In the last couple of years I’ve seen a lot of criticism1 toward minimalism. People will compare a modern building to a Gothic cathedral and go “when did we stop building beautiful things? Modern design prioritizes convenience, and it is making us sick with its neutral colors, smooth surfaces, narrow constraints, and lack of stories”.

When looking at bioreactors, minimal cells, recombinant proteins, and IVF robots, I cannot help but wonder whether biotechnology is following a similar minimalist ideology by stripping the complexity from wild-type biology.

Broadly speaking, definitions in art and design will say that minimalism is the emphasis on the essence of something and that it avoids expressing the opinion of its creator or any other non-essential wrapping, because “less is more”. Conversely, maximalism could be thought of as the excess and abundance of something, because “more is more”.

But according to whom or to what standards are we making these claims? Is biology minimalist because evolution selects for the survival and reproduction of functional elements by spelling only four letters differently? Or is it maximalist because of the “immense” diversity and symbiotic relationships that emerge from this code, spanning the cell to a world?

After WWII, minimalism arose both due to the need to rebuild cities fast, and as a philosophical statement against the historical maximalism practiced by the elites. Ironically, in simplifying objects, minimalism incentivizes their mass usage and consumption. This is better exemplified by minimalist yet addictive social media interfaces, and is also present in home decoration with programmed obsolescence that results in consumerism and houses that can be built in days and scaled to neighborhoods that look the same.

Minimalism and maximalism, however, are not opposite but intertwining and, in fact, complementary ideologies. A synthetic cell grown in a bioreactor for a single function can seem as minimalist as an iPhone made out of stainless steel and glass running 0s and 1s. But both hold immense power to scale in complexity and thus generate a maximalist amount of AI slop or a biological catalog the size of planet Earth.

Instead of absolute maximalism or minimalism, biology pursues homeostasis. Simple at the impermanent individual level, complex at the enduring population level. Neither waste nor excessive consumption can be afforded. Convenience is required, but details are essential. Biology doesn’t have to sacrifice beauty for scale.

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You and I remember Dr. Jiankui He’s announcement of the world’s first gene-edited babies in 2018, as well as his following 2-year prison sentence. What has the average person heard about the issue since then?

Crickets.

Bioethicists and journalists exiled the idea from the zeitgeist, made it too taboo to even consider. If “should we” questions were asked, they almost always led to “no” answers.

Seven years later, Silicon Valley startups are already selecting human embryos and investors are hungry for startups that CRISPR them.

Nucleus Genomics and Orchid Bioscience offer whole genome embryo sequencing to select your embryo based on their genetics. Manhattan Genomics and Dr. He himself say to be building embryo editing services, and tech investors like Brian Armstrong (CEO of Coinbase) have publicly shown interest in funding human embryo editing companies.

Who is discussing these topics in public? Who is asking different questions or providing different answers, given the times? Where are all the biotech philosophers?

My prayers were finally heard, and last month, The Free Press organized a debate with Jamie Metzl, Allyson Berent, Carter Snead, and Lydia Dugdale. The question: Is designing babies unethical — Or a moral imperative?

As a biotechnologist, I need to study this subject a LOT more deeply. Personally, I need to think a LOT more about it. This discussion, however, sparked some preliminary thoughts…

First, I don’t think we are scared of designer babies, we’re scared of the socioeconomic inequalities they may enlarge.

“If their babies are enhanced and mine isn’t, mine will be at a greater disadvantage than ever”. It’s true.

This is not a problem of biotechnology, but of economics. We do not live in egalitarian societies, but in meritocratic ones.

So here’s another teaser: having babies, “wild type” ones through this old tech called sex, is already a luxury to many. Period.

Global birth rates have declined so drastically in the last few years. While having children is now a status symbol of the elites, and middle class GenZ are having less sex, low income countries will be those with the youngest population.

That means those who can afford to have babies will also be the only ones enhancing them.

Second, biology is (indeed) very complex.

This means two things: that we may not know how seemingly simple edits will impact babies as they grow, or their offspring. It also means that optimizing for “traits” like high intelligence may be farther away than most people fear.

“Once we allow medical edits, we will move on with enhancement” is an argument I completely agree with. Biology finds a way, and so do consumers, especially when something desired is legally restricted.

Yet again, the enhancements may not concern aesthetics or intelligence, since we don’t know enough about many of those complex traits yet.

As the graveyard of biotech shows, the fact that silicon valley is ready to commercialize certain technological promises doesn’t mean it’s ready to make them real.

Finally, I think too many people have been concerned about the technology being restricted to elites. However, if it is in the best interest of companies, governments, and individuals to make it as cheap and accessible as possible, and knowing this is technologically possible indeed, I have a final question:

Would it be more ethical to pass on messy genes, and preserve the right not to be edited, than to pass on healthy ones?

Would it be ethical for governments or insurance companies, at some point, make of gene therapies and germline editing a requirement to reduce healthcare costs?

I’m not sure it’s morally correct, but I think they will.

That leads to my conclusion: I think that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

It would be foolish to assume that gene editing, including germline editing, will not bring any negative repercussions, including those suggested by those against, and some other still unforeseen consequences.

At the same time, it is true that under free markets, and given the great suffering that some parents and patients go through, we will inevitably take the risk.

Thank you for paying attention to some of these preliminary thoughts. I’m eager to know how my arguments grow stronger as I read more philosophy, transhumanism, and economics books.

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According to an estimate from the website Share the Luck, there is only one four-leaf clover for every 5,076 three-leaf clovers. So far, we only know that the gene responsible for this rare trait is recessive for the quadruploid plants, and that luck favors warm conditions, approximately two-fold when it comes to growing four leaves.

Vincent Pennetti, who has been fascinated by the iconic plants since he was a teen, recently finished his PhD at the Parrot Lab at the University of Georgia, where they studied the multifoliolate leaves of Trifolium repens (common clovers species).

One of their papers highlights that the Trifolium genus could have originated from multifoliolate ancestors whose leaflet number was reduced during evolutionary time via a dominant locus that inhibits the expression of multifoliolate leaves.

The precise genotype of the iconic four-leaf clover, however, remains a mystery. After all, who wants to invest tax dollars to figure St. Patrick out? This is not a science project. It is an artistic quest on how the cultural meaning of an organism changes as it morphs from a rare gift of nature into an engineered product.

Per his LinkedIn profile, Vincent is still an independent clover breeder. He once sold $300 worth of clovers to a guy who wanted to give them out at a senior living community for St. Patrick’s Day. When it comes to bioengineered clovers though, he thinks that would “ruin the search for everybody else” and prefers not to be the one doing it.

Poets of Living Objects think differently of this issue. A very ambitious project would not only bioengineer Trifolium to have four leaves, but also make its leaves iridescent, bigger, and reactive to touch like Mimosa pudica… as far as I could read, no one has done or tried this yet.

Philosophically speaking, biology has long relied on statistics, a backward-looking lens that reduces reality to frequencies, averages, randomness. Bioengineering, by contrast, could support itself on calculus that captures direction, infinitesimal change, and precise transformation.

The bioengineered four-leaf clover would make a statement: life is no longer a lottery ticket.

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Recently, 1984 has been brought up on online videos that reference AI and social media companies as the “Big Brothers” used for massive civil surveillance, as well as the drivers of a “newspeak” which may simply reflect how our addictive technologies atrophy our brains.

In Orwell’s book, the nuclear family is also distorted such that children can accuse their parents of “thought-crime” to get them “vaporized” (cancelled, cough cough). However, little has been said about “Anti-sex”.

The political party in 1984 arranges marriages such that couples have no desire towards each other. They reframe sex from a private act of love, to the duty of producing obedient citizens.

As I scroll past news about automated IVF factories, embryo selection services, GenZ’s poor sexual life, and declining fertility rates, I can’t help but think that biotech too is bringing us to a 1984 world, and there’s not much we can do about it.

In a world in which marriages don’t last, young people don’t want to marry, and most people can’t afford the time nor the money to have children, then humans may either be a biologically enhanced breed that symbolize status for the rich… or a massified commodity whose only purpose is to sustain the economy, perhaps even on other planets.

So far, humans have spread across the Earth through sexual reproduction. It’s at the core of who we are as living things, what motivates us and even how our culture and economic machines develop, for sex relates to gender and the latter is entangled with power, identity, and cultural norms.

In 1984, it is mentioned that Big Brother exists not as a mortal human does, but as a supposedly immortal embodiment of the Party. Some say this as mirroring capitalism, or the algorithms and platforms (and biotechnologies) that serve it.

In a conversation between Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis (CEO of Deepmind and Isomorphic Labs), the space-tech entrepreneur was presumably appalled to realize that, even if he turns humans into an interplanetary species, AIs with political and cultural views that oppose his own will inevitably follow him all the way to Mars.

No technology is apolitical. Perhaps Musk will IVF his way to colonizing the red planet only with humans descended from him, and AIs that his companies develop. If reproduction is life’s greatest power, there is no reason our technocrats will not harness it. Brian Armstrong, founder of Coinbase, is already investing in companies in the space.

By the way, the fact that we can grow any biological thing in a dish or a tank, from teeth to tomatoes, means that it’s not only human reproduction that is at stake, but all of biology. Since AIs are becoming the essential Chief Growth Officers at these biotech companies, they will undeniably continue to exert control over organisms when they move to Mars.

Back to Earth 2025, biotechnology is turning the act of having kids into a rather commercial transaction. If I’m rich enough, in a couple of decades from now I may be able to buy my first kid using bitcoin through a BCI implant. I could send a sample of my cells, have them turned into stem cells that make an embryo whose genome I design before having it grown in an artificial womb.

As countries continue racing for technological supremacy, inevitably automating every human task possible through robotics and artificial intelligence, machines will become more human-like — with AI and biotechnology that can quantify every molecule in our bodies to optimize for longevity and productivity, humans will become more machine-like.

Perhaps the misunderstood implication of Julian Huxley and other transhumanists’ vision for the transcendence of the human race, is the literal process of our extinction before the machines, which as Gods we made to our own image, succeed us.

For now, since I don’t want to have us all buy embryos on some social media marketplace through some AR glasses, I urge us to start a counterculture of love.

Biology’s greatest “feature” has never been an eye color, fur texture, or voice tone. The most beautiful “feature” of life is the intangible and unquantifiable connection between two sentient beings that we call love.

It goes beyond the butterflies in the belly and a twinkling gaze. It could be love towards a friend, a spouse, a pet, a sibling, a father or a mother. Being present with them, seeing them smile and know they are happy, right here, right now is a kind of magic that Big Brothers may try to eradicate, but may never quite be able to engineer.

As we create new biotechnologies, I wish for us to keep this absolutely unscientific point of view in mind, for it will undoubtedly determine how we design, develop, and deploy them as culture.

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Todays’ clocks are essentially oscillators of a highly regular physical process, like the vibration of a quartz crystal or the oscillation of a pendulum. But oscillators are also present in circadian clocks, heartbeats, and neural rhythms that regulate biological cycles. Time is has always directed how organisms age and evolve.

Today’s quantified self movement has spurred all kinds of devices to measure such cycles — REM-measuring rings, epigenetic clock tests, hormone testing devices — often aided by AI for interpretation and forecasting.

We, biology have outsourced introspection to machines that tell us how rested, young, or even happy we are. Instead of looking at our analogous biology itself, we look at digital numbers on a screen.

Tired of this enslaving approach, a rebellious biological watchmaker decides to bring biological time somewhere it can be seen as it is. The biological watch contains engineered cells from the user to project visible signals at every passing unit of biological time.

The International System of Units (SI) defined the second as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation of the cesium-133 atom, which quartz watches approximate.

The biological watch, instead, ticks at the cell’s own tempo. A neuron, an egg, gut bacteria, a stem cell, all tell a different story, as they ages. Unlike the silent ticking of a digital clock, the biological watch reminds the user of two deep truths about life: entropy and finitude.

Naturally, biologizing time means not only to make a strap out of mycelium. It is to understand, imbue with, and remind the user of what it means to be alive, including decay. It is an instrument for introspection.

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PS: this was a small creative experiment after reading a bit about cells that ‘can keep time’. If you have deep technical understanding that could bring this to life, I’d love to chat to write a better proposal.

In light of the recent funding cuts to the NIH, the CDC, and the NSF, great pieces have been written on how the social contract established post-WWII built the scientific institutions we know, the limitations it presents to generating more scientific breakthroughs, and where we could be going next.

In this post, I want to focus on the Decentralized Science (DeSci) movement that once promised to change how science is done and enable all kinds of new research that wouldn’t be possible under the old dogma. Four years post-hype, I have a very simple and pragmatic question: what have these rebellious scientists and technologists actually achieved?

Amidst the monkey NFTs, I remember the explosion of biotech Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) in 2021. Some wanted to cure aging, others were off for rare diseases, psychedelics, climate, what not. The point was to support ideas and projects so crazy that public institutions wouldn’t even consider them; projects risky enough to scare VCs away; and huge for humanity, if true.

Oversimplifying the concept, DAOs are a group of people organized via blockchain technology, in order to fund a certain category of scientific projects by buying tokens (coins) that give them voting power to decide what specific projects to fund. The system allocates capital directly to the winning scientists, skipping the middleman.

The project’s IP (like a patent or license) can further be turned into a token, an IP-NFT, allowing backers to own a slice of the science itself, and aligning scientific progress with financial upside. DAOs can also buy equity in a company just like venture funds, except token holders can vote to decide which companies to fund and get proportional gains on future returns.

DeSci aims to be the engine in which everyone has skin in the game—funders get a say, researchers get equity, patients help shape the science—DAOs, tokens, and IP-NFTs are the gears designed to keep the engine running, at least in theory…

VitaDAO, perhaps the most popular of all biotech DAOs, is dedicated to funding aging research. Their tRNA suppressor project received $91k from VitaDAO in 2022, raised $300k via their IP-NFT, and this year, they successfully delivered their therapy to six organs in mice without any adverse effects. In preparation for clinical studies in humans next year, they have partnered with Lonza, a CDMO specialized in gene therapy production.

