Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #394

Whenever we start a new project, it has to have these ingredients of simultaneous complexity. It has to be novel. In terms of the synthetic biology, material science, robotics, engineering, all of these elements that are discipline based or rooted must be novel. If you can combine novelty in synthetic biology with a novelty in robotics, with a novelty in material science, with a novelty in computational design, you are bound to create something novel.

The following is a conversation with Neri Oxman, an engineer, scientist, designer, architect, artist, and one of the kindest, most thoughtful and brilliant human beings I've ever gotten to know. For a long time she led the Mediated Matter group at MIT that did research and built incredible stuff at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, material science and synthetic biology, doing so at all scales, from the micro scale to the building scale. Now she's continuing this work at a very new company for now, called Oxman, looking to revolutionize how humans design and build products, working with nature, not against it. On a personal note, let me say that Nary has for a long time been a friend and someone who in my darker moments has always been there with a note of kindness and support. I am forever grateful to her. She's a brilliant and a beautiful human being. Oh, and she also brought me a present. War and Peace by Tolstoy and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. It doesn't get better than that. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Neri Oxman. Let's start with the universe. Do you ever think of the universe as a kind of machine that designs beautiful things at multiple scales?

I do, and I think of nature in that way. In general, in the context of design specifically, I think of nature as everything that isn't anthropomass, everything that is not produced by humankind, the birds and the rocks and everything in between. Fungi, elephants, whales.

Do you think there's an intricate ways in which there's a connection between humans and nature?

Yes, and we're looking for it. I think that from, let's say from the beginning of Mankind, going back 200,000 years, the products that we have designed have separated us from nature. And it's ironic that the things that we designed and produced as humankind, that those are exactly the things that separated us before, that we were totally and completely connected. And I want to return to that.

World, but bring the tools of engineering and computation to it.

Yes, yes, I absolutely believe that there is so much to nature that we still have not leveraged and we still have not understood, and we still haven't. And so much of our work is design, but a lot of it is science is unveiling and. And finding new truths about the natural world that we were not aware before. Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has a kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence. And it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology. If you think about humans versus nature, at least in the realm, at least in the context of definition of nature is everything but anthropomass. And I'm using Ron Milo, who is an incredible professor from the Weizmann Institute, who came up with this definition of anthropomass in 2020, when he identified that 2020 was the crossover year when anthropomass exceeded biomass on the planet. So all of the designed goods that we have created and brought into the world now outweigh all of the biomass, including, of course, all plastics and wearables. Building cities, but also asphalt and concrete all outweigh the scale of the biomass. And actually, that was a moment. You know how in life there are moments that be a handful of moments that get you to course correct. And my. It was a zoom conversation with Ron, and that was a moment for me when I realized that that imbalance, oh, now we've superseded the biomass on the planet, where do we go from here? And you've heard the expression more phones than bones, and the anthropomass and the Anthropocene and the technosphere, sort of outweighing the biosphere. But now we are really trying to look at, is there a way in which all things technosphere are designed as if they are part of the biosphere? Meaning if you could today grow instead of build everything and anything, if you could grow an iPhone, if you could grow a car, what would that world look like? Where the Turing Test for sort of this kind of. I call this material ecology approach, but this notion that everything, material, everything that you design in the physical universe can be read and written to as, or thought of or perceived of as nature grown. That's sort of the Turing test for the company, or at least that's how I started. I thought, well, grow everything. That's sort of the slogan, let's grow everything. And if we grow everything, is there a world in which driving a car is better for nature than a world in which there are no cars? Is it possible that a world world in which you build buildings and cities, that those buildings and cities actually augment and heal Nature as opposed to their absence. Is there a world in which we now go back to that kind of synergy between nature and humans where you cannot separate between grown and made, and it doesn't even matter?

Is there a good term for the intersection between biomass and anthropomassis, like things that are grown?

Yeah. So in 2005, I called this material ecology. I thought, what if all things materials would be considered part of the ecology and would have a positive impact on the ecology where we work together to help each other. All things nature, all things human. And again, you can say that that wisdom in nature exists in fungi. Many mushroom lovers always contest my thesis here, saying, well, we have the mushroom network and we have the mot trees, and they're all connected and why don't we just simply hack into mushrooms? Well, first of all, yes, they're connected, but that network stops when there is a physical gap. That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree in Israel to connect with a weeping willow in Montana. And that's sort of a world that I'm dreaming about. What does it mean for nature to have access to the cloud at the kind of bandwidth that we're talking about? Sort of think neuralink for nature, you know, since the first computer, and you know this by heart probably better than I do, but we're both MIT lifers. We today have computational power that is 1 trillion times the power that we had in those times. We have 26.5 trillion times the bandwidth and 11.5 quintillion times the memory, which is incredible. So humankind, since the. Since the first computer, has approached and accessed such incredible bandwidth. And we're asking, well, what if nature had that bandwidth? So beyond genes and evolution, if there was a way to augment nature and allow it access to the world of bits, what does nature look like now? And can nature make decisions for herself as opposed to being guided and guarded and abused by humankind?

So nature has this inherent wisdom that you spoke to, but you're also referring to augmenting that inherent wisdom with something like a large language model.

Exactly.

To compress human knowledge, but also maintain whatever is that intricate wisdom that allows plants, bacteria, fungi to grow incredible things at arbitrary scales, adapting to whatever environment and just surviving and thriving no matter where, no matter how.

