerned
with a different kind of oxymoron.
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Just plain old genetic engineering.
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The comedian Simon Munnery once wrote
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that genetic engineering is actually
insulting to proper engineering.
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Genetic engineering is more like throwing
a bunch of concrete and steel in a river
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and if somebody can walk across,
you call it a bridge.
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And so synthetic biologists
were pretty worried about this,
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and worried that genetic engineering
was a little bit more art that science.
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They wanted to turn genetic engineering
into a real engineering discipline,
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where we could program cells
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and write DNA
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the way that engineers write
software for computers.
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That day 10 years ago started me on a path
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that gets me to where I am now.
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Today, I'm the creative director
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at a synthetic biology company
called Ginkgo Bioworks.
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Creative director is a weird title
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for a biotech company
were people try to program life
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the way that we program computers.
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But that day when I met Daisy,
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I learned something about engineering.
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I learned that engineering
isn't really just about equations
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and steel and circuits,
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it's actually about people.
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It's something that people do
and impacts us.
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So in my work,
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I try to open up new spaces
for different kinds of engineering.
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How can we ask better questions,
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and can we have better conversations
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about what we want
from the future of technology?
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How can we understand the technological
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but also social and political
and economic reasons
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that GMOs are so polarizing
in our society?
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Can we make GMOs that people love?
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Can we use biology to make technology
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that's more expansive and regenerative?
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I think it starts by recognizing
that we as synthetic biologists
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are also shaped by a culture
that values "real engineering"
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more than any of the squishy stuff.
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We get so caught up in circuits
and what happens inside of computers,
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that we sometimes lose sight of the magic
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that's happening inside of us.
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There is plenty of shitty
technology out there,
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but this was the first time
that I imagined poop as technology.
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I began to see that synthetic
biology was awesome,
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not because we could turn
cells into computers,
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but because we could bring
technology to life.
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This was technology that was visceral
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and unforgettable vision
of what the future might hold.
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But importantly, it was also
framed as the question:
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is this the kind of future
that we actually want?
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We've been promised a future of chrome,
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but what if the future is fleshy?
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Science and science fiction
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help us remember
that we're made of star stuff.
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But can it also help us remember
the wonder and weirdness
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of being made of flesh?
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Biology is us,
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it's our bodies, it's what we eat.
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What happens when biology
becomes technology?
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These images are questions
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and they challenge what we think of
as normal and desirable.
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And they also show us
that the future is full of choices
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and that we could choose differently.
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What's the future of the body,
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of beauty?
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If we change the body
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will we have new kinds of awareness?
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And will new kinds of awareness
of the microbial world
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change the way that we eat?
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The last chapter of my dissertation
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was all about cheese that I made
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using bacteria that I swabbed
from in between my toes.
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I told you that the poop changed my life.
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I worked with smell artist
and researcher Sissel Tolaas
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to explore all of the ways
that our bodies and cheese are connected
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through smell and therefore microbes.
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And we created this cheese
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to challenge how we think
about the bacteria
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that's part of our lives,
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and the bacteria
that we work with in the lab.
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We are, indeed, what we eat.
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The intersection of biology and technology
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is more often told as a story
of transcending our fleshy realities.
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If you can upload
your brain to a computer,
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you don't need to poop anymore after all.
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And that's usually a story
that's told as a good thing, right?
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Because computers are clean
and biology is messy.
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Computers make sense and are rational
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and biology is an unpredictable tangle.
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It kind of follows from there
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that science and technology
are supposed to be rational,
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objective,
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and pure,
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and it's humans that are a total mess.
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But like synthetic biologists poke holes
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in that line between nature
and technology,
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artists, designers and social scientists
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showed me that the lines that we draw
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between nature, technology and society
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are a little bit softer
than we might think.
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They challenge us to reconsider
our visions for the future
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and our fantasies
about controlling nature.
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They show us how our prejudices,
our hopes and our values
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are embedded in science and technology
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through the questions that we ask
and the choices that we make.
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They make visible the ways
that science and technology are human
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and therefore political.
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What does it mean for us
to be able to control life
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for our own purposes?
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The artist Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr
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made a project called Victimless Leather,
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where they engineered
a tiny leather jacket
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out of mouse cells.
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Is this jacket alive?
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What does it take to grow it
and keep it this way?
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Is it really victimless?
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And what does it mean
form something to be victimless?
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The choices that we make
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and what we show and what we hide
in our stories of progress,
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are often political choices
that have real consequences.
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How will genetic technologies
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shape the way that we understand ourselves
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and define our bodies?
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The artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg
made these faces
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based on DNA sequences
she extracted from sidewalk litter,
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forcing us to ask questions
about genetic privacy,
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but also how and whether
DNA can really define us.
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How will we fight against
and cope with climate change?
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Will we change the way
that we make everything,
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using biological materials
that can grow and decay alongside us?
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Will we change our own bodies?
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Or nature itself?
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Or can we change the system
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that keeps reinforcing those boundaries
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between science, society,
nature and technology?
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Relationships that today keep us
locked in these unsustainable patterns.
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How we understand and respond to crises
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that are natural, technical
and social all at once,
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from coronavirus to climate change,
are deeply political.
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And science never happens in a vacuum.
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Let's go back in time
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to when the first European settlers
arrived in Hawaii.
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They eventually brought their cattle
and their scientists with them.
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The cattle roamed the hillsides,
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trampling and changing
the ecosystems as they went.
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The scientists catalogued the species
that they found there,
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often taking the last specimen
before they went extinct.
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This is the Maui hau kuahiwi,
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or the Hibiscadelphus wilderianus,
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so named by [unclear] Wilder in 1910.
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By 1912, it was extinct.
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I found this specimen
in the Harvard University herbarium,
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where it's housed with five million
other specimens from all over the world.
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I wanted to take a piece
of science's past,
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tied up as it was with colonialism,
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and all of the embedded ideas
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of the way that nature and science
and society should work together.
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And ask questions about science's future.
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Working with an awesome team at Ginkgo,
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and others at UC Santa Cruz,
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we were able to extract
a little bit of the DNA
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from a tiny sliver of this plant specimen
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and to sequence the DNA inside.
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And then resynthesize a possible version
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of the genes that made
the smell of the plant.
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By inserting those genes into yeast,
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we could produce little bits of that smell
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and be able to maybe smell
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a little bit of something
that's lost forever.
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Working again with Daisy
and Sissel Tolaas,
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my collaborator on the cheese project,
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we reconstructed and composed
a new smell of that flower,
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and created an installation
where people could experience it,
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to be part of this natural history
and synthetic future.
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Ten years ago, I was a synthetic biologist
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worried that genetic engineering
was more art than science
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and that people were too messy
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and biology was too complicated.
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Now I use genetic engineering as art
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to explore all the different ways
that we are entangled together
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and imagine different possible futures.
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A fleshy future
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is one that does recognize
all those interconnections
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and the human realities of technology.
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But it also recognizes
the incredible power of biology,
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its resilience and sustainability,
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its ability to heal and grow and adapt.
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Values that are so necessary
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for the visions of the futures
that we can have today.
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Technology will shape that future.
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But humans make technology.
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How we decide what that future will be
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is up to all of us.
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Thank you.