Companies they acquired equity from are also gaining traction. GERO, a techbio company, received $100k from VitaDAO. In 2023, they collaborated with Pfizer to discover potential therapeutic targets for fibrotic diseases in 2023, and this year, they closed a $250M partnership with Chugai Pharmaceutical (owned by Roche) to co-develop novel antibody drugs for aging.‍

Athena, another DAO that focuses on women’s health research and started in 2022, has partnered with GERO to identify up to 10 novel targets for ovarian aging and potentially develop a drug. They have two other projects on ovarian follicle growth and senescence in ovarian aging.

ValleyDAO, the only major DAO outside the health space, funds climate biotech projects. This year, their chocolate project is partnering with manufacturers to test their microbe-produced cocoa fats. Their hemp textiles project has turned raw hemp fiber into softer, more flexible fibers suitable for sustainable textile applications.

Unlike most of these groups, PsyDAO funds psychedelic science and art. They are asking if we naturally synthesize DMT; they’re developing deoxymethoxetamine (DMXE), a dissociative compound that may offer advantages over ketamine in a medicinal context; and they have established partnerships with indigenous people on the Amazon River who make coffee and art.

CerebrumDAO nurtures potential Alzheimer’s solutions. Their six active projects include a consumer software product; equity on Arctic Therapeutics, a company disrupting amyloid plaques that just closed a €26.5M Series A; and an IP token on Fission Bio, a pre-seed drug discovery platform spun out of Stanford. It was just this year that their $NEURON token was launched.

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All the above have tokens are worth $1.2 USD max. At $56 USD per token, HairDAO marks the exception. They’ve gone the extra mile in democratizing science by building anagen, a telehealth platform that matches consumers with doctors who recommend the best out of 18 treatments proven safe and effective in in-vivo clinical trials.

Customers can be rewarded with 10% $HAIR tokens at the time of purchase, 10% after two review time points, and 10% bonus for high quality photos. This not only creates a direct feedback loop, but literally makes consumers part of the whole R&D cycle by giving them voting power for future products. Brilliant, IMO.

Apart from not wearing “DAO” in its name, Curetopia is unique in supporting projects to address the trillion-dollar market TradBio isn’t incentivized to address: rare disease. Most of their projects are either inspired or led by people who had a personal experience with rare disease, who are taking a drug repurposing angle to find cures. A patent is currently being filed for their positive studies in yeast to target AARS2 deficiency. They just listed their token in March.

This is a good point to mention that, before listing tokens for public trading, DAOs can validate their model using grants from other crypto organizations, VC funding, and multisig treasuries (crypto wallets). ValleyDAO, for instance, received early support from Gitcoin, Axial VC, and Protocol Labs while VitaDAO was initially backed by Molecule. Akin to startups, early contributors to the DAO can be partially paid in tokens before these launch.

Molecule who? The technological and legal infrastructure needed for all the IP-NFTs mentioned above, is courtesy of Molecule, a VC-backed DAO that has supported over 35 funded research projects, channeling over $170 M in funding across their ecosystem.

Part of Molecule’s job is to facilitate licensing for researchers. As you may have noticed, a lot of the projects funded by these DAOs are still done by researchers from universities like Stanford and Imperial College London. While it is ironic how some DAOs use these brands to project credibility, these are the kind of quick signals that may convince the skeptics to give DeSci a shot.

On the edge, others are pushing for the decentralization of science, not only in the economic sense but geographically too. Based in Próspera, Roatán, Infinita City is part of a special economic zone where taxes are lower and drug regulatory approval process is streamlined: a safe harbor for renegade scientists, DIY biohackers and serious founders to build cheaper and faster than anywhere else in the world.

Infinita builders are working on gene & cell therapy deployment like Minicircle, cybernetic implants and neurotech trials like Symbiont Labs, diagnostic assistants like Rejuve AI, longevity clinics where patients contribute and shape protocols like Optispan or Everest Health, and more.

Builders can visit Infinita for just $15 USD a day (con 50% OFF para pasaportes latinos, ¡eso!). An all-inclusive, one-week experience (housing + food + access to all places), you’d be paying $875 USD… or I should say $875 LIVES, the unofficial currency of Infinita City is a stablecoin equivalent to $1 USD, that earns you 2.5% cashback. If you ask me, a latina, not the most accessible experience if you add the $1,200 USD flight.

You may also enjoy my piece about Scientist-Influencers and Biohacker-Creators:

For one, I am pleasantly surprised that not all DAOs concern human health. HairDAO, Curetopia, and AthenaDAO support causes that are traditionally underfunded by old systems. Still, the incentive for commercialization is quite clear for most, if not all, projects. “Pure curiosity research” is rare in DAOs.

Furthermore, the initial reliance of DAOs on specific organizations to validate their model, as well as the fact that most financially successful ones are $VITA and $HAIR, makes me wonder whether DeSci could be more of a techbrocracy that creates longevity products for the top 0.1%, than a democracy that attends to the current needs of the bottom billion. I get it though, DAOs != charities.

And decentralization != democratization. Theoretically, DeSci’s open culture leaves doors open to people without credentials. Most biohackers, however, are still first-gen migrants from the old system. “Stanford dropout” still carries the uni tag and unis are still the place where most of us first learn to do science. If even folks in developed nations are reluctant to study bio because of the tough job market, how will biotech be democratized?

In the end, you know that I’m a hyper optimist, and that I too care more about biotech research that can be translated ASAP into products that billions of people use to have a better life. It’s still early, bu I do see in DeSci a better opportunity than in academia to build new biotech products faster and in places that haven’t traditionally been hubs. As the ecosystem grows, I think it can become an open harbor for people from different backgrounds to become biotech builders too.

This January, I took the train from San Francisco to Sacramento to visit California Cultured, a company that turns cocoa tree cells into flavanol-rich, contaminant-free, eco-friendly, and irresistible cocoa. Not only did I get to see the whole process from cell to chocolate, but I actually had a bit myself!

The Official Biopunk Tour includes a brief visit to three rooms. First, the Hell of Chocolate, where we’ll explore some reasons why there’s a need for lab-grown things in the first place. Next, there’s Da Lab, where I’ll show you how CaCultured practices Green-Clean-Lean Biotech to go from cocoa tree cells to chocolate.

BSL5, the last room, includes a full video tour of California Cultured’s lab and interview with CEO and founder, Alan Perlstein. Since this Biopunk Tour is not sponsored by CaCultured or any other company, BSL5 is reserved for paid subscribers only. Get your own mighty GOLDEN TICKET by upgrading to paid:

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The hell of chocolate: don’t drown.

As you’re surely aware, futures markets have seen a 300% increase in the price of cacao since 2021, and 2024 marked the third year in a row in which supply was shorter than demand.

Even this year’s Valentine’s, prices were still up by 20%. Companies like Hershey and Mondelez have considered hiking product prices, and others like Mars have resorted to decreasing the size of their chocolates while selling them for the same price.

Blame it on biology! The cacao swollen shoot virus (CSSV) uses Mealybugs to move between trees. Since the bugs are sensitive to drought or excessive rainfall, climate disasters like El Niño — which impacted 81% of the Western North region of Ghana — can increase the spread of pests. Within two years, CSSV can decrease yields by half in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where 60% of the world’s cocoa is produced.

Despite widespread trials, chemical control has been inconsistent, expensive, and environmentally problematic, especially for smallholder farmers in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. So far, the only way to stop the spread has been to cut the infected trees and plant new ones, which can take four years to grow fruit.

The Cocobod (cocoa board) is the only organization allowed to market and export beans in Africa. It sets fixed prices at the beginning of the season, so farmers get the same regardless of price volatility (in this case, a net loss). Even at these prices, Ghana only captures about 2% of the $100 billion dollar chocolate industry, and virtually all of the world’s chocolate gets consumed elsewhere.

Rich in gold, illegal mining operators have intimidated African cacao farmers into selling their land. These practices increase the risk of cadmium and lead root uptake as the crop grows, as well as during harvesting and drying. In South America too, cadmium contamination can be caused by fertilizers and water.

No wonder that, out of 23 brands tested by Consumer Reports, only 4 had safe levels of both heavy metals. Then, you can get Bryan Johnsons selling clean chocolate at a premium, because products noted as “organic” were actually more likely to display higher levels of heavy metals.

🎮 Da Lab: Grow everything, everywhere, all at once

In nature, cacao trees begin to produce between 20 and 30 cocoa pods every year, when they’re 4 to 5 years old. Each pod contains 20 to 60 beans which are harvested, dried, fermented, and roasted.

During fermentation, the pulp that covers them is removed, so ethanol and acids from microbial metabolism diffuse into the seed. The combination of heat, low pH, and oxygen contributes to protein and polyphenol breakdown.

Next, roasting stops enzymatic activity, reduces moisture content, drives off volatile acids, and ultimately develops a complex aromatic and flavor profile of over 600 compounds.

At the factory, the beans are roasted and are cracked to break the shells and release the nibs (the edible part). These nibs are ground into cocoa liquor, which can be blended with other ingredients like milk. This mixture is refined to reduce particle size, tempered, and solidified in molds.

In Da Lab, the first step is to find rare and exotic cocoa pods from around the world. We open the pod, take a cutting from a bean, and put it on a petri dish with media specifically formulated to induce calli growth (think of calli like plant stem cells).

After about 4 weeks, calli cells are formed. After 6 weeks, some of those can be placed in proliferation media in ever-larger vessels. CaCultured constantly monitors media changes, calli growth rate, flavors, and environmental conditions, so they can select the best-performing cells in each dish and flask.

Let’s be real: growing things in a lab is not magically more “sustainable” than growing them in fields. In fact, it may be the complete opposite at first, if you’re not careful, honey: making steel for bioreactors energy-intensive, so is sterilizing the bioreactors and all of the other instruments; not to mention some of the media ingredients still come from plants grown in a field with fertilizers, and all of the plastic used and disposed of in a biotech lab.

Throughout the tour, Alan demonstrated three principles for how they think of cellular agriculture at California Cultured: Green-Clean-Lean Biotech. What may otherwise be known as “a truly circular bioeconomy”.

In a first instance, they substitute expensive chemical reagents for extracts from plants cultivated nearby, mainly as carbon sources for their growth media. This is commonplace for tissue culture labs that want to save a few bucks. For other media ingredients, CaCultured partners with large producers to reduce costs and de-risk their supply chain.

When it comes to scaling up, CaCultured understands that they can’t bringing this new cocoa to the market using the same heavy, expensive, and energy-intensive equipment their biopharma incumbents are used to. That’s why they’re building their own biomanufacturing infrastructure: their plastic reusable bioreactors can be sterilized with low energy chemical cleaning instead of steam, saving energy and time.

As an interesting fact, researchers from Zurich University of Applied Sciences, found how bioreactor design can have an important influence in the final taste of chocolate by eliciting the production of different secondary metabolites. For instance, if the cells are shaken, they produce more fruity aromas; in the presence of a lot of air, like in an airlift reactor, they produce more floral compounds.

After 3-4 days, we can harvest our flavonol-rich cells from the bioreactors. If used as a nutritional supplement, we can simply dry in a kitchen dehydrator (#LeanBiotech). If the goal is to make chocolate, yeast and microbes are added to ferment the beans and create the flavors people love. The rest of the process is done per usual.

BSL5: the industrialization of biology

“Over the next five years, every single country and company is going to want to have locally produced products and ingredients to avoid issues with labor, transport, pollution. People will prefer this to be done cleanly, safely and affordably, which is what domestic bioproduction can do” — Alan Perlstein.

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“Today’s lecture is about the problem of design” Richard Dawkins primes the young audience at the The Royal Institution during a 1991 Christmas event. He proceeds to explain how simple objects like stones and clouds are produced by accident through laws of physics on their own, while designed objects like a microscope or a watch couldn’t have come about by luck. Design has a purpose, as well as a cost, a benefit, and efficiency that can be measured.

Where, then, do living objects lie within that spectrum?

A pitcher plant that fills itself with water to drown its prey and holds a symbiotic relationship with maggots that chew up preys in exchange for oxygen; a snake that rearranges the bones in its skull to swallow an unbelievably larger prey than the original size of its mouth; a spiny leaf insect that every non-biologist would confuse with dead leafs.

Dawkins thus coins the term designoid objects, for things that are too complex to be compared with a rock or a crystal, but that come about through evolutionary hindsight instead of conscious foresight. This process, he argues, gives way to inefficiencies like the distorted face of the Picasso fish. Given the same constraints, a human designer might have rather opted for a proportionally spaced body like that of the skate.

In 1991, everyone could call it a day and say that evolution builds upon simple objects to create ever-more-complex designoid objects, that can eventually become creators themselves. To you, present reader, I’ll say: today’s piece is about the problem of biodesign.

In search of biodesign

Creations like space suits embedded with bacteria, myoglobin-rich tomato, and 3D-printed algae vessels, seemed all too far away from the familiar world of medical biotechnology when I first got introduced to them. “Biodesign” is what some of them were labeled as. Not bioengineering, not biotechnology, not biomimcry. Biodesign.

The clear line between software design and engineering, or frontend and backend, doesn’t seem to be present in bioengineering and biodesign. The popular rhetoric in most websites or articles about biodesign is “design principles applied to biology”. Meanwhile, some have proposed biodesign to be whatever its practitioners believe it to be (not clear enough).

As I skimmed through the pages of Biodesign books and websites, it was easy to notice that most creations — including mycelium-based bricks, algae-derived textiles, or air filters made out of spider webs — were repurposed materials produced through biological means. Though they might have come about through design considerations and constraints like circularity, affordances, or even feedback, these objects were only building blocks within a larger design effort, like a building or clothes. They are not a final product.

Biomimicry, on the other hand, is defined as “a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies used by living organisms to solve challenges”. Arguably, this is a framework within the whole design discipline, that takes inspiration from nature’s forms and functions to create new objects that are not necessarily made out of natural materials. Neri Oxman’s Aguahoja and Spider Silk Pavilion exemplify the application of natural functions like carbon capture and material synthesis that respond to physical patterns. Not only are the final products organic, but they have a form designed by humans, and a function oriented or inspired by the natural world.