Exactly. So I think of it as large molecule models. And those large molecule models, of course, large language models are based on Google and search engines and so on and so forth. And we don't have this data currently. And Part of our mission is to do just that. Trying to quantify and understand the language that exists across all kingdoms of life. Across all five kingdoms of life. And if we can understand that language, is there a way for us to first make sense of it, find logic in it, and then generate certain computational tools that empower nature to build better crops, to increase the level of biodiversity? In the company, we're constantly asking, what does nature want? What does nature want from a compute view?

If it knew it, what could aid it in whatever the heck it's wanting to do?

Yeah. So we keep coming back to this answer of nature wants to increase information but decrease entropy. Right. So find order, but constantly increase the information scale. And this is true for what our work also tries to do, because we're constantly trying to fight against the dimensional mismatch between things made and things grown. Right. And as designers, we are educated to think in X, Y and Z. And that's pretty much where architectural education ends and biological education begins. So in reducing that dimensional mismatch, we're missing out on opportunities to create things made as if grown, but in the natural environment. We're asking, can we provide nature with these extra dimensions? And again, I'm not sure what nature wants, but I'm curious as to what happens when you provide these tools to the natural environments. Obviously with responsibility, obviously with control, obviously with ethics. Ethics and moral code. But is there a world in which nature can help fix itself using those tools?

And by the way, we're talking about a company called Oxman.

Yeah. Just a few words about the team.

Yeah. What kind of humans work at a place like this? They're trying to figure out what nature wants.

You know, I think they're first, like you, they're humanists first. They come from different disciplines and different disciplinary backgrounds. And just as an example, we have a brilliant designer who is just a mathematical genius and a computer scientist and a mechanical engineer who is trained as a synthetic biologist. And now we're hiring a microbiologist and a chemist. Architects, of course, and designers, roboticists. So it's really. It's Noah's Ark, Right? Two of each.

And always dancing between this line of the artificial, the synthetic, and the real. What's the term for the natural?

Yeah, the built and the grown. Nature and culture, technology and biology. But we're constantly seeking to ask, how can we build, design and deploy products in three scales? The molecular scale, which I've briefly hinted to. And there in the molecular scale, we're really looking to understand whether there is a universal language to nature and what that language is, and then build a tool that I think and dream of it is the iPhone for nature. If nature had an iPhone, what would that iPhone look like?

Does that mean creating an interface between nature and the computational tools we have?

Exactly. It goes back to that 11.5 quintillion times the bandwidth that humans have now arrived at and giving that to nature and seeing what happens there. Can animals actually use this interface to know that they need to run away from fire? Can plants use this interface to increase the rate of photosynthesis in the presence of a smoke cloud? Can they do this automatically without a kind of a top down, brute force, policy based method that's authored and deployed by humans? And so this work really relates to that interface with the natural world. And then there's a second area in the company which focuses on growing products. And here we're focusing on a single product that starts from CO2. It becomes a product, it's consumed, it's used, it's worn by a human, and then it goes back to the soil and it grows an edible fruit plant.

So we're talking about from CO2 to fruit.

Yeah, it starts from CO2 and it ends with something that you can like literally eat. So the world's first entirely biodegradable, biocompatible, biorenewable product that's grown. Yes, either using plant matter or using bacteria. But we are really looking at carbon recycling technologies that start with methane or wastewater and end with this wonderful reincarnation of a thing that doesn't need to end up in a composting site, but can just be thrown into the ground and grow olive and find peace. And there's a lot of textile based work out there that is focused on one single element in this long chain, like, oh, let's create leather out of mycelium, or let's create textile out of cellulose. But then it stops there and you get to assembling the shoe or the wearable and you need a little bit of glue and you need a little bit of this material and a little bit of that material to make it water resistant and then it's over. So that's one thing that we're trying to solve for, is how to create a product that is materially, computationally robotically novel and goes through all of these phases, from the creation, from this carbon recycling technology to the product, to literally. How do you think about reinventing an industry that is focused on assembly and putting things together and using humans to do that? Can that you know, can that happen just using robots and microbes and that's it.

And doing it end to end. I would love to see what this factory looks like.

And the factory is great too. I'm very, very excited. In October, we'll share first renditions of some of this work. And in February we'll invite you to the lab.

I'm there. I've already applied. I haven't heard back. I don't understand. Okay, let me ask just before we get to number three, it'd be amazing to just talk about what it takes with robotic arms or in general, the whole process of how to build a life form. Stuff you've done in the past, maybe stuff you're doing now. How to use bacteria, it's kind of synthetic biology, how to grow stuff by leveraging bacteria. Is there examples from the past?