Both of these subsets of biodesign are undoubtedly a weird blend between simple, designed, and parts of designoid objects. Ironically, they still seem somewhat dead to me. Whenever the organism is used, it’s not meant to interact with the final consumer, it’s just a part of a larger process, a brick of a house instead of the house itself.

A stranger kind of biodesign is GMOs. We design whole organisms that serve us, by making plant-based protein, textile and food dyes, spider silk, cotton, or cellulose-based leather. Those examples, however, still see the organism as a factory, a means to an end. I am more interested in organisms that are living, interactive products themselves: the cell therapy that beats cancer, the brain cells that play pong, the probiotic that prevents hangovers, the petunia that glows in the dark.

The last example, in particular, once again begins to blur the line between the functional and the aesthetic, between science and art. While evolution sculpted parts like flowers and functions like camouflage into designoid objects with the objective of survival and reproduction, biodesigners see the organism as a white canvas on which they can express themselves, solve modern problems, tell a story, connect with other organisms through shared feelings.

Let’s look into some examples.

A flower designer

Unless you’re a plant biologist, chances are you haven’t even heard of Arabidopsis Thaliana, the fast-growing weed with little white flowers. However, a lot of the genetic recipes for flower color, shape, and texture are now known thanks to the scientists who have studied it for decades. If any of this rings a bell, you may have recently come across Nick Desnoyer’s tweet on how he turned A. Thaliana into a fuchsia diva using CRISPR — “How come???” You ask.

Meristems are plants’ totipotent cells located at key points of growth. When external stimuli like light or temperature trigger mitotic cell division in the shoot apical meristem, it differentiates into a floral meristem. After this, there’s no cell division or stem elongation, and flowers begin to grow through the elegant ABC genetic mechanism of flower development.

Outwards to inwards, a flower has 4 main parts: sepal/calyx, petal/corolla, stamen/androcium, carpel/gynocium. A class genes, AP1 and AP2, promote the development of sepals and petals; B class genes, AP3 and PI, promote the development of sepals and petals; and C class gene, AGAMOUS, promotes the development of carpels and stamens — Can you believe that only five genes determine what gets grown in a flower?!

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The craziest part is that this works almost like logic gates: if A genes are mutated, C genes are expressed in their place, growing no sepals or petals, only carpels and stamens; if B genes are mutated, only sepals and carpels grow; if C genes are mutated, only sepals and petals grow… since AGAMOUS is also responsible for termination of the floral meristem at whorl 4, mutant flowers produce extra whorls that lead to the rose-like phenotype in Nick’s flowers.

As for the color, Nick used the reporter system RUBY, which consists of three genes (CYP76AD1, DODA, and glucosyl, fused by self-cleaving 2A peptides) that convert the amino acid tyrosine into the bright red pigment betalain. He put RUBY under the control of the pOp6-LhGR system, so that he could activate (and control the intensity of!!) the red coloring using the hormone dexamethasone. Similar to the better-known LacI operon, pOp6 functions as RUBY’s promoter and it’s activated by LhGR only when the hormone is present.

If relatively simple genetic tweaks led to a leapfrog in aesthetics, can you imagine what other plants we might design and grow as our understanding of plant morphology and development does? I’m personally excited about creating more interactive plants that react to touch like the Mimosa pudica, or more plants like Codariocalyx motorius, whose leaflets move at speeds rapid enough to be perceivable with the naked eye.

Further, I imagine how we might build a digital biodesign UI in which people design their own flowers by pressing buttons, moving sliders, drawing what they imagine, or even by simply prompting the system through natural language. The more plants we characterize, the broader design capabilities will be. We are ultimately headed towards a mind-atoms interface that I hope to see in my lifetime.

Taste and distribution are all you need

Biology’s countless and jaw-dropping possibilities indeed invite wild dreamers into a new era of biodesign. When it comes to building a consumer business around such products, I think a lot about MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable), the principle used by Raymond Loewy (the father of industrial design) to design logos and products that were still recognizable to consumers while appearing more modern and efficient.

There is such a thing as death by excess of innovation. Companies that deeply understand 1) their customers’ current needs and innovation elasticity, 2) the cultural zeitgeist of the moment, and 3) their own technical capabilities, design the evolution (what an oxymoron, I know!!) of their products across time to always launch at the sweet spot.

As of today, the three “consumer plants” startups I follow are: LightBio (glowing petunias), NeoPlants (air-purifying pothos), and Senseory (aromatic plants). All of them have designed plants with functions they wouldn’t normally have, they are using some kind of genetic engineering to bring their products to life, and they need to sell them to remain alive themselves.

Though they’re all the Biopunker’s dream, some are making strides across media channels, and I don’t even know their sales numbers, my take is they were too innovative for the 2024 consumer. The main reasons Americans bought house plants during the 2020 pandemic year was aesthetics and a desire to reduce stress. You want to pay attention to what interior design influencers and outlets are modeling, and what makes sense to bring into your home.

Leaf Envy, a UK house plants brand, took note and action. While consumers would’ve normally preferred to shop their plants based on a physical interaction, during the pandemic Leaf Envy built a subscription and delivery business for both final consumers and businesses. Through robust social media advertising and a website that allows customers to filter plant varieties based on their expertise level, light conditions, size, and benefits (like air purification or pet friendliness), they brought their plants to places like Soho Home, Grind, and Google.

Meanwhile, non-GMO variegated varieties of monsteras have been sold for $30,000 USD each at the International Exotic Plants Expo in Bangkok. More than any other feature, color is the current low-hanging fruit for designer plants. Variegation has been genetically painted into other plants like the pothos, anthuriums, and my personal favorite, the Philodendron Pink Princess.

From a biological point of view, variegation is a fascinating result of mechanisms like mutations to genes involved in chlorophyll synthesis, microscopical structures that interfere with visible light, or anthocyanins that are red pigments. Since these variations don’t tend to get passed on to seeds, tissue culture and grafting techniques are used to reproduce the plants, which creates a tiny moat.

Designer plants follow a distribution of innovations curve similar to iPhones: novel features get announced at events for nerds, who buy them first at ultra-high prices either for themselves or to sell them to Influencers who model the new plants to the early majority through fancy Arch Digest pics. At this point, the price can be low enough for the early majority to spread the desire like fire through hot Instagram pics and word of mouth until the plant is part of the basic category for the late majority and the laggards.

Completely unmodified Alocacias, Fiddle Leaf Figs, and Philodendrons have existed for millions of years and yet they became trendy in 2024. Not by chance, but by social design. Right now, consumers don’t want Barbie plants that fly or cook dinner. In this Instagramy and Tiktoky world, taste and distribution are all you need.

Mega side note: My dream is to bring all kinds of GOAT artists along in the creative process — What would it look like for Billie Elish to release an album where each song has its own flower, designed to express the same feeling that the song does? As consumers have reached a saturation point for digital-only products, biology serves as the merged experience they crave. Billie models the flowers in her videos, brands them as hers, sends her fans over to the Flower Co website where they can order them. Some of them tell the story of a broken heart, others are meant to give to your crush or your significant other. Perhaps some to a parent, sibling, or mentor too. They can also buy the limited edition Billie 3D printed glass pot as an immortal object in which they can place their next Flower Co order. Instagram and TikTok word of mouth between fans drive sales.

Patterns that are alive

At this point, you may be wondering (as I am) what the hell this thing you’re reading is and why it’s called Poets of Living Objects. I’ll now take a tiny step away from plants to explain.

In biology, we refer to DNA bases as “letters”, the genome as a “book”, and genetics as a “language” all the time. Furthermore, Dawkins’ The Genetic Book of the Dead argues that anatomy, instincts, and biochemistry are a series of keys to the locks that constituted their ancestral environments.

Though buildings are not alive in the same way that biological beings are, in the Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander concludes that the central task of architecture is the creation of a single and evolving language that responds to environmental patterns (like the keys and locks) and everyone can use to design the buildings that truly solve their needs and make people feel good.

I therefore think that our job as future biodesigners should too involve the creation a biological language that everyone can contribute to and use to create biology with completely new forms and functions. The organism, not as a simple material or a means of producing it, but as a living and interactive experience itself. Through the use of this new biological language, future biodesigners will be poets of living objects.

Once you master the syntax, the goal of the pattern language is to reclaim the intuitive way of building that lies within you, and only you can only access through your feelings. The Timeless Way of Building showed me that our world is not nearly as beautiful as it can be, and it made me feel responsible for a) helping prevent biological technology from being used to create products that make people feel awful, and b) helping more vote for the future they want to see, by speaking biology.

[People] have lost confidence in their own judgment. They have handed over the right to design, and lost their own pattern languages so utterly that they will do anything which architects tell them (…) Yet, architects themselves, have lost their intuitions too. Since they no longer have a widely shared language which roots them in the ordinary feelings people have, they are also prisoners of the absurd and special languages which they have made in private — Christopher Alexander

I’m glad that people like Josie Zayner, Dan Grushkin, Keoni Gandall, Sebastian Cocioba, and Nick Desnoyer share the belief that new living objects, and the ability to create them, should be in the hands of billions. I’m only worried there’s not enough of us. What if we’re all wrong and organisms will suffer when we modify them simply to amuse ourselves? What if, even I as a woman, am still thinking through an oppressive patriarchic mind that deems herself worthy of determining another living thing’s fate?

The last word in the title of this essay, “object”, is meant as an ecofeminist question on the way we see nature. Darwin’s theory of evolution removed the notion that there was a single master orchestrator behind the music of biology, including us. While this might have invited some to reflect on their resemblance to fellow animals, I also wonder how the lack of a creator that resembles us might have made other organisms less valuable in our minds — if every tree had a human creator behind it, if it was as unique and unmistakeable as a Picasso, would we hold it in higher regard?

We are living patterns, and so are our ideas. Please write new living poems into my mind by sending your thoughts via your preferred bioanthena so I can think a little different. Happy new year! :D

Premium mediocre

I heard the awesome designer Emmet Shine talk about this concept before I realized it’d been coined 8 years ago by another dude. So at first I saw it as a design/aesthetics topic only, something like “oh it’s things that pretend to be luxurious and cost a lot but are actually shit”.

The concept is actually SO much deeper. It’s a story about the shrinkage of the American middle class and how corporations leveraged their mimetic desire to feel well-off to create products that serve as a signal more than as substance — Like food that Instagrams better than it tastes, or any product with a “premium” label on it. My favorite way to understand it:

Premium mediocrity is creating an aura of exclusivity without actually excluding anyone.

Beyond that, I think it’s super interesting how the economic setting influences our online behaviors, especially for the get-rich-quick influencer or crypto-trader bros and gals. Yet that doesn’t exclude Maya Millennial or Sofia GenZer, high achievers who haven’t achieved anything big quite yet1 but are willing to shoot their shot by building great personal brands before driving UBER cabs.

When I read that, I couldn’t help but think our dude was just stating the facts… and I also read someone who might just be pissed off at their IVY-league friends who have played whatever this game is better and have a house in Bali plus 100k twitter followers that he wants.

Personally, I don’t like the idea of something being branded as premium, costing a premium, and actually being shit. However, I’ve figured out there’s yet another product category I actually despise with all my heart, and which I think can also reach this pseudo-middle class: Premium stupid™.

Premium stupid is Lululemon pants that will perhaps resist 30 more washes than Uniqlo’s but cost 3x. Premium stupid is Stanley cups that have absolutely no innovation to them but suddenly hundreds of girls and moms in your city are buying them. Longchamp bags that surely cost $1 USD to make but are priced at 10x that. Alo caps. WHOOP. The latest iPhone.

They’re all about signaling. The difference is that, while Premium mediocre barely makes the cut for the Instagram picture, Premium stupid is supposed to be “the real deal”, which the logo and price tag speak for. Stupid does exclude some people, which is why there are lots of copies of them. Mediocre is as bad as you can get, so you can’t really tell if there’s a “better mediocre” option.

Of course most luxury is stupid and that’s kind of the point. My baby designer heart, however, wishes there were brands out there that genuinely cared for creating incredible products with outstanding materials, innovative design, and real functions, and let that inform the price and exclusivity. Instead, I see signaling-first design, and 2nd-hand products that are mere vehicles to play with people’s limbic system and make poor-hearted people richer.

Questions for myself:

1. How can we create products that make both users and “fans” of those users feel better with themselves?

2. What products would allow people to balance their creative inputs and outputs? (Avoid consuming more than they create)

3. How can we balance utilitarianism and experience-oriented design to create products that are desirable both from a utility and aesthetics perspective?

4. Are we, as humans, just wired to establish social hierarchies and feel the need to signal our place in these?

Social media is cheap, experiences are exclusive

We all know there’s something fundamentally wrong about social media. There’s something utterly wrong with our eyes being glued to screens for hours every day, watching 150 15-second videos about how to be more productive. Something’s really fucked up about the anxiety we feel when we imitate Annie, Joe, and Sam as though they were our blood siblings, just because we watch them every morning.

Little do we know that code (aka AI) choosing what we think because it chooses what we consume is only the beginning.

What will happen when that code BECOMES Annie, Joe, and Sam? Literally today, we could easily create a version of Instagram in which I consume content that is all AI-generated, AI filtered, and I cannot tell.

Then, no surprise: if I am what I consume, I will become AI. Sure, AI that is trying to emulate how the human brain works. It is, regardless, AI. Chips, sand. It’s not alive.

Why in the world would I do that, Sofia? Well why in the world do you already let it decide what you consume therefore what you think?

Zoom, Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn, our desktops. These are now the places we spend the most time in. We complain about shitty cities with terrible public transport and buildings that are falling apart. I don’t think we care enough about software that makes us feel bad in the long term, especially social media.

I used to acknowledge these concerns when I heard about them from some people, but the act of truly understanding something, for me goes hand-in-hand with feeling something about it. Just like when I realized that most things around me were once petroleum, or when I understood that many of the “processed” food I would find in the supermarket contains things like corn syrup that is addictive.