Yes. And just take a step back. Over the 10 years, the mediated Matter group, which was my group at mit, has sort of dedicated itself to bio based design would be a suitcase word, but sort of thinking about that synergy between nature and culture, biology and technology. And we attempted to build a suite of embodiments. Let's say that they ended up in amazing museums and amazing shows and we wrote patents and papers on them, but they were still n of ones. Again, the challenge, as you say, was to grow them. And we classified them into fibers, cellular solids, biopolymers, pigments. And in each of the examples, although the material was different, sometimes we used fibers, sometimes we used silk with silkworms and honey with bees or comb as the structural material. With vespers, we used synthetically engineered bacteria to produce pigments. Although the materials were different and the hero organisms were different, the philosophy was always the same. The approach was really an approach of computational templating. That templating allowed us to create templates for the natural environment where nature and technology could duet could dance together to create these products. So just a few examples. With Silk Pavilion, we've had a couple of pavilions made of silk. And the second one, which was the bigger one, which ended up at the Museum of Modern Art with my friend, an incredible mentor, Paul Antonelli, that pavilion was 6 meter tall and it was produced by silkworms. And there we had different types of templates. There were physical templates that were basically just these water soluble meshes upon which the silkworms were spinning. And then there were environmental templates, which was a robot basically applying a variation of environmental conditions, such as heat and light to guide the movement of the silkworm.

You're Saying so many amazing things, and I'm trying not to interrupt you, but, like, one of the things you've learned by observing, by doing science on these is that the environment defines the shape that they create or contributes or intricately plays with the shape they create. And so, like, and you get to. That's one of the ways you can get to guide their work is by defining that environment. By the way, you said hero organism, which is an epic term that means like is whatever is the biological living system that's doing the creation.

And that's what's happening in pharma and biomaterials. And by the way, precision ag and new food design technologies as people are betting on a hero organism is sort of how I think of it. And the hero organism is sometimes it's the palm oil or it's the mycelium. There's a lot of mushrooms around for good and bad, and it's cellulose or it's fake bananas or the workhorse E. Coli. But these hero organisms are being betted on as, like the. What's the one answer that solves everything? Hitchhiker's guide.

42.

42.

Yeah.

These are sort of the 40 twos of the enchanted new universe. And back at MIT, we said, instead of betting on all of these organisms, let's approach them as almost like movement in a symphony. And let's kind of lean into what we can learn from each of these organisms in the context of building a project in an architectural scale. And those usually were pavilions.

And then the computational templating is the way you guide the work of this. How many did you say? 17,000?

17,532. So each of these silkworms threads are about, you know, 1, 1 mile in distance, and they're. They're beautiful. And when. And just thinking about the amount of material, you know, it's a bit like thinking about the, you know, the length of capillary vessels that grow in your belly when you're pregnant. To feed that incredible new life form is just. Nature is amazing. But back to the silkworms. I think I had three months to build this incredible pavilion, but we couldn't figure out how. We were thinking of emulating the process of how a silkworm goes about building its incredible architecture, this cocoon, over the period of 24 to 72 hours, and it builds a cocoon basically to protect itself. It's a beautiful form of architecture, and it uses pretty much just two materials, two chemical compounds, ceresin and fibrin. The ceresin is sort of the glue of the cocoon. The fibrin is the, the fiber based material of the cocoon through fibers and glue. And that's true for so many systems in nature. Lots of fiber and glue. And that architecture allows them to metamorphosize. And in the process, they vary the properties of that silk thread so it's stiffer or softer, depending on where it is in the section of the cocoon. And so we were trying to emulate this robotically with a 3D printer that was a 6 axis Kuka arm, one of these baby kukas, and we're trying to emulate that process computationally and build something very large. When one of my students, now a brilliant industrial engineer roboticist on my team, Marcus, said, well, you know, we were just playing with those silkworms and enjoying their presence when we realized that if they're placed on a desk or a horizontal surface, they will go about creating their cocoon. Only the cocoon would be flat because they're constantly looking for a vertical post in order to use that post as an anchor to spin the cocoon. But in the absence of that post, on surfaces that are less than 21 millimeters and flat, they will spin flat patches. And we say, aha, let's work with them to produce this dome as a set of flat patches. And a silkworm, mind you, is quite an egocentric creature. And actually the furthest you go, you move forward in evolution by natural selection, the more egoism you find in creatures. So when you think about termites, their material sophistication is, is actually very primitive, but they have incredible ability to communicate and connect with each other. So if you think about the entire all of nature, let's say all of living systems as a matrix that runs across two axes. One is material sophistication, which is terribly relevant for designers, and the other is communication. The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap, right? It's just saliva and feces and some soil particles that are built to create these incredible termite mounds at the scale that when compared to human skyscrapers, transcend all of buildable scales, at least in terms of what we have today in architectural practice, just relative to the size of the termite. But when you look at the silkworm, the silkworm has zero connection communication across silkworms. They were not designed to connect and communicate with each other. They're sort of a human designed species. Because the domesticated silk moth creates the cocoon, we then produce the silk of it, and then it dies. So it has dysfunctional wings. It cannot fly. It's not so. And that's another problem that the sericulture industry has is why did we in the first place author this organism 4000 years ago that is unable to fly and is just there to basically live as to serve a human need, which is textiles. And so here we were fascinated by the computational kind of biology dimension of silkworms. But along the way, by the way, this is great. I never get to tell the full story.

I'm enjoying this so much.

I'm always like people say, I always speak in Nietzschean paragraphs. They're way too long. And this is wonderful. This is like heaven.

Nietzschean paragraphs. You're drawing so many good lines. I love it.

But really, those silkworms are not. Yes. They're not designed to be like humans. Right. They're not designed to connect, communicate, and build things that are bigger than themselves through connection and communication.

So what happens when you add 17,000 of them communicating effectively?