Traumatizing the kids sometimes works, but adults are different. They’re already addicted to these things, they don’t like change, they think they know better because they already make their own decisions — I think it is only when you show them a better world to compare and contrast theirs with, when they might get it.

When you savor a peach whose taste and flavor is so sublime that it could never be matched by the careless amounts of sugar and fat in a doughnut. When you talk around millenary mountains and touch the cold water of the river that flows through them with your own hands, and just understand how little it matters whether your apartment is a penthouse. When you read a book written with the author’s full heart, slowly, and it turns your mind around… only then, you can see how uglily, tastelessly, and lifelessly social media has been architected.

Of course this ties back to the premiums. Premium stupid and its copies exist because the true elite is no longer (only?) buying Rolexes but going to space. Experiences are the true exclusive luxuries of today and perhaps the rest of the decade, and I think there’s a chance that their exclusiveness is actually made clear in the absence from social media.

Just think about how cheap photos have become. Kings used to take photos, now a low class person in Mexico can take photos too even if it’s not an iPhone they posses. Not only that, but anyone can share those photos, and get likes. The base of the pyramid now has access to that dopamine-hit service of saying “I was at W, doing X with Y, and I possess Z”. Photos and social media, especially in the era of AI, are now commodities.

We will increasingly find exclusivity as offline, physical goods. Neither mediocre Apple Watch nor stupid Rolex but functional Junghans. Neither mediocre Vox nor Wall Street Journal but some only-print newspaper (is that even profitable?), neither Instagram nor X but Soho Houses. Neither AG1 nor Sweetgreens but some kind of a legit farmers market (is Blueprint premium stupid?).

Creators biotech values

I don’t know anything about creating a brand, except many for what people call a “personal brand”. I know what they mean, but I also think that any brand must be personal because you must believe in it, “you” being the people you convince to join your team, the brand’s key partners, your customers of course, and even the government.

The reason, I think, why we establish a certain connection with some brands more than with others, is because their products are not just great products. They stand for something, and they deliver it, which generates trust. We trust that Apple products will always work, we trust that Starbucks will help us feel socially in, we trust that Google will provide us with all the info we might need, that our shipping will be safe and fast with DHL, that Nike takes out the high performance athlete within us.

Artificial intelligence is one of those big fish in our little blue pond today, and it will unarguably inform much of what we value and thus the way we design the future. In an era of uncertainty, meaning both positive expectations and fear of catastrophe, the values I would imbue into a consumer brand, if I were to build one today, would be the following:

1. Life above all else: suddenly, in front of AI, we have a lot in common with the rest of the living kingdom, don’t we? Protecting life means not only the right to live but prioritizing life’s needs in front of AI’s. If there could one day be more AI individual brains (or its equivalent) than humans, the mere fact that an artisan from rural Mexico is also a verifiable human, makes their art more valuable, non-fungible, than an AI-generated one. Further, life as a value is not only found in a moving and breathing DNA-containing thing. It is a design quality human creators imbue their surroundings with. When something is designed through the values below, we shall call it “lifefull”.

   1. Question: how does this apply to “human-created” life? Like real wagyu that doesn’t come directly from a cow, or silk that wasn’t grown by worms?

2. In defense of authenticity: the value that every social media platform dares to preach yet none deliver. Even from an information theory standpoint, some data is lost in translation from ideas to their expression and understanding. Claiming authenticity for something that can inherently not be so is inauthentic. Authenticity for this brand actually starts from within, it means to be honest with yourself about who you are. If you want to put a filter on top of that, do so. Just be aware of it.

3. We are not as artisans: big corps and governments talk this and that about sustainability, “greenwashing” some call it. Why don’t we all just admit that we are not artisans living in the mountains? Our world today is not economically or socially sustainable without freight, fertilizers, and petrol. We will look for the solutions that actually move the needle in the problems we care about. We will not overpromise and underdeliver.

4. Care over control: human life, especially in our modern society, is possible because we have motives to wake up in the morning and do something, whatever it is. You might care about your sister, art, money, food, science, yourself. Whatever that is, it gives your life meaning. When something is meaningful to you, there’s no room for ego, mediocrity, or sugar coating. As a brand, we’re not here to conquer the world or humanity, not even markets. We have something much deeper to care about, and these are the values we believe in. The products that we create are vehicles to deliver that care.

5. Soul reconnection: whatever religion, race, gender, profession, we believe there’s something about living things that kind of transcends what we can currently explain through science. Feelings, the self, intuition, love, altruism… we believe these must be protected from any dark forces of the ugly, the mundane, hate, and the worst of them all, fear. You don’t need a fancy app, expensive coach or certified course to get to know yourself and all the beautiful things you can create. Listen to and trust your gut, for it is always right.

I was at the Aspen Ideas festival and chose to approach a stranger to eat dinner with. He happened to have an education non-profit, which has everything to do with grass, of course 🙄 (well, kids also grow). Really nice guy, he told me how he helped more children in the Middle East get access to quality education. Then I introduced myself as someone who engineers plants to make new things. “Plant synthetic biology is what we call it”.

We were about to say our goodbyes as he was looking for a potential funder for his organization, when he said “You know, I know nothing about plants or genetic engineering but ever since I was a child I’ve had this idea of making grass that doesn’t grow. Sounds like it’s down your alley and could be a big business. You know, cause mowing your grass is always a pain in the neck, especially for big national parks or sports clubs. If you like it, you can run away with the idea, make a lot of money and then donate some of it to my foundation”.

I’d oooobviously never thought about that idea before! I’ve never actually mowed my own grass. I don’t know how much of a pain in the neck it is, I’ve only rejoiced at the smell of freshly cut grass from afar and felt some empathy for those adults who let their homes’ grass grow until it looks like a jungle. “Grass that doesn’t grow” sounds something out of an 1980s futuristic cartoon.

So of course I said “bet, I’ll run away with your idea”. After going down some rabbit holes, I’ve decided to share it with you you can now run away with it too, if something about it happens to be a good idea after all, and if you’re more passionate about grass than I am. Don’t mind donating money to me though! Just tell your friends to subscribe to Biopunk so we all keep creating and enjoying the smell of real fresh biotech 😝.

What’s the problem?

Entrepreneur hat on. When asking myself for whom it is the greatest pain in the neck to mow grass and is willing to try out EverGrass’ biopunk solutions, golf courses were the most obvious call. Their main problem areas, ranked in considered order of importance are:

1. Salaries represent over half of total maintenance costs. The US national median is 30% of gross profits going to course maintenance. Rough mowers were budgeted at $100,000 in 2023. The greens are the most expensive area to maintain, taking 4,920 annual labor hours greens in mowing and rolling plus fertilizer and chemical applications.

2. No-play Mondays and mowing mornings suck. Even if clubs spend what they can afford to spend, they’re limiting their users in play time as maintenance takes time. Since workers don’t arrive before 4am in most cases, there’s only so little time to finish before the first tee goes off. Stopping maintenance activities for 2-4 weeks or more, the first mowing will lead to scalping of the playing surface and turfgrass loss.

3. Disease and weed control are second most expensive. Changing weather conditions in some areas mean new things growing that we definitely don’t want to see in a golf course, like Bermuda grass. Other pests like Dollar Spot have also caused trouble in the past and need a lot of costly chemicals adding up to the budget. Can you guess what the most effective prevention against weeds in turf grass is? Mowing!

4. Humans aren’t perfect. Never remove more than one third of the leaf blade in a single mow, for grass cut too short or allowed to grow too tall can adversely affect the health and playability of the putting green and stressed turf is more susceptible to diseases, uneven growth, and decline in overall quality.

5. Machines are noisy. EverGreen could solve this for courses located in residential areas. Not that anyone else might care too much.

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Single-cell sequencing has been key in identifying cell subpopulations, helping researchers develop more precise treatments for various cancers and immune diseases that require a cell-level understanding of the patient’s genetics. However, most single-cell platforms have so far been limited to short reads that cannot cover a complete RNA transcript and thus make researchers lose valuable data found in isoforms and ambiguous sequences.

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Architecture of the ideal mind

Most discrimination I know is against a biological trait that differs from the mean. Discrimination against higher melanin content in the skin or lower in the hair, against lower testosterone levels, against the production of a dysfunctional protein, against the aging phenotype, against higher adipose contents.

Each epoch has also had its own ideal of a perfect human, dictated by the current people in power. From 18th century’s white and well-fed kings, to today’s muscular and stylish billionaires.

Now that biotech is empowering us with the proteins of that young and lean body, I’ve developed an interest in the architecture of the ideal mind — What personality and behavioral patterns have we historically discriminated against? What do today’s dominant minds wish to select for?

I started thinking about this because, in my experience, obesity has never been a malady of the body but a result of something else happening in the mind, like depression, anxiety, loneliness or boredom. Those, which have become buzzwords, and some claim to be the future’s most pressing problems, are problems of the mind. Yet today we still discriminate against the result. When we think of obese people, we imagine their fat body, not their aching… or shall I say “weak” mind?

The patterns of mind that we value and censor are perfectly present. Behind the muscular human I see a mind that trades intrinsic hedonism for extrinsic validation of a defined physical aesthetic. Behind the feminine gay man, I see a mind that expresses its sexuality freely. Behind the trillion-dollar CEO, I see a testosterone-full and dominion-seeking mind. And still we don’t know how much of these patterns is rational, reptilian, or Darwinian.

I don’t understand the difference between feelings and thoughts. Ironically, when asking ChatGPT about this, the answer might be interpreted as thoughts having a language to them that feelings lack. Since we cannot deny that the mind comprises both, are we to discriminate against feelings or how “we react” to them? That question probably pertains to the larger realm of “the self”.

In a world of intellectuals and athletes, emotional “control” (if we can call that EQ) might be a zero-multiplier as much as an opportunity equalizer. Elon’s rockets may drive us to Mars but his tweets might break the world apart. The amount of pleasure or pain any given human might experience is roughly the same, regardless of all other circumstances.

Most people think that GATTACA is a movie about a genetic engineering world. I see it rather as a movie about a mind’s reaction to a genetically engineered society. Vincent’s superpower is not in the blood he uses or how he transformed his body, but in his mind.

Today, I can biohack the fat in my belly and the tone of my skin to fit in. Tomorrow, would I take a cortisol reduction pill to calm my anger? What about some dopamine-regulating drug to be less delusional and more realistic? More testosterone to be more logical and less risk averse?

The question of agency over the mind is not new. We see it in regulations around conditions like schizophrenia — Should these people be medicated against their will, to bring their dopamine circuitry “back to how it used to be”? Many of them used to be smart and high achievers. Antipsychotics scare hallucinations away but the mind doesn’t seem to come back.

I’ve wandered far into the woods of a forest that is just beginning to grow. In summary, I think we could start to directly select for and against certain ways of thinking and feeling as we understand more about our biology, especially as it relates to the mind. I think and feel that this mind revolution could be one of the most beautiful of them all, but I don’t know yet what that means.

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Marketing

Although my college degree reads “biotechnology engineering” which includes some introductory chemical engineering courses, today I see engineering as the last thing I’d like to do as a job. When I tell them this, my college classmates look at me as though I was joking, crazy, or simply lost in life. Those who took the genetic engineering course with me have called that creative path a “waste of my intelligence”.

I think that’s interesting as it relates to the ideal of a mind. In my small college campus, it’s so clear how the chemical engineers think more highly of themselves and make fun of those studying food engineering, and even more fun of those studying the arts. They assign a higher degree of effort to disciplines like physics, chemistry, and math, and think that those can get them higher paying jobs more easily.

The latter claim is easier to debunk, for there are many ways of making money. The former, however, is more complex. Numerical rationality is ascribed a higher social value compared to creative thinking or the act of creation itself from an understanding of human behavior and feelings, no matter how much capital and power is amassed in those other disciplines.

From my point of view, how we value different traits depends on both who we are ourselves and the models of power we are exposed to. Someone may be born as more logical than creative thinkers, and if they know that most of the founders and CEOs of today’s most valuable companies are engineers, they might assign the highest value to those traits as well. Many people thinking that way reinforces that worldview.

Anyway, my dad thinks it would be good for my professional development to start working for someone else, whether that’s at a large corporation or at a small startup. Just to get experience and learn how other people get things done, and to acquire skills out that.

Though I used to systematically reject the idea of working for somebody else, I’ve slowly opened myself to the opportunity of being paid to learn. After looking at open roles on LinkedIn, I confirmed that only only those in marketing, sales and some kind of product development sound slightly appealing.

See, the problem is that I only like the kind of research that clearly conducts towards a product, and I’m not satisfied with that; I also want to write the copy, produce the ad, and choose the hex code for the color of the package; and then I can also turn into a freak of making, managing, and saving money — Does that sound like the entrepreneur mind pattern?

Well, my grandmother on my father’s side is what I call “a real” entrepreneur. She built a business out of the resources she had and has managed to grow its cashflow over the years, throughout the tough times. Since all I did throughout high school is read a lot of research papers and write words, she as my classmates thinks I’m either to become a researcher or a writer. Not a designer, not an entrepreneur, not a marketing director.

Ironically, I think that the single reason why my writing has been successful is because I can make you want to click something by writing attractive copy, creating out-of-the-box banners, or daring to speaking about biotech confidently and romantically — Like if you’re a biotech company and come to me for marketing, it’s to win. We can only win if we’re the best. So we’re the best, and that’s what your customers should know. Period.

But what is marketing anyways?

Simple — It’s all just sex.

Let me explain.

The way I’ve heard most people talk about marketing is incredibly narrow, even compared to the first formal introduction I got to the subject. While most people think only of branding and promotion when they think of marketing, my International Baccalaureate High Level course in Business Management taught me that there are up to 7 Ps to marketing: people, place, product, promotion, price, process, and physical evidence.

Marketing is about the design of the product, its value proposition and how it’s imputed, the process through which it is made, the people involved in that process and in the sale, the channels through which the product arrives to the customers… Wow. That’s a deal more than just a commercial, nice colors or copy, huh?