That's a really great question. What happens is that at some point the templating strategies, and as you said correctly, there were geometrical templating, material templating, environmental templating, chemical templating, if you're using pheromones to guide the movement, bees in the absence of a queen, where you have a robotic queen.

Robotic queen.

But whenever you have these templating strategies, you have sort of control over nature. Right. But the question is, is there a world in which we can move from templating, from providing these computational material and immaterial physical and molecular platforms that guide nature, almost like guiding a product, almost like a gardener to a problem or an opportunity of emergence, where that biological organism assumes agency by virtue of accessing the robotic code and saying, now I own the code, I get to do what I want with this code. Let me show you what this pavilion may look like or this product may look like. And I think one of the exciting moments for us is when we realize that these robotic platforms that were designed initially as templates actually inspired, if I may, a kind of collaboration and cooperation between silkworms that are not a swarm based organism. They're not like the bees and the termites. They don't work together and they don't have social orders amongst them, the queen and the drones, et cetera, they're all the same in a way. Right. And here what was so exciting for us is that these computational and fabrication technologies enable the silkworm to sort of hop from the branch in ecology of worms. To the branch in ecology of maybe human like intelligence, where they could connect and communicate by virtue of feeling or rubbing against each other in an area that was hotter or colder. So the product that we got at the end, the variation of density of fiber and the distribution of the fiber and the transparency, the product at the end seems like it was produced by a swarm silk community, but of course it wasn't. It's a bunch of biological agents working together to assemble this thing. That's really, really fascinating to us. How can technology augment or enable a swarm like behavior in creatures that have not been designed to work as swarms?

So how do you construct a computational template from which a certain kind of thing emerges? So how can you predict what emerges?

I suppose so if you can predict it, it doesn't count as emergence. Actually.

That'S a deeply poetic line we can talk about. I mean, it's a bit like exaggerated.

Doesn't count as.

Right, right.

Speaking of emergence, an empowerment, because we're constantly moving between those as if they're equals on the team. And one of them, Christophe, shared with me a mathematical equation for what does it mean to empower nature and what does empowerment in nature look like? And that relates to emergence. And we can go back to emergence in a few moments. But I want to speak, I want to say it so that I know that I've learned it, and if I've learned it, I can use it later.

Yeah. And maybe you'll figure something out as you say it.

Also, of course, Christoph is the master here, but really we were thinking again, what does nature want? Nature wants to increase the information dimension and reduce entropy. What do we want? We kind of want the same thing. We want more, but we want order. Right. And this goes back to your conversation with Josha about stochastic versus deterministic languages or processes. His definition, or the definition he found was that an agent is empowered if the entropy of the distribution of all of its states, it's high, while the entropy of the distribution of a single state, given a choice, given an action, is low. Meaning it's that kind of duality between opportunity, like starting like this and going like this, opening and closing. And this really, I think, is analogous to human empowerment. Given infinite wide array of choices, what is the choice that you make to, you know, to enable, to empower, to provide you with the agency that you.

Need, and how much does that make in that choice? Actually control the trajectory of the system. That's really nice. So this applies to all the kinds of systems you're Talking about.

Yeah. And the cool thing is it can apply to a human on an individual basis, but. Or a silkworm or a bee or a microbe. A microbe that has agency or by virtue of a template, but it also applies to a community of organisms like the bees. And so we've done a lot of work sort of moving from. You've asked how to grow things. So we've grown things using cofabrication, where we're digitally fabricating with other organisms that live across the various kingdoms of life. And those were silkworms and bees, and with bees, which we've sent to outer space and returned healthily, and they were reproductive.

You're going to have to tell that story. You're going to have to talk about the robotic queen and the pheromones. Come on.

So we've built what we call a synthetic apiary. And the synthetic apiary was designed as an environment that was a perpetual spring environment for the bees of Massachusetts. They go on hibernation, of course, during the winter season, and then we lose 80% of them or more during that period. We're thinking, okay, what if we created this environment where before you template, right, before you can design with. You have to design for. You have to create this space of mutualism, space of sort of shared connection between you and the organism. And with bees, it started as the synthetic apiary. And we have proven that that curated environment where we design the space with high levels of control of temperature, humidity, and light, and we've proven that they were reproductive and alive. And we realized, wow, this environment that we created can help augment bees in the winter season in any city around the world where bees survive and thrive in the summer and spring seasons? And could this be a kind of a new urban typology, an architectural typology of symbiosis, of mutualism between organisms and humans? By the way, the synthetic apiary was in a co op in nearby Somerville. We had robots. Our team slept there every day with our tools and machines, and we made it happen. And the neighbors were very happy, and they got to get a ton of honey at the end of the winter. And those bees, of course, were released into the wild at the end of the winter, alive and kicking. So then, in order to actually experiment with the robotic queen and idea or concept, we had to prove, obviously, that we can create this space for bees. And then after that, we had this amazing opportunity to send the bees to space on Blue shepherd mission that is part of Blue Origin. And we, of course, said, yes, we'll take a slot. We said, okay, can we outdo NASA? So NASA in 1982 had an experiment where they sent bees to outer space. The bees returned, they were not reproductive, and, and some of them died. And we thought, well, is there a way in which we can create a life support system almost like a small mini biolab of a queen and her retinue that would be sent in this blue origin new shepherd mission in this one cell? And so that if the synthetic apiary was an architectural project, in this case, this second synthetic apiary was a product, it was right. So from an architectural controlled environment to a product scale control environment. And this bio lab, this life support system for bees, was designed to provide the bees with all the conditions that they needed. And we looked at that time at the NASA no pheromone that the queen uses to guide the other bees. And we looked at pheromones that are associated with a bee and thinking of those pheromones being released inside the capsules that go, the capsule that goes to outer space, they returned back to the media lab roof, and those bees were alive and kicking and reproductive. And they continued to create comb. And it ended with a beautiful nature paper that the team and I published together. We gave them gold nanoparticles and silver nanoparticles because we were interested if bees recycle wax. It was known forever that bees do not recycle the wax. And by feeding them these gold nanoparticles, we were able to prove that the bees actually do recycle the wax. The reason I'm bringing this forward is because we don't view ourselves as designers of consumable products and architectural environments only. But we love that moment where these technologies. And by the way, every one of these projects that we created involved the creation of a new technology, whether it be a glass printer or the spinning robot or the life support system for the bee colony. They all involved a technology that was associated with the project. And I never, ever, ever, ever want to let that part go because I love, love technology so much. But also another element of this is that always these projects, if they're great, they reveal new knowledge about or new science about the topic that you're investigating, be it, you know, silkworms or, or bees or glass. That's why I say, I always tell my team it should be at MoMA and the COVID of nature or science at the same time. Don't separate between the art and the science. It's, it's, it's, it's one of the.