During her interview on the Grow Everything podcast, I think that Christina Agapakis emphasized the importance of place and product. There’s an irony in non-scientists being scared of scientists because scientists are scared of non-scientists. The DNA that I’ve read in most scientists expresses fear of making “bold claims” and often fear of being too transparent too. I don’t think anyone would want a life partner with those characteristics.

Christina repeatedly mentioned throughout the episode that marketing is not downstream but upstream of product development. To me it makes sense. The 7 Ps tell you that marketing is not only about speaking for your product but about listening to your potential customers and designing a product that solves their needs within the boundaries of the economic and political environment.

As I’ve mentioned before, nobody cares about GMOs — Does it solve my problem? Does it collide with my current interests? Does it fit my budget? Does it make me feel like a better person? Cool, then the hell with GMOs.

I, Sofia, think that the marketer’s job is to understand people’s feelings, in order to make them feel in a certain way, through the products, through the ads, through the colors and the price tags.

As far as feelings go, my reductionist mind brings me back to the selfish gene. We all just want to survive and reproduce. Whatever signals fitness is truly in the reproduction business. Perfumes, social media, cars, elite higher education, fashion, bars… it’s all just sex! Or survival: medicines, food, freight, politics, construction, insurance…

Maybe that’s just one current of marketing though.

Design

Well, well, where have our biotech adventures led us to! In my quest for the meaning of biodesign, I’ve made a couple of conclusions: a) “bio”design as we know it today is fake and invalid because it contradicts a key principle of design itself: choice; b) design is harder than engineering, at least for me at this moment.

The way I see biodesign today is as “how do we solve problems with biology?” — I think that’s wrong. The world doesn’t need to solve problems with biology. The world needs to solve problems. If the solutions happen to be biological, the role of the biodesigner would be the figure out how to optimize that product so that it solves that problem even better than it currently does.

It is the job of the designer to clearly define the problem in question, understand its root cause, and search for the solution that matches that specific part of it. We cannot hope to have a single “cure for cancer” because that problem itself is too broad. Even when narrowing it down to something like pediatric early stage acute lymphoblastic leukemia, we’re looking at multiple factors.

If I’m getting it right, this is also something Christina talked about in the episode — It’s cool to come up with different solutions like biofuels or social media campaigns against fast fashion, but if we don’t understand the root of the problem and the macro forces at hand, we can’t hope to truly solve it. For some people that may be fine; but others do want to actually solve things.

In practice, I had been redirecting my cotton project towards producing functional cotton fibers: cotton that grows with antioxidants that the plant already produces naturally! When my mentor told me this was possible and I imagined the experiences I could create through that, I fell in love with the idea.

Then I embarked on this little biodesign journey and realized that, whatever my product ended up being, I wanted to show the world what great biodesign would be. So I questioned: why grow the cotton with antioxidants when you could just add them through a coating downstream?

And I remembered that I was chatting with one of the founders of Modern Meadow, Andras Forgacs, at Synbiobeta in 2022 and he told me how companies didn’t want cotton that grows with colors but didn’t explain why. It was only until I asked myself what it would take to sell this cotton or turn it into a product that I understood.

I needed to re-analyze the supply chains and understand my core business: I currently have a tissue culture platform. If I want to grow whole plants, I need to have land or sell these plantlets to cotton producers who need to get rid of cotton impurities like seeds, then take it to the mill, then to a textiles factory which follows the design of a brand that finally sells to consumers either directly or through retailers.

Interestingly, part of the reason why the cotton garments value chain is so long has to do with biology. Unlike other fabrics like nylon which are chemically synthesized by humans and our machines, cotton grows in plants, and it grows having seeds and a little bit of leaves, and in a boll instead of yarns.

My initial idea was to grow cotton trichome cells (which are the fibers) in-vitro, from cotton “stem cells”. This has been used as a research technique since the 1970s but only a graduate student from the University of Texas ever thought about scaling that up. Then GALY did, and then I asked myself “why not?” too.

Because the fibers grow shorter in-vitro and fiber length is probably the most important feature of cotton. Because growth media and bioreactors are currently more expensive than fertilizers and land. Because scientists are more expensive than farmers. Because we don’t even understand enough about cotton to differentiate stem cells into fibers consistently and directly. Because fashion companies are moving away from cotton, into polyester and other synthetic fibers.

There are as many reasons to try to overcome these obstacles. Because few fibers resemble cotton’s absorbance capabilities, biocompatibility, and biodegradability. Because climate change and pests are impacting cotton production and companies still want to use some of it. Because the US has banned the import of Chinese cotton. Because lab-grown cotton is completely transparent and free of pollutants. Because plant tissue culture can be automated.

That doesn’t immediately make it the best solution to the problems described. DNA markers can be used to trace cotton across the supply chain. The plant can be engineered to bloom faster. Other cellulosic fibers with similar characteristics and other attributes can be lab-grown more easily. I even imagine what it would take to grow seedless cotton (just like seedless lime) to facilitate its processing.

Ah, I understood that nobody would want colored cotton or cotton that grows with antioxidants because there’s a big chasm between that and the Paris designer choosing what exact Hex color this season’s polo shirts should be. What if they change their minds? Can the bioengineering guarantee the same consistency that chemical dyes have? How accurately can you calculate supply and demand for a single or multiple companies? Maybe I just don’t understand.

The big chasm was also between my tissue cultures and my desire to build consumer brands, which I alluded to in the marketing section — Could I somehow resolve these two forces or would I have to make a choice between the two?

For that I learned about the story of some clothing brands that I see my peers and I wearing today. Lululemon stood out. Did you know they use silver-infused yarns to interact with bacteria’s cell walls, kill them, and prevent them from stinking your clothes? I didn’t but I found that very cool. More importantly, I learned that they partner with a yarns company that has been doing this since the 90s.

So my dreamy mind, ignorant of the business of fashion despite having met the founder of the magazine with that name himself, finally understood that we live in a world in which chefs don’t grow their own wheat and computer companies don’t make their own chips: consumer-philic = production-phobic = design-centered — It’s part of the macro forces Christina was talking about, I think.

Maybe it’s a bit how our bodies work too. Our pancreas, for instance, is made up of endocrine and exocrine cells. Even within the endocrine cells, there are about five types, each specializing in the production of a different type of protein, for a different function. They still all work together, like a clock, in what we call pancreas. And the pancreas is part of a system which is part of our body, and so on. We are interdependent. No one does everything on their own. Complete vertical integration is unheard of.

If I was to show the world what great biodesign could be, then, I needed to choose the need or problem that I wanted to address.

A technology to grow thousands of genetically identical plants in a few squared meters, virtually eliminating the risk of pest infections at the earliest growth stages and the use of pesticides or fertilizers in young plants, bypassing the complications of germinating a new variety, and sometimes even seasonality too. It’s been here for over sixty years, it’s grown to serve a >380-million-dollar market, and it’s called plant tissue culture.

Despite such attributes, the largest cost driver in plant tissue culture is still labor. While mammalian biotech is increasingly automated with all kinds of liquid and plate handling devices and there are multiple efforts to automate agriculture in the fields, currently there are only handful of companies in the world that build robotic systems to make the tedious process of industrial plant micropropagation (aka tissue culture) more time efficient and cost effective.

The number of plant molecular farming, cellular agriculture, gene editing, companies is increasing and plant tissue culture is an infrastructural base for them to grow and develop their products. Robotic arms and bioreactors made specifically for plant micropropagation could significantly reduce costs of this technology. First for big companies, soon for the smaller businesses, nature preservation NGOs, and the indie planters who will grow the plants of our dreams.

This is an exploratory article. Choose your own adventure:

1. “Spoiler: bottlenecks ahead” is a primer on plant tissue culture and some cost analyses

2. “Back to the future” is a collection of attempts to automate plant tissue culture in before the 2000s

3. “C3-PO: Your favorite Cyborg Plant Organizer” is a short list and description of current companies building robots to automate plant tissue culture

4. “Think outside the jar” is a list and brief description of complementary technologies helping at different stages of the micropropagation process

Spoiler: bottlenecks ahead

Broadly speaking, thousands of seeds may be sold for the same price of a single or a few in-vitro plants. It’s not prohibitive for the value propositions mentioned above, added to the ability to grow thousands of plants from a single tissue cut in a super small portion of land. However, there are a few complications…

First, anyone who’s been there and done that knows how tedious and labor-intensive it is to make plants in jars. The damn green things are so delicate and different from each other that it requires the average human months of training to get decently fast and dexterous at this job.

Those humans’ salaries can make up for more than half of operation costs. In high income countries, this is the largest cost driver after electricity. In lower income countries, electricity and reagents tend to be the largest cost drivers — more material for the next season of the Decentralization of Biotech Innovation.

For reference, a study done in India estimated a cost of $0.49 USD per plant, with materials as the largest portion, while another study done in Taiwan got $0.28 USD per plant having direct skilled labor as their largest cost, by far. Does anyone have any data on European countries?

Out of the ~4 stages in the plant tissue culture process, multiplication of the tissues and acclimatization of the final plants are the most labor intensive ones. How labor intensive multiplication is depends on the company’s tissue culture strategy, which means, what type of tissue they want to culture in order to get to a final plant with roots and shoots.

While an embryo should not be cut, microshoots are actually multiplicated by taking cuts from the initial culture and distributing them in other jars. Both routes can be either direct from the explant, or indirectly derived from plant “stem cells” called callus that do require cutting for long term maintenance as they oxidize over time.

A bioreactor may be used in any of these cases to better control the growing conditions and provide a larger space for explants to grow without the need for cutting or the use of gelling agents. Another very important advantage of bioreactors (and other automation systems that will be discussed in the next section) is that they significantly reduce the risk of fungal contamination that might otherwise occur even in the best trained hands.

While some companies may export thousands of plants in their jars across the world, which has its obvious advantages, others may go through final tedious stretch of transplanting each one of them from their comfy jars back into soil. Unless I lack creativity, there doesn’t seem to be anything that currently saves companies from this hurdle. Or is there???

Back to the future

TOSHIBA was among the first companies in the world to showcase their automated system for masspropagation in the 90s. It consisted of two robots: one would measure the plantlet shapes through laser beams and decide the cutting positions, then the other would grip the stem of the plantlet, cut it between the nodes, transplant the cut-out segment into the other tray, and repeat.

They claimed the robot was able to cut each plant segment in 5 seconds which, according to personal experience, sounds decently good. A human who knows what they’re doing might take less than 3 seconds per cut but, as we will see throughout this exploration, cutting is just one operation. To guide ourselves in the following examples, another metric is a maximum of 2,500 plants transplanted per human per day.

At that time, industrial robots used to cost around $100,000 USD. Only the combination of the demand from the automotive industry1, Moore’s law, and advancements in software and materials science would bring it down >10x by today. All this time, only industries with a larger demand like the automative and now pharma could provide a quicker ROI. Is now plants’ turn?

Another commendable attempt built by the Australian company ForBio Robotics was the Vitron TM 501, a tissue culture robot that could harvest a ~6cm tree plant from a tray, cut it into a smaller viable explants and plant these into trays with growth medium.

Tissue culture allowed them to look at genetic markers to know how tall each tree would grow when it’s only 3 cm tall instead of waiting 20 years, and select for a pool of those that would grow about the same size. They were also able to sterilize the trees to control the spread of any genetic modifications they made and concentrate energy into growth as opposed to reproduction. Still, not the right timing yet.

Lastly, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab also developed a similar system. The following is a short clip out of a full 5-minute procedure to place 2 plants in that agar plate. If it’s true TOSHIBA could do that in 15 seconds, 10 years earlier, I understand why US taxpayers might be dissatisfied (bad joke?). Anyway, NASA’s “micro” propagation resembles spinach and jelly than tissue culture.

C3-PO: Your favorite Cyborg Plant Organizer

“A third hand” might be the best way to describe SmartClone, the system demoed in 2020 by the Australian company NuPlant. Their innovation doesn’t end at robotics but using special squared culture media trays with little cuvettes inside them for each plantlet. This not only means more plants per squared centimeter but an easier time for the robot to pass them to the technician who cuts them. Together, they can transplant and cut each plantlet in about 5 seconds — a record?

Now, the system that caught my attention first and foremost was The Tissue Culture Planter unveiled by the horticultural producer ISO in collaboration with the experts in agriculture automation, Viscon Group, in 2023. Though the Planter doesn’t cut, it can transplant plantlets from a tray to a plate with new media using a combination of a delicate grip and forceps and computer vision software that keeps track of each individual tissue inside a completely sterile cabinet.

Viscon’s edge is to have been in the business of optimizing and automating all kinds of operations in crop and animal agriculture, including greenhouse production, vertical farming, warehousing, chicken hatcheries, and insect farming, since 1927. In the last few years, they’ve delivered 25 ready-made tissue culture labs around the world, including a large one in China that can produce 85 million blueberry plants annually.

Think outside the jar

A complex and labor intensive production line contains many individual hanging fruits to pick from before building or buying a Tesla Optimus that does it all. There’s cutting, mixing, pouring, cleaning, sterilizing, labeling. Since the easiest (temperature, light, and humidity control) has already been picked by quite many folks, we can look at the others.

One of the first steps in tissue culture is so boring that unlucky undergrads starting out in academic labs get to do it for free: preparing growth media. Microbiologists have autoclaves that hand them in ready-to-use Petri dishes with fresh media, but those aren’t made for the bulkier plant tissue culture jars.

Hence, RAYPA’s AE-MP prepares and sterilizes culture media for microbiology and plant tissue culture. It would be great to see it integrating with a system for automatic pouring into thousands of jars.

Once the undergrad has learned how to prepare growth media, they can go ahead and chop little green things using forceps and a scalpel which they need to sterilize using a flame and ethanol, carefully so they don’t cut themselves or burn the whole place down in the process. You can imagine how much time is lost between each cutting, not to mention how you can burn your explants if you’re not careful.

Enter plant lasers, one more elegant innovation of the past. A CO2 laser can cut 25 potato plantlets in less than 9 seconds and result in superior growth parameters compared to mechanical cutting. Just as robots, lasers have become several orders of magnitude cheaper per watt in the last 20 years but I’m not sure that even with great computer vision it would be worth the investment unless it’s seamlessly integrated with something like the Planter.

In between the media and the cutting lies the. No, we don’t talk about j@r$. We think outside of them to facilitate automation and save costs by packing more plants per cm2. Actually, Nic-In found out that you can fit 30% more plants in the same space simply by switching to rectangular containers.

Before we get to them, Growcoon is a little nest-shaped material where plantlets grow to be easily handled by a robotic arm without damage. As roots don’t grow as strong in-vitro than in-vivo, this device helps keep them safe before and as they go back to soil. I only wonder how many other seemingly little innovations might end up making a noticeable difference, especially together with automation…

Of course none of this matters, for those who actually want to truly automate the multiplication stage and significantly increase their yields will not be transplanting tissues across squared jars using robotic arms. They’ll be using squared (joke) bioreactors that can grow up to 100,000 plants per cubic meter, cut down labour cost by 75% in a fully automated model, and even eliminate the need for gelling agents!

Plant bioreactors can work so that plants are either immersed partially (through gases or turning), or submerged continuously (like for embryogenesis) which are mechanically agitated or air-driven.

The reality for low to middle scale production facilities in low income countries is that “any vessel” very often means using plastic bottles or even plastic bags that might look rather improvised and whose design is questionable especially regarding sterility. Are they optimal or is there a market need for bioreactors specifically designed for plant micropropagation? Another topic to the list of things I haven’t written about.

For the last stage of tissue culture (also left to the undergrads), the Australian company Nic-In has developed a transplanter that can do 14,000-15,000 plants per hour or the same work that would take 30 people per day. They take the whole agar block and put it in the substrate, which apparently won’t lead to contamination if you use their “Jungle Juice” of fungi that will keep other fungi away from your plantlet. Yes, you need to apply that to your agar plates somehow before transplanting.

Last but not least and encompassing every stage of the process is, quite surprisingly 🙄, some form of Artificial Intelligence. In the last few years we’ve been feeding AI with lots of image data from the fields. Today it’s interesting to see machine learning models that predict which tissues will germinate and which ones won’t, based on tissue culture image data. However, my eyes look towards a future where we feed AI with omics data, especially for GM😍s.

So, will you build the robots?

Regardless of your chosen tissue culture strategy, you will need to do cuttings of explants, media preparation, transplanting, and other repetitive and manual work. So, after this exploration, I do think there’s an unmet need for reasonably priced automation systems that optimize large scale tissue culture to drastically increase companies’ productivity.

Did I miss anything? Do you build robots and want to help grow plants that save the world? Do you grow plants that could save the world and resonate with this piece or disagree with something in it? Have a friend who would answer yes to either of these questions? As the YouTubers would say: comment, share, like, subscribe, shoot me a message, or all of the above.

A few months ago I spent some hours consuming content about the fashion industry itself to better understand what it’s all about, beyond new biotech-based materials. I found out about the most bizarre yet fascinating things, from landmark buildings as part of a marketing strategy, to live shopping in China, and hyper-realistic robots that are Instagram influencers.

I scribbled down some notes and put them together somehow, with links to some of those sources. I didn’t write too many comments but perhaps my greatest learning is that there are many other (potentially easier) ways to make fashion more sustainable than materials. For example, making more efficient manufacturing machinery and reducing the return rate of clothes.

Throughout this exploration I consistently asked what I now call The Chesky Question. The AirBnB cofounder and CEO mentioned in his Stanford Business School interview that social changes are much harder to predict than technological ones. So my question was: how are people changing nowadays, and how is that changing fashion?

21 Trends

“If a 15- or 16-year-old is doing it today, chances are pretty high that you and I will be doing the same thing in a few years”

1. Social media as a search engine: Gen Z and Millennials are more likely to search for, interact and purchase through social media rather than go for search engines and branded websites

2. Bots can act as virtual stylists: offering fashion advice and helping customers put together outfits.

3. Virtual try-ons: address the challenge of returns, which continues to pose a significant hurdle for fashion e-commerce (>24%). Businesses can operate more sustainably by reducing this kind of waste.

4. Phygital fashion: incorporating digital elements into traditional fashion design. NFT shoes that you can also buy and get shipped to your house.

5. Extravagant fashion: almost half of Gen Z consumers expect brands and designers to offer trends they can experiment with, which they wouldn’t otherwise try in real life. Buh bye SV Zuckers.

6. RFID supply chain tracking: to provide customers with detailed information on the entire supply chain, Zara, Adidas, and H&M use RFID tech to collect data of identified products.

7. Gender fluidity: inclusivity and diversity are increasingly important in fashion, with size representation and emerging as key factors.

8. Comfort: fashion has been moving in an increasingly comfortable direction for decades.

9. Mental health: enormous tailwind due to the pandemic and likely to boost the outdoor market in the long term.

10. Antiviral properties: Polygiene from Sweden and HeiQ from Switzerland have developed special finishes for textiles that kill viruses and bacteria, thus helping people feel safer.

11. Subscriptions(?) Generation Z is more interested in using products rather than owning them.

12. AI or robot influencers: Miquela, Imma.

13. Metaverse stores? Fashion brands can sell their products not only in the real world, but via NFTs in games like Roblox and Fortnite.

14. Live shopping: in China, 20 percent of online trade already takes place via live shopping on social media.

15. AI-aided design: generative clothes that help designer imagine new possibilities, perhaps create the actual design files as well. Alena Stepanova.

16. Embedding culture into materials: knitwear made from organic yarn, upcycling coconut shells to use as buttons. Link is no longer working:(

17. Slow fashion? I’ve heard of it, I’m skeptical on people (especially my generation) wanting to give up novelty for impact. As I understand it, either recycling or subscribing would be much better.

18. Modern masculinity: men are now avoiding the macho image of the past, like they’re taking care of the babies. This market is going to grow a lot.

19. Buildings as ads: architects want to make incredible buildings, brands want to be remembered, we need social housing. Think about a Nike health building, or an H&M diversity building.

20. Video: we watch tv while we scroll down instagram, so why are we relying on a single image for a single season in fashion? Hire filmmakers over advertisers.

21. Gamification: making the process fun and engaging for both buyers and sellers, whether that’s through chats, fan groups, online forums, and other tools that help create community and an emotional connection.

Top 0.1%

“It’s much harder to predict sociological changes than technological ones” - Bryan Chesky

• CFO of LVMH: “We don’t sell [most Luis Vuitton] products to rich people. We sell them to people who have money and want to indulge themselves”.

• “How can we maximize desire with this product? Luxury for me is how can you create desire”.

• Fashion brands have not been doing well after the pandemic. The middle class has cut their expenses on luxury. Brands that serve the top 0.1% have not experienced such reductions.

• Now that old money is becoming popular among the middle class, what will the top 0.1% do next?

• Why are brands like Luis Vuitton and Dior so successful? They are timeless and modern at the same time.

• Couture open-sourced designs so even when young people can’t buy them, they fall in love and start a relationship with the brand.

Sustainability

• Conscious Maximalists are 23% more likely to believe that sustainable products are oversold. They don’t live up to the hype.

• Conscious Maximalists are 75% more likely to do more than most people when it comes to sustainability.

• “I think we’ll see a dramatic shift away from the multitrillion-dollar retail market toward the $300 billion luxury market. People will realize that durable products made with real craftsmanship result in higher residual value, and they’ll be able to resell those products.”

• Renewcell breaks down used cotton and other cellulose-rich textiles and transforms them into a new, biodegradable raw material that can be used to make virgin quality viscose or lyocell textile fibers.

• Clothing recycling and textile recycling are independent topics. Textile waste arises out of production processes like fiber and filament manufacture, spinning, weaving, knitting, clothing manufacturing.

• Challenge: clothing may have many components such as labels, sewing threads, buttons, zippers, and interlining, all of which make the separation process difficult.

• Recycled fibers are used to make a variety of products. Recycled pre-consumer textile wastes are used in the construction, automotive, furniture, paper, and clothing industries.

• By 2030, it might be possible to make new clothes out of postconsumer waste and carbon emissions. Just like with plastics, the best solution to fashion sustainability might be recycling.

• The fashion industry could champion regenerative farming and systemic changes that consumers actually see the impact of. Then it’s not just using less resources but actively helping the environment.

• Agraloop: transforms crops leftovers into fabric.

• Newlight: PHB from microbes

• H&M and Lanzatech partnership to make clothes from CO2

Futures

“Why do we wear clothes, in the first place? We first invented them to protect us from the cold but we’re now using them to feel and signal something”.

• Phase change, shape memory, chromic, conductive, UV-protecting, anticrease and fluorescent whitening agents, water repellence, self-cleaning, flame-retardant, anti-phone radiation, menstrual underwear.

• Infrared textiles that absorb energy from the sun, then radiate it back onto the body at specific wavelengths to enhance blood circulation, rejuvenate of skin and muscle tissue, or promote regeneration.

• Smart socks.

• What if we could wear AI, literally? Like, our phones are somehow already part of our outfit these days. Now have clothes with electronics that read your body, your thoughts, think about it, and talk to you?

• Unconventional materials: seaweed powder, soy cashmere (from the surplus of tofu production), rose petal silks (from fallen rose petals, dyed with natural pigments).

• Think beyond fashion: astronauts, firefighters, athletes, cooks, physicians, soldiers, F1 drivers, construction workers, scuba divers, swimmers, ski sports athletes — they all need to wear special type of clothing.

• Vanity clothing works on the premise of compressing, lifting, or supporting specific body parts in order to create an artificially sculpted and perfectly shaped body.

• Extroverted and introverted: the former externalizes things like aroma, sound, and texture. The latter react to internal and external conditions but only for the wearer.

• Pants with sensors for yoga feedback

• Haptics so deaf people can feel music.

• 3D printed kimonos.

• Responsive textile from MIT Media Lab.

• Clothes designed from BCI readings.

As a kid, I was told the story of Galileo Galilei being imprisoned for challenging the status quo geocentric theory through science and how it took centuries for society to catch up and acknowledge him not only as sane but as a hero.

If I were to point to today’s Galileo’s, I’d point to biohackers. Folks doing crazy biotech, genetic engineering stuff outside of traditional institutions that limit them. Those who skip the prestigious journals and share their biotech with anyone who wants to watch the future on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram.

While for some biohackers imprisonment has meant to be banned from online platforms, non-biohacker scientists backed by prestigious credentials have been favored by the algorithms to accumulate millions of followers, likes, and views. This piece explores the impact of content creation in these two “kinds” of scientists: Scientist-Influencers and Biohacker-Creators.

The Scientist-Influencer

Scientist-Influencers (SI): not the PhD student doing boring scientific dissemination or “days in the life”. Not science-based companies whose founders barely even post on LinkedIn. SI are scientists who woke up to the fact that the world cares about their work and they could make a larger immediate1 impact (and passive $) if they productize their science through YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and newsletters.

After three years of launching his podcast, Andrew Huberman now has over 5 million subscribers on YouTube, 6 million followers on Instagram, 500 thousand newsletter subscribers, and 300 thousand likes on TikTok. His sponsors now include nutrition supplement AG1, online therapy service Betterhelp, and fitness wearable WHOOP.

Content creation is a two-faced business. Andrew’s consumer product is actionable insights for a healthy and productive life, wrapped as a podcast that he partially monetizes through $10/mo or $1,500 lifetime memberships (for access to exclusive content, early access to events, and AMAs). Whether an audience pays or not, they’re the product too, as their trust and attention is sold to brands that “sponsor” the podcast.

Peter Attia’s audience includes 669 thousand YouTube subscribers and 1 million Instagram followers. Interestingly, his podcast relies entirely on $19/mo and $149/yr member subscriptions (no sponsors). His book, Outlive, has sold over 1 million copies. Though he holds an MD from Stanford, he’s not an active academic researcher.

Similarly, Sam Harris has 674 thousand YouTube subscribers and monetizes only through $100/yr memberships. What makes him particularly interesting as a SI, is the product he built separate from the podcast: meditation app WakingUp that you can access for the modest price of $20/mo, $130/yr, or $0 if you get their “scholarship”.

While some sports players collaborate with brands only as an image that supports it, others co-develop these products and even buy equity in those companies (e.g. Roger Federer and ON). As more scientists build their personal, consumer-facing brands, I strongly believe that the next step for those SI is to become the main actors in the product development process of consumer products and protagonists of the stories that these products would otherwise lack.

These SI will not only become co-developers, early adopters and thus true influencers in the success of these consumer bio products, but also the translators that biotech so often needs. #ItsTimeForTheMKBHDOfBiotech. For the most part though, content is not changing their science. Their funders remain the same, their research is still conservative. The audience never joins the stage.

Introducing…

The Biohacker-Creator

Biohacker-Creator (BC): full-time bioengineer who does experiments academia wouldn’t fund and are interesting to a niche audience of both scientists and non-scientists. Their main activity is science and they productize it through fun and interesting videos. Not to be confused with the fitness coaches though the line may get a little blurry if Bryan Johnson played with CRISPR instead of olive oil.

Now, don’t trust me. Listen to the first 30 seconds of billionaire Balaji’s interview on the Decentralized Science (DeSci) podcast: “Look at Veritasium, look at 3Blue1Brown, look at some of these science channels on YouTube. There’s an audience for it and actually there’s a fairly well-heeled audience that wants to learn about this stuff. You could actually monetize your teaching now, for example, and use that to fund research”.

Balaji is indirectly answering what I call “The Chesky question”: if social, behavioral changes are harder to predict than tech laws like Moore’s, what are the behavioral changes we will see in the 2020s and beyond? The somewhat crazy answer offered by Balaji and a humble writer is this: consumer trust shifting towards individual creators will lead to content-funded science.

The Thought Emporium is a DIY science (not only biotech) channel with over 1.7 million subscribers and 200 million total views on YouTube, 5.3 million likes on TikTok, and 156 thousand followers on Instagram. Biotech videos range among his most popular ones. Only on YouTube: Grape Made of Meat (9.8M views), Rat Neurons Playing Doom (3.4M views), Synthetic Spider Silk (2.6M views), Meat Leaf (2.5M views).