Same so as you're creating the art, you're going to learn something about these organisms or something about these materials. I mean, is there something that stands out to you about these hero organisms like bees, silkworms? You mentioned E. Coli has its pros and cons as bacteria. What have you learned that small or big that's interesting about these organisms?

Yeah, that's a beautiful question. What have I learned? I've learned that, you know, we also worked with shrimp shells with Agoha. We built this tower on the roof of sfmoma, which by a couple of months ago, until it was on the roof, we've shown the structure completely biodegrade into then. Well, not completely, but almost completely biodegrade to the soil. And this notion that a product or part an organism or part of that organism can reincarnate is very, very moving thought to me because I want to believe that I believe in reincarnation.

I want to believe that I believe.

Yeah, that's my relationship with God. I like to believe in believing most great things in life are second derivatives of things. But that's part of another conversation.

I feel like that's a quote that's going to take weeks to really internalize.

That notion of I want you to want or I need you to need, or that there's always something, a deeper truth behind what is on the surface. And so I like to go to the second and tertiary derivative of things and discover new truths about them through that. But what have I learned about organisms?

And why don't you like E. Coli?

I like E. Coli. And a lot of the work that we've done was not possible without our working on E. Coli or other workhorse organisms like cyanobacteria.

How are bacteria used?

Death masks. The death masks.

So what are death masks?

So we did this project called Vespers, and those were basically death masks that was set as a process for designing a living product. What happens? And we looked at. I looked at. I remember looking at Beethoven's death mask and Agamemnon's death mask and just studying how they were created. And really they were sort of geometrically attuned to the face of the dead. And what we wanted to do is create a death mask that was not based on the shape of the wearer, but rather was based on their legacy and their biology. And maybe we could harness a few stem cells there for future generations or contain the last breath. Lazarus, which preceded Vespers, was a project where we designed a mask to contain a single breath, the last breath of the wear and again, if I had access to these technologies today, I would totally reincorporate my grandmother's last breath in a product. So it was like an air memento. So with Vespers, we actually used E. Coli to, to create pigmented masks. Masks whose pigments would be recreated at the surface of the mask. And I'm skipping over a lot of content, but basically there were 15 masks and they were created as three sets. The masks of the past, the mask of the present, and the mask of the future. The masks, there were five, five and five. And the masks of the past were based on ornaments and they were embedded with natural minerals. Like gold. Yes, yes, yes.

And we're looking at pictures of these and they're gorgeous.

Yes.

Extremely delicate and interesting fractal patterns that are symmetrical.

They look symmetrical, but they're not. This is intent. This is. We intended for you to be tricked and think that they're all symmetrical, but there's imperfections. There are imperfections by design. All of these forms and shapes and distribution of matter that you're looking at was entirely designed using a computational program. So none of it is manual. But long story short, the first collection is about the surface of the mask. And the second collection which you're looking at is about the volume of the mask and. And what happens to the mask when all the colors from the surface. Yes. Enter the volume of the mask inside, create pockets and channels to guide life through them. They were incorporated with pigment producing living organisms. And then those organisms were templated to recreate the patterns of the original death masks. And so life recycles and re begins and so on and so forth. The past meets the future. The future meets the past. From the surface to the volume. From death. To life. To death. To life. To death. To life. And that again is a recurring theme in the projects that we take on. But there, from a technological perspective, what was interesting is that we embedded chemical signals in the jet in the printer and those chemical signals basically interacted with the pigment producing bacteria, in this case E. Coli, that were introduced on the surface of the mask. And those interactions between the chemical signals inside the resins and the bacteria at the surface of the mask, at the resolution that is native to the printer, in this case 20 microns per voxel, allowed us to compute the exact patterns that we wanted to achieve. And we thought, well, if we can do this with pigments, can we do this with antibiotics? If we can do this with antibiotics, could we do it with melanin? And what are the implications? Again, this is a Platform technology. Now that we have it, what are the actual real world implications and potential applications for this technology? And we started a new area. One of my students, Rachel, her PhD thesis was titled after this new class of materials that we created through this project, Vespers hybrid living materials, HLMs. And these hybrid living materials really paved the way towards a whole other set of products that we've designed. Like the work that we did with melanin for the Mandela Pavilion that we presented at sfmoma where again, we're using the same principles of templating, in this case not silkworms and not bees, but we're templating bacteria at a much, much, much more finer resolution. And now instead of templating using a robot, we're templating using a printer. But compute is very, very much part of it. And what's nice about bacteria, of course, is that from an ethical perspective, I think there's a range. Right. So at the end of the silk pavilion, I got an email from professor in Japan who has been working on transgenic silk and said, well, if you did this, this create amazing silk pavilion, why don't we create, you know, glow in the light silk dresses? And in order to create this glow in the light silk, we need to, you know, to apply genes that are taken from a spider to a silkworm. And this is what is known as a transgenic operation. And we said no. And that was for us a clear decision that no, we will work with these organisms as long as we know that what we are doing with them is not only better for humans, but it's also better for them. And again, just to remind you where I forget the exact number, but it's around 1000 cocoons per single shirt that are exterminated in India and China in those sericulture industries that are being abused now. Yes, this organism was designed to serve the human species and maybe we should, maybe it's time to retire that conception of organisms that are designed for a human centric world or human centric set of applications. I don't feel the same way about E. Coli. Not that I'm agnostic organism agnostic, but. But still, I believe there's so much for us to do on this planet with, with, with bacteria.

And so in general, your design principle is to grow cool stuff as a byproduct of the organism flourishing. So not.

Yes, not using the organism, the win win the synergy. A whole that's bigger than the sum of its parts.

It's interesting. I mean it's, it Just feels like a gray area where genetic modification of an organism. It just feels like, I don't know if you, if you genetically modified me to make me glow in the light kind of. Kind of like that.

I think you have enough of an aura.

All right, thank you. That was. I was just fishing for compliments. Thank you. I appreciate it.

So. Absolutely right. And by the way, the gray area is, you know, is where some of us like to live and like to thrive, and that's okay. And thank goodness that there's so many of us that, that like the black and white and that thrive in the black and white. My husband is a good example for that.

Well, but just to clarify, in this case, you are also trying to thrive in the black and white in that you're saying, like, the silkworm is a beautiful, wonderful creature. Let us not modify it. Is that the idea? Or is it okay to modify a little bit as long as we can see that it benefits the organism as well as the final creation?

So with silkworms, absolutely. Let's not modify it genetically. Let's not modify it genetically and then some. Because why did we. Why did we get there to begin with, 4,000 years ago in the Silk Road? And we should never get to a point where we evolve life for the service of mankind at the risk of these wonderful creatures across the kingdoms, across the kingdom of life. I don't think about the same kind of ethical range when I think about bacteria.

Nevertheless, bacteria are pretty wonderful organisms.

I'm moving to my second cup here.

Take two. Things are getting serious now.

Bacteria are. Yeah, for sure.

Let's give bacteria all the love they deserve. We wouldn't be here without them. They were here for. I don't know what it is like a billion years before anything else should happen.

But in a way, if you think about it, they create the matter that we consume and then reincarnates or dissolves into the soil and then creates a tree, and then that tree creates more bacteria and then that bacteria. I mean, again, that's why I like to think about not recycling, but reincarnating, because that assumes a kind of imparting upon nature, that dimension of agency and. And maybe awareness. But yeah, lots of really interesting work happening with bacteria. Directed evolution is one of them. We're looking at directed evolution. So high throughput, directed evolution of bacteria for the production of products. And again, those products can be a shoe, wearables, biomaterials, therapeutics, and doing that direction computationally. Totally computationally. Obviously, in the lab with the hero organism the hero bacteria. And what's happening today in ecomicrobial synthetic biology. Synthetic biology that lends itself to ecology. And again, all of these fields are coming together. It's such a wonderful time to be a designer. I can't think of a better time to be a designer in this world, but with high throughput directed evolution. And I should say that the physical space in our new lab will have these capsules which we have designed. They are designed like growth chambers or grow rooms. And in those grow rooms we can basically program top down environmental templating, top down environmental control of lights, humidity, light, etc. Light, humidity and temperature, while doing bottom up genetic regulation. So it is a wet lab, but in that wet lab you could do at the same time genetic modulation regulation and environmental templating. And then again, the idea is that in one of those capsules maybe we grow transparent wood. And in another capsule we transparent wood for architectural application. Another capsule we grow a shoe. And in another capsule we look at that language, large language model that we talked, and there is a particular technology associated with that, which we're hoping to reveal to the world in February. And each of those capsules is basically a high throughput computational environment, like a breadboard that has, think of sort of a physical breadboard environment that has access to oxygen and nitrogen and CO2 and nutritional dispensing. And these little capsules could be stressed. They're sort of a an ecology in a box. And they could be stressed to produce the food of the future, or the products of the future, or the construction materials of the future. Food is a very interesting one, obviously because of food insecurity and the issues that we have around, both in terms of food insecurity, but also in terms of the future of food and what will remain after we can't eat plants and animals anymore and all we can eat is these false bananas and insects as our protein source. So there we're thinking, can we design these capsules to stress an environment and see how that environment behaves? Think about an ecological, a biodiversity chamber, a kind of a time capsule that is designed as a biodiversity chamber where you can program the exact temperature, humidity and light combination to emulate the environment from the past. So, Ohio 1981, December 31st, at 5:00am in the morning, what did tomatoes taste like to all the way in the future 200 years ago? These are the environmental inputs. These are some genetic regulations that I'm testing. And what might the food of the future, or the products of the future, or the construction materials of the future feel like, test like, behave like, et cetera. And so these capsules are designed as part of a lab. That's why it's been taking us such a long time to get to this point, because we started designing them in 2019 and they're currently literally, as I speak to you, under construction.