The Thought Emporium also does livestreams on project planning or lectures on technical topics. Hear me out: even if it’s just $2 bucks, how crazy is it that seemingly random people are sending this seemingly random dude money that they could otherwise spend in McDonald’s, to have him do the science they want to watch? How crazy is it that over 800 people actively support him on Patreon with memberships going from $1/mo to $500/mo, collectively making $1,600/mo?

Unlike a crowdfunding campaign where backers can get something like a t-shirt or the first version of a product in return, content itself is the main product of this new model. As this content reaches larger audiences, I think these donations may turn into a literal vote for the ideas they want to watch. If the SI hold AMAs, could BC hold brainstorming sessions of crazy biotech ideas that actually make it to reality given enough backers?

David Ishee is a biohacker who started streaming videos on his CRISPRed dogs on YouTube five years ago. Though his channel’s metrics may not be as impressive as others, he’s been featured in the Netflix documentary Unnatural Selection and Walter Isaacson’s Code Breaker book, the latter for being part of a group of biohackers who made and injected themselves with a COVID mRNA vaccine before all big pharma launched their own. Today, David receives over $1,400 in Patreon monthly donations while working at The ODIN, a biohacking kits co.

Jo Zayner is the founder and CEO of The ODIN. An artist at heart whose art happens to be science, it’s sad to see how the algorithms have in fact banned her. Microbiome transplants, CRISPR to increase muscle mass, growing chicken cells in your kitchen, and an expedited COVID vaccine were all videos available for anyone to learn to do biotech from anywhere in the world. Hands-on, step-by-step, livestreams where she answered questions. It was beautiful.

Throughout her career as a biohacker, Jo has received all sorts of requests from dozens and dozens of people who want a cure for x or y disease. Today’s healthcare system, including academia and pharma, has failed them. They don’t care whether Jo has an MD-PhD from Harvard or Yale. They just want a solution and Jo is the only person who’s crazy enough to try this sort of things out.

Jo is the reason why I was able to actually learn and do genetic engineering as a 15-year-old in my house in Mexico, away from anyone who could tell me that I’m too young or not smart enough to learn about such beauty. A friend of ours, Roya, has a similar story. Fast-forward 7 years, she’s now selling badass lab robots to Jo for her new company. Full circle.

Biohacking to me is about creating the world you want to see. To start right now, instead of waiting for permission, because sometimes, when you want to see something in the world that doesn’t exist yet, you can’t wait for a reformation. You gotta be the Galileo and do it yourself (lit DIY, lol) first.

Stories

Stories have always been the connective tissue of society. My crazy dream is that the Reformation of biotech, driven by consumer behavioral shifts in content creation and consumption, brings about more Scientist-Influencers and even more Biohacker-Creators. A future in which anyone can cook is a future in which we not only trade money for entertainment and education but access to our biological data for actual insights and new designer biotech.

As always, eager to read your thoughts! Please message/email me or leave a comment :)

Easily moldable, highly durable, and cost-effective, bakelite soon remade everything from cars to phones, washing machines, irons, and combs. Together with other new materials like nylon and teflon that had properties not found in nature, they made a statement: Synthetic materials have an identity of their own. You can rearrange atoms in new, imaginative ways. It’s not about emulating nature, but transcending it.

It took less than a decade since World War II for plastics to be massively embedded in everyday life, mostly without questioning whether “the good old natural we used to know was actually better”. After the war’s significant R&D push for synthetic materials, the rise of the American middle class and women’s rights, advertising for plastics companies was clear: new, more practical and cheaper materials for everything and for all.

So far with biology the vibes have felt like “Take that protein, put it in bacteria and grow it in a tank”, copy-paste-grow(-optimize). We are living in a time when culture is influencing our biotech ideas more than biotech is influencing culture. Our constrains are not merely technological but also cultural.

As plastics have now polluted our oceans and our bodies, we have entered a parallel universe where “synthetic” equals bad and “natural” equals good, especially in materials, food, and agriculture. Despite being so, most consumer biotech goods are not being branded as synthetic and “non-GMO” labels are the gold standard consumers trust.

Interestingly, the anti-synbio mentality doesn’t always seem to impact health products as much. We want to move away from chemically-synthesized drugs, we want more information about our bodies, and are willing to try out the bunch of new consumer GM probiotics.

That is because the new natural is human centric. Even when it comes to ecological consumer products, sustainability alone is not enough as a value proposition. I think we can use the new natural as a marketing and design north star to sell biobased products that not only copy-paste nature but transcend it like bakelite once did. Examples in hyperlinks.

This marks my final piece of fuzzy dreams at the intersection of culture and biotech. From now on, I aim to evangelize the new natural to curious non-scientists through stories of how specific biotech products work. Wish me luck!

It’s 5:00AM in Toluca when Sofia Sanchez wakes up to the sound of her Westclox, ready for another day as a business major. She drives to her hometown’s business school, listening to the radio, wondering what her professor’s reaction will be to the 76-page final report she wrote with the help of her beloved IBM Selectric, her worn-out Chartpak stencil, her family’s encyclopedia, and Mexico City’s IBM center for some calculations. She makes a stop at a phone call station to remind her teammate to correct the finger mistake on the cardboard they made about some ultra-innovative “personal computing” devices her uncle in the US once told her about. Not much more is to be said about Sofia Sanchez. April 1st, 2024 was just another day for a normal 20-year-old in a small town in Mexico.

Thank Lick it’s April Fool’s!

“How do the current and next thing get determined?” was the question that gave birth to this piece. Whether they’d be ideas, beliefs, fonts, or technologies, I’d been deeply curious to understand the nature of trends in our world. I wanted to know if there were principles for steering the world towards a particular direction, and whether I could use those principles to change the way biotechnology changes the world.

For the past few weeks, I’ve explored J.C.R Licklider’s visionary mind, Everett Roger’s theory on the Diffusion of Innovations, René Girard’s Theory of Mimetic Desire, and the desires of GenZ influencers on Instagram. This piece is a third batch of thoughts at the intersection of culture and biology, this time focusing on how biology can influence modern culture as much as modern culture influences biology.

The Presynbiotech Era

The habitants of the terrifying alternate universe I described in the very first paragraph, are firm believers that the future is merely what hasn’t happened yet but eventually will. To them, technology equals destiny and evolution is synonymous with inexorable. What we, in this universe made happen in 30 years, they might start dreaming about in 60.

To yours and my own fortune, 5 years prior to the birth of Moore’s Law, Man-computer symbiosis was published by J.C.R Licklider (Lick for us friends). While Moore had made an accurate prediction on how far we could take computers, Lick set a clear vision and agenda for how personal computers and the intergalactic network would become the new medium of creative expression: how tech would change culture.

Lick dreamed about everything from Zoom to PayPal, Instagram, and the iPad and he led the development of early versions of them. Slightly paraphrased, one of my absolute favorite passages in the Dream Machine book answers how he did that:

Lick knew he couldn’t get it all done in one year or two years or a lifetime. By creating a community of fellow believers, however, he guaranteed that his vision would live on after him. When he arrived at ARPA in 1962, there was nothing more than a handful of uncoordinated efforts scattered across the country. By the time he left in 1964, he had forged those into a nationwide movement with direction, coherence and purpose. By putting most of the money into universities, he supported the rising generation, whose hearts and minds he won and convinced that computer science was an exciting thing to do. In 1988, that community was the one thing that he was willing to take credit for: “I think I found a lot of bright people and got them working in this area”.

Of course, we would be doomed too if the world was only full of dreamers like Lick! We need builders like Alan Kay who build them to life and artists like Steve Jobs who steal from them and bring the tech to everyone once it’s cheap enough. Call it lack of vision, bad management or timing, neither Intel nor H&P nor Xerox nor IBM capitalized on their decades of technological advantage over the garage hackers. Yet the garage hackers didn’t invent the tech alone; they more so put the puzzle together once the pieces were there. Dream, build, sell.

Today, we are living in the Presynbiotech Era. It is a time before ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence-engineered life, a time before the worlds of silicon and carbon intelligence truly fuse as one.

Oddly enough, I have not yet encountered a clear 50-year dream of the social paradigm shifts that we will create through biotechnology. If no one’s even dreaming, how will we arrive at a different future❗❓

Computers have changed the way we think. Synbio will change the way we feel. There will not only be dinosaurs, but UBERs, TikTok marketplaces and AirBnBs. We will have new kinds of enhanced humans of mixed sexes, races and talents, iPlants that act as programmable vending machines where I can buy anything from on the street, an axolotl-turtle hybrid that wakes me up in the morning and cleans my bedroom, and expresso machines that use personalized capsules that keep track of and maintain each one of my biomarkers in place. End of famine, disease, poverty and war too.

The fact that we even start thinking of a Pre-synbiotech Era means that we can start dreaming about a Synbiotech one. If you’d been waiting for a call, here you go: I’m calling YOU to share more audacious, truly crazy, dreams of a Synbiotech future, for those who look back on these dreams 50 years hence might as well be living them.

And surely, remember: had the world waited for Lick to sell iPads, you would not be reading this either. Dreams matter as much as execution and you truly can learn anything. So if you enjoy building, go for it. Real artists ship.

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Today’s weirdos are tomorrow’s basics

In his Theory on the Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers defines innovation as anything that is perceived as new by someone. He categorizes the adopters of an innovation into 5 main groups, according to influential power, risk aversion and the resulting order in which they adopt: the innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards—A business school all-time favorite.

The graph is so good that reading the whole book won’t get you much farther than: 1) it’s early adopters (aka influencers) and not innovators who bring innovations to billions; 2) though anyone can be an influencer, the closer the better; 3) the who matters more than the what.

The theory checks as I go back to my latest purchasing and habit decisions. For example, I’d heard about the WHOOP band from Bryan Johnson, Steve from Diary of a CEO, other macro influencers and numerous YouTube ads, but I was only convinced enough to buy it until I interacted closely with a user I could relate to: a young, female, Mexican bioengineer who’d graduated from the same university where I study.

Something that Tesla has left clear too, is that innovators and early adopters can absorb the cost of being first. They are not only helping spread the technology by providing feedback and generating revenue but by modeling that desire to the early majority that relies on and admires them.

Where Rogers falls short and Girard goes deeper is in the actual dynamics between influencers and followers. What I learned from reading about the Theory of Mimetic Desire is that, in our quest for personal differentiation, we look up to people whom we can relate to, who are looked up to by people like us AND who have something we still lack.

The most obvious examples of influencers are early adopters like Bryan Johnson and Steve. The more subtle yet more powerful influencers are people like the bioengineer with the WHOOP who had something I wanted (being perceived as a healthy person) while still being relatable.

Lick’s dreams have come to life to such an extent that being an internet influencer is no longer exclusive to elites. The rise of the microinfluencer (<100k followers) is a whole case study, not only of a shift in the distribution of goods but a paradigm shift of trust from the system towards the individual (which Lick’s visions quite promoted too). I, a GenZ girl, no longer care for what Walmart might put on TV or even YouTube ads but tell me about the 20-second reel of a microinfluencer on her Sunday trip to Walmart and I’ll buy the thing just as I bought the WHOOP.

“The thing” only matters to the innovators and the early adopters, the masses only care about who is modeling it. One day you buy the story of Zuck and Thiel dropouts, the next you buy YC’s and PG’s of staying in school. Stupid TikTok trends go viral and waves of Web3, LLM and VR founders come and go. Why, then, wouldn’t we be able to make culturally viral biotechnology once it’s ready?

In all non-pharma biotech, I consider myself an early adopter (and aspiring innovator) of ideas. While all opinion leaders are early adopters, however, not all early adopters are opinion leaders. The key to innovations crossing the chasm towards the early majority is in opinion leaders (aka influencers). I think biotech in particular, needs translators: people lying at the intersection of innovators and early adopters. Translators understand the science well enough to SHOW and SELL it to an early majority of niche influencers who will take it to the masses. In the best case, they are founders with amazing products who are also great storytellers.

Idea-grown bioeconomies

People are freaking making live sales on TikTok, snacks are the new autographs, the young are heavily steering towards lifestyles of running more than drinking and subscribing more than we owning. Sustainability and diversity are on the agenda and actions of major corporations, and social media is the new search engine not only for products but for people starting communities and friendships that are URL-first and IRL-second.

Knowing stuff like Moore’s law for DNA gets you to build Ozempic. Knowing where culture is headed (and where it’s not) gets you to design the right thing in the first place so that billions 1actually use it. It gets to to understand the power of making pilots with [farmers] who are also influencers who can model your product to their followers, at scale. Replace farmers with your customer.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need less videos of adayinthelifeofanivyleaguephdstudentpipetting and more lab and startup tours of [Living Carbon], explaining step by step how they make their [superplants]. Sexy Instagram pics of that [superplant] in my nice millennial-styled home. Replace Living Carbon and superplant for 500 startups doing cool shit like that.

Though I’m mostly talking about consumer biotech here, vaccines like moderna’s, GMOs like BT maize and cotton, recombinant insulin, and algae-derived Omega-3 all needed someone to be convinced to even begin production and eventually reach massive consumption. Sometimes that someone is a policy-maker, as is the case of Mexican officials who ban GMOs.

Ideas can inspire products that grow bioeconomies. To change how biotechnology changes the world, how biotech influences our culture, I shall share my Synbiotech dreams with biotechnologists as much as I translate and show what they build to the early majority so we all can live in the future, in a different future.

“I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one” — Ayn Rand

PS: In OUR universe, at 5:00AM, a young Sofia Sanchez wakes up to the vibration of her WHOOP band, ready for an extraordinary day as a future biological technologist. She nurtures her mind by listening to the brightest minds from around the world on podcasts, and connects with friends creating the future on something called X. She wrote down this article on her beloved MacBook Air and sent it to nearly 500 hundred people via an intergalactic network. April 1st, 2024 was a new beginning in her journey to bring exceptional biology into the hands of billions ;)

In the carbon economy, construction’s carbon credit score is in red. Out of all CO2 emissions worldwide, manufacturing materials like cement, iron and steel costs 10% and obtaining the energy for operations like lighting, heating and ventilation in buildings 17.5%. In the carbon economy, bricks could be grown out of plants and buildings designed to look and function more like nature does. What are these biological solutions for sustainable construction and are they also built for social and economic sustainability?