How well is it understood how to do this dance of controlling these different variables in order for various kinds of growth to happen?

It's not, it's never been done before. And these capsules have never been designed before. So when we first decided these are going to be environmental capsules, people thought were crazy. What are you building? What are you making? So the answer is that we don't know. But we know that there has never been a space like this where you have basically a wet lab and a grow room at that resolution, at that granularity of control over organisms. There is a reason why there is this incredible evolution of products in the software space, the hardware space. That's a more limiting space that because of the physical infrastructure that we have to test and experiment with things. So we really wanted to push on creating a wet lab that is novel in every possible way. What could you create in it? You could create the future. You could create an environment of plants talking to each other with a robotic referee and the robotic referee and you could set an objective function and let's say for the transaction driven individuals in the world, let's say the objective function is carbon sequestration. And all of those plants are implemented with a gaming engine and they have this reward system and they're constantly needing to optimize the way in which they carbon sequest. We weed out the bad guys, we leave the good guys and we end up with this ideal ecology of carbon sequestering heroes that connect and communicate with each other. And once we have that model, this biodiversity chamber, we send it out into the field and we see what happens in nature. And that's sort of what I'm talking about. Augmenting plants with that extra dimension of bandwidth that they do not have. Just last week I came across a paper that discusses the in vivo neurons that are augmented with a Pong game and in a dish, they basically present sentience and the beginning of awareness, which is wonderful. Like that you could actually take these neurons from a mouse brain and you have the electrical circuits and the physiological circuits that enable these cells to, to connect and communicate and together arrive at sort of swarm situation that allows them to act as a system that is not only perceived to be sentient but is actually sentient. Michael Levine calls this agential material, material that has agency. Right. So this is of interest to us because this is sort of, again, this is emergence post templating. You template until you don't need to template anymore because. Because the system has its own rules, right? What we don't want to happen with AGI, we want to happen with synthetic biology. What we don't want to happen online and software with language, we want for it to happen with bio based materials because that will get us closer to growing things as opposed to assembly and mechanically putting them together with toxic materials and compounds.

If I can ask a pothead question for a second. So you mentioned just like the silkworms, the individualist silkworms got to actually learn how to collaborate or actually to collaborate in a swarm like way. You're talking about getting plants to communicate in some interesting way based on an objective function. Is it possible to have some kind of interface between another kind of organisms, humans and nature? So like a human to have a.

Conversation with, with a plant, the already is. You know that when we cut freshly cut grass, I love the smell, but it's a smell of actually, it's a smell of distress that the leaves of grass are communicating to each other. So the grass, when it's cut, emits green leaf volatiles, GLVs. And those GLVs are basically one leaf of grass communicating to another leaf of grass. Be careful, mind you, you're about to be cut. These incredible life forms are communicating using a different language than ours. We use language models, they use molecular models. At the moment, where we can decode these molecular moments is when we can start having a conversation with plants. Now, of course, there is a lot of work around plant neurobiology. It's a real thing. Plants do not have nervous system, but they have something akin to a nervous system. It has a kind of ecological intelligence that is focused on a particular timescale. And the timescale is very, very slow, slow, slow, slow timescale. So it is when we can melt these timescales and connect with these plants in terms of the content of the language, in this case molecules, the duration of the language, and we can start having a conversation, if not simply to understand what is happening in the plant kingdom. Precision agriculture, I promise to you, will look very, very different, right? Because right now we're using drones to take photos of crops of corn that look bad. And when we take that photo, it's already too late. But if we understand these molecular footprints and things that they are trying to say, the stress that they are trying to communicate, then we could of course, predict the physiological biological behavior of these crops, both for their own self perpetuation, but also for the foods and the pharma and the type of molecules that we're seeking to grow for the benefit of humanity. And so these languages that we are attempting now to quantify and qualify will really help us not only better nature and help nature in its striving to surviving, but also help us, you know, design better wines and, you know, and better foods and better medicine and better products. Again, across all scales, across all application domains.

Is there intricacies to understanding the time scales like you mentioned, at which these communications, these languages like operate? Is there something different between the way humans communicate and the way planets communicate in terms of time?