Let there be light

Like it or not, humanity depends on energy. From plants that harness the sun’s light and pass it across the food chain, to how we burn fossil fuels to run modern civilization. It is unsurprising then, that the energy sector accounts for more than 70% of CO2 emissions worldwide. What might be interesting is that at least 17% of such emissions come from buildings. This is more CO2 than road transport, aviation and shipping combined, and almost the same as agriculture emissions!

While renewable energy technologies are our best bet to reduce the sector’s emissions, less than 10% of the world’s energy is sourced from them. Fossil resources reasonably pose challenges on the economic incentives for a green transition in the largest CO2 emitters. Yet even Brazil, who sources over 80% of their energy from renewables, can benefit from different solutions as their climate inevitably changes over the next decades and increases their need for more efficient Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems.

In Eastgate in Harare, Zimbabwe, architect Mick Pearce redefines the pristine glass tower archetype as part of the old world to make way for a new order of brick and stone in tune with the local resources, culture, and weather. While stone has a high thermal mass that helps regulate temperature indoors, it’s really termite architecture that helps Eastgate save 35% of total energy and 10% of total building cost when compared to the average consumption of other conventional buildings with full HVAC in Harare.

“Termite architecture you say???” Hell yeah! Termites themselves live underground so their mounds serve as a passive ventilation system that prevents the accumulation of toxic gasses, regulates temperature and humidity. During the day, the outer tunnels of the mound flush out the hot air that carries CO2 and methane while pulling in cool air from outside, and the opposite happens at night. This makes it possible for termites to farm fungi at 87 ºF, even when outside temperatures are 35-104 ºF: “the termitary; an ecosystem not a “machine for living in”.

Inspired by this design, the Eastgate uses low power fans that pull in cool air at night and releases hot air through ducts that lead to a chimney in the roofs as temperatures rise during the day because of the weather and human activity. Additionally, uplighters in the office space use the concrete vaulted ceiling to reflect light downwards and absorb their heat.

That was awesome! Let’s now look at a Norman Foster before you decide to biologize my building. The Gherkin is one of the most emblematic modern buildings in London. Finished 20 years ago, the 40-story skyscraper was built using 5500 panels (24000 square meters!) of glass that allow daylight to penetrate deep into the interior spaces, initially designed to illuminate even underground floors.

This time, the design inspiration came from E. aspergillum, a glass sponge found in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Does your building build itself? Cuz these organisms grow their own fiberglass by extracting silicic acid from seawater and converting it into silica. With it, they form a lattice-like hollow ‘basket’ that allows the sponge to withstand the deep-sea pressures by bending at the intersecting points to absorb stress while maximizing sea water flow to filter it for nutrients.

The main feature that the Gherkin mimics from these glass sponges is their round shape to, in this case, maximize the flow of wind around it. Then, similar to the Eastgate, passive ventilation mechanisms were built into the construction in order to reduce the need for air conditioning by up to half (of comparable buildings in the zone). Between each floor are atrium spaces that act as vertical shafts that allow air to circulate throughout the building, the two-layered glass separated by a gap creates insulation,

Unfortunately, just a year after its opening, one of the building’s operable windows broke off and fell some 28 floors to the ground. Though no one was injured, the mixed-mode ventilation system has been disabled since then. What went wrong? Apparently one of the mechanical arms of the window. Does this mean the biomimetics was inherently wrong? I don’t think so but the risk was too high to keep on figuring it out. Could this biomimicry principle work better elsewhere with different wind conditions, materials or height? That I am curious to know.

Still hungry for truly green operational buildings? The Algae House (Bio Intelligent Quotient [BIQ] House) in Hamburg was designed by Splitterwerk, an Austrian architecture firm in collaboration with ARUP, a multinational professional services firm (the algae engineering arm). The 15 flats were inaugurated in 2013 and are more alive than ever before.

While the previous examples mimic nature’s designs, this Algae House quite literally embodies its name by getting 30% of its heat from the algae that live inside its bioreactor-windows. These algae act as biological solar panels that turn light and 10 kg of CO2 per square-meter per year into oxygen, sugar, and heat: the magic of photosynthesis! The heat is captured by an automatic heat-capturing system and the dead algae can be used to make food supplements rich in minerals.

Cool but can I even get light through the windows? That’s a must! Not only do the transparent photobioreactors allow for the building to receive natural light, but controlling the density of the algae makes it possible to provide natural shading and thus reduce the need for artificial cooling during sunny periods. More sun, more algae growth, more shade, at least in principle. I’d be curious to know how this is precisely coordinated throughout a year in Hamburg.

Fine! If all of these bio-innovations truly work, why don’t we all have algae solar panels? Can buildings replicate like organisms do? — My research just led me down the most serendipitous rabbit-hole I’ve experienced in a while: GreenFluidics, a Mexican startup 15 minutes away from my home is building scalable algae bioreactors fused with solar panels to produce electricity while capturing CO2. Their CTO was my physics professor and I’m just getting to know about it. What a small green world!

What’s more, a cost comparison between algae photobioreactors and photovoltaic cells done by researchers at the University of South Wales concluded that, despite the ROI coming later for algae (24 versus 16 years), it would end up being higher than that of its purely silicon-based counterpart, not to mention to CO2 captured throughout. Still, some questions on contamination risk, how to collect and what to do with the dead algae if you were to install it yourself at home.

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Localization

Following energy, the biggest construction decarbonization challenge to tackle is cement. Cheap, available, durable and resistant to natural disasters like earthquakes. Hollywood has made it the face of futuristic construction, sometimes even the face of progress too. This millenary partnership has built trust and aversion towards change, as hard as the material itself. Without any clear financial incentives to do so, any contractor will show themselves reluctant to allocate resources to becoming an expert on x or y new building material from day to night, let alone run the risk of using it.

Countries in the global south, particularly Latin America, prove an interesting case study for being where: i) most urbanization will happen in the coming decades (140% increase versus 34% in the global north); ii) most cement is produced and thus where many houses are built out of it (plus consider that residential buildings are the main CO2 emitters) and on top of that; iii) 6% of global food loss happens: virtually free feedstock waiting to be revalorized into new materials, prevent emissions from food loss and reduce cement emissions?!

Similar to how some new meat companies are creating hybrids between plant and cell-grown meat, or how fashion brands are using a certain percentage of sustainable textiles in their clothes, materials that come from hemp, coconut, straw and algae are being used as concrete reinforcements that provide the tensile strength that concrete lacks, making the composite material capable of withstanding a wider range of stresses such as bending and stretching forces.

Coconut fiber, which would be usually wasted, can improve the shear strength of concrete by up to 30% and split tensile strength by 10%. Bamboo strips also show relatively high tensile strengths of 70 MPa (only 12% lower than grade 60 steel rebar) but only until the 2nd and 3rd years of cultivation and when it’s not treated chemically, it can cause significant cracks in cured concrete due to water absorption. Ask a country with frequent earthquakes like Mexico if we’re up for it and you’ll likely get a “No-no: please, do not biologize my building!”.

Let’s talk about hemp… crete: hempcrete! Hempcrete is a mix of hemp hurds (traditionally waste), lime, sand, or pozzolans used for construction materials and insulation. I didn’t believe Dr. Darshil Shah when I read him say that hemp could capture carbon even 2x better than trees but when you sum up the cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin carbon content in it through napkin math, you can verify the 10 tons of CO2 captured per hectare (at least in the UK) which can be 2x’d when cultivated twice per year. Plus, its yield is up to 7x higher than those of wheat!

It’s vital to make it clear that concrete is still 6.6x more resistant to compression than hempcrete alone which is why many construction projects like Mobius House use a hempcrete and concrete hybrid or the Paris Studio Lemoal Lemoal whose exterior is clad in white, cement-fiber panels that protect the hemp blocks. When used alone, hempcrete is used for insulation purposes only — an alternative to the widely used fiberglass that often causes irritation or polyurethane foam which uses environmentally unfriendly chemicals.

Then there’s algae, algae, and more algae. Prometheus materials mixes algae with minerals to make biomineralized calcium carbonate which is then dried into a powder that serves as the base for zero-carbon concrete masonry units. This process reduces CO2 emissions by avoiding heating industrial kilns to 1,500 ºC and when transporting their material which is 15-20% lighter in weight compared to Portland cement. What’s more, flexural and bond strength as well as noise absorption are several times better than the incumbents’.

Minus Materials, another biocement startup, is leveraging Coccolithophores’ natural capacity as limestone microfactories to produce limestone while capturing CO2. Though there will be emissions from transforming limestone into cement, 60% of them will have been offset by using Minus’ limestone. Plus, there’s no need for grinding since the limestone can be harvested already as a fine powder. Beyond just cement, this biocement co aims to expand into algae-based paint and consumer goods.

Whether it’s concrete, reinforcements for it or insulating materials we’re talking about, it’s important to address challenges like maximum lifespan of the materials, the local availability of the type of binder used to make the end materials, and (of course) the unit economics since it’s biotech commodities we’re talking about after all.

‘Commodities’ also mean big, huge, production volumes that no single type of solution or company will be able to replace alone. As these materials get tested, it’s likely that some of the companies behind them (and our planet) will benefit from patent licensing, policies to accelerate the adoption of low-carbon products, and non-bio companies that reduce emissions in later processing stages.

“The biggest enemy to progress is this concept that it has to be perfect before you start. The best way to make actual impact is to go out there with a good enough solution and what’s good enough now is using these things that can bring down the carbon, so we can start making an impact right away” — Sean James (Microsoft) in an interview regarding Microsoft’s investments in green construction

Biofun

Albeit kept for the last section of this piece, the first picture that comes to mind when I think of biologizing buildings is that of buildings in the beautiful country of Singapore. Not only Gardens by the Bay which is on the left part of the cover of this article but the airport and, honestly, any other building with lots of plants in it.

Liu Thai Ker designed Singapore to work like a family. Youngest members have the smallest needs (e.g. elementary schools, grocery shops), the middle ones slightly bigger needs (e.g. high schools, polytechnic, small supermarkets) and the oldest ones the biggest needs (e.g. universities, malls). Children can easily get their basic needs but depend on their parents to get them toys — a lot of traffic can be avoided when you don’t put all the weight in a single person.

It seems to me that Liu thinks of humans as indifferent from other living creatures as the urban-planning principles that he works with — such as hierarchical structuring, decentralization, interdependence and resource efficiency — are present in every ecosystem.

And still, no matter how much the ecosystem or the city changes, he reminds us that to understand human needs, is to understand nature’s, is to build to last and to make create beautiful. To construct buildings that contain at least 100% of the greenery that would’ve been is to control temperatures, capture CO2, improve mental mental health, create landscapes that resemble what we evolved for.

“Form follows function follows fun”— Liu Thai Ker. The urban planner shares how understanding the need came before making Singapore a garden city.

Biology’s passionate love affair with architecture is anything but a recent fad. Marcus Vitruvius, the Roman architect himself, was inspired by the dimensions and proportions of the human body as symbols of harmony. Perhaps he was also thinking about nature when he outlined his 3 principles of architecture in his book De Architectura: utilitas (utility), firmitas (durability), , venustas (beauty).

I, a humble biology enthusiast, believe that these principles shall not change as we biologize our buildings either through new materials or designs, for they could be the same ones that evolution used to build living monuments. Though organisms evolve, there is Firmitas in the species defined by genetic blueprints. The constant change in biology is a function of the similarly changing environment to adapt to, in a utilitas sense. Such adaptations are expressed as circular rather than edgy shapes that most of us humans think of as beautiful: venustas!

Allow me, thus, to regard natural evolution as the mother of all architects. When amino acids are building blocks for proteins which are the scaffold, walls, tubes and floor of cells; when cells build up tissues that grow organs which conform bodies; when functions are encoded by a DNA blueprint and expressed as forms, when organisms like trees and fungi communicate through kilometric world wood webs… what is a building then?

When we truly program, grow and evolve buildings from programmable, self-healing, changing, symbiotic, organic and inorganic, materials — What will a building be then?

As Mark’s oncologists receive his leukemia cell sequencing results to design a targeted treatment, they get a general understanding of the initial genetic variations and activity of his genes. However, the traditional sequencing methods they used are only an average of all the immune cells in Mark’s blood or bone marrow, which means they cannot attribute specific mutations to specific immune cell populations. It’s like seeing the fog of a fire from afar without being able to point to the source. Even when using flow cytometry to sort and isolate specific types of immune cells, Mark’s doctors find themselves limited in the number of genes they can analyze, which isn’t of much help considering leukemia’s high genetic heterogeneity.

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We never stop playing as we grow older. Play just changes. What once was a doll, a teddy bear or a ball might now be a car, a building, social media, or clothes. The latest theme for the Ginkgo Creative residency was, indeed, play. The resident’s work, a LEGO kit to build a mini-bio world, is a perfect example of biologizing toys.

Here, I wonder: what does it look like to toy-ize biology? LEGO, for instance, manufactures billions of pieces that are precise down to scales smaller than a millimeter. They’re modular and replicable; scalable.

Now think about a seed: this zip file that contains the genetic blueprint of the design, functions and features of an organism to be unzipped. LIFE’s UI is so magical that you don’t even need to know what the right biochemical buttons are to press. You just apply water, nutrients, the right temperature and sunlight et voilà, a treen has grown.

While LEGO makes 70k pieces per hour, an average human’s output is in the 1quintillion units (?). Biology is already modular, replicable, scalable. It is the stories that we tell around those toys, like the one I just told you about the seed, that often come in the second place.

Toys, whether they’re clothes, computers, LEGOs or apples, are objects that bring about values into the world. They make people happy, bring you to the moment. As we toy-ize biology, it is worth thinking about the processes, materials, machines, and people that make them, distribute them, and play with them.

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