Remember when we started the conversation talking about sort of definitions in the context of design and then in the context of being? That question requires, I think, a kind of a shift, a humility that requires a kind of a humility towards nature, understanding that it operates on different scales. We recently discovered that the molecular footprint of a rose or of a plant in general during nighttime is different than its molecular footprint footprint during daytime. So these are circadian rhythms that are associated with what kind of molecules these plants emit, given stresses and given, you know, there's a reason why the jasmine, a jasmine field smells so, so delicious and 4am in the morning and there's peace and rest amongst, you know, amongst the plants. And you have to sort of tune into that time dimension of the plant kingdom. And that of course requires all this humility where in a single capsule to design a biodiversity chamber, it will take years, not months and definitely not days and to see these products. And also that humility in design comes from simply, you know, looking at how we are today as a civilization, how we use and abuse nature. Like, just think of all these Christmas trees, right? These Christmas trees, they take years to grow. We use them for one night, the holiest night of the year, and then we let them go and think about in nature, to design a quote, unquote product, an organism spends energy and time and thoughtfulness and many, many, many years. And I'm thinking about the redwoods to grow these channels, these, you know, the cellulose layers and channels and reach these incredible heights takes sometimes hundreds of years, sometimes thousands of years. Am I afraid of building a company that designs products in the scale of thousands of years? No, I'm not. And the way of being in the physical world today is really not in tune with the time dimension of the natural world at all. And that needs to change. And that's obviously very, very hard to do in a community of human beings that is, at least in the Western world that is based on capitalism. And so here, the wonderful challenge that we have ahead of us is how do we impart upon the capitalist movement. We know that we need to produce now products that will enter the real world and be shared and used by others and still benefit the natural world while benefiting humans. And that's a wonderful challenge to have.

So integrate technology with nature. And that's a really difficult problem. I see perilous here with another company of Neuralink, which is, is basically like, I think you mentioned, Neuralink for nature, that there are short term products you can come up with, but it's ultimately a long term challenge of how do you integrate the machine with this creation of nature, this intricate, complex creation of nature which is the human brain. And then you're speaking more generally nature.

You know how every company has an image like this, one single image that embodies the spirit of the company. And I think for Neuralink, it was to me that chimpanzee playing a video game. It was just unbelievable. But with plants, there potentially is a set of molecules that impacts or inspires, I like that word, the plant to behave or act in a certain way and allows still the plan, the possibility of deciding where it or she or he wants to go. Which is why our first product for this molecular space is going to be a functionalized fragrance. So here we're thinking about the future of fragrances and the future of fragrances and flavors. These products are in the industry as we know it today, are designed for totally for a human centric use and enjoyment and indulgence and luxury. They're used on the body for the sake of dunno, attraction and feeling good and smelling good. And we were asking ourselves, is there a world in which a fragrance can be not a functional fragrance? Because you could claim that all fragrances are functional, but is there a world in which the fragrance becomes functionalized, is again imparted upon or given agency to connect with another organism? Is there a world in which you and I can go down to your garden and use a perfume that will interact with the rose garden downstairs? I've just been enamored with the statements that are being made in the media around, oh, this is completely biologically derived fragrance and it's bio based and. But when you look into the fragrance and you understand that in order to get to this bioderived fragrance, fragrance. You went through, you blew through, you know, 10,000, 10,000 bushes of rose to create 5 milliliters of a rose fragrance. And all these 10,000 bushes of rose, they take space, they take water management and so much waste. Is this really what we want the future of our agriculture and molecular goods to look like? And so when we did the Aguajoca pavilion on the roof of Asif Moma, we calculated that for that pavilion we had 40,000 calories embedded into this pavilion that was made of shrimp shells and chitosan and apple skins and cellulose from tree pulp. And we calculated that overall the structure had 40,000 calories. Interesting way to think about a structure, right, from the point of view of calories. But as you left the gallery, you saw these three clocks that were so beautifully designed by Felix on our team. And these clocks measured temperature and humidity. And we connected them to a weather channel so that we could directly look at how the pavilion was biodegrading in real time. And, and in our calculations, I say this long winded description of the pavilion to say that in the calculation, we incorporated, you know, how much electricity we used for our computers for the 3D printers that printed the pavilion. And you know, and these were called energy calculations. Right? Energy and materials. And when you think about a product and you think about, you know, a shoe or a chair or a perfume or a building, you don't stop at the object. You want to go all the way to the system. Again, instead of designing objects or singular embodiments of the will of the designer, you're really tapping into an entire system that is interconnected. And if you look at the energy budget that characterized the project Iguoja, it traverses the entire planet. Right. Some of these shrimp shells were brought from places in the world we haven't thought of in terms of the apples and the shrimp shells and the tree pops. And so going back to fragrances, it's really, really important to understand the product in the context of the ecological system from which it's sourced and how it's designed. And that is the kind of thinking that is not only desired, but is required if we are to achieve synergy between humanity and nature.

And it's interesting because the system level thinking is almost always going to take you to the entire Earth, to considering the entire Earth ecosystem, which is why.

It'S important to have a left brain and a right brain competing for attention and intimacy. Yes.

You mentioned a fragrance that kind of sends out a message to the.

Environment, essentially a message In a bottle.

Yeah, a message in a bottle. So, like, so you can go to a rose garden and trick the rose garden to think it's 4am essentially you.

Could if you wanted to. But maybe that is not trick.

Trick is such a bad word, right? Inspire.

But inspire I like. I like the idea of providing nature with a choice, which is why I love that elegant mathematical equation of empowerment and agency.

Empower the rose garden to create a romantic moment for the wearer of the fragrance.

But now, again, you're. You're again all of this to go back to, back to that human centric notion of romance. But maybe there's another way to do romance, right, that we haven't yet, you know, that we haven't yet explored. And maybe there's a way to tap into what happens to the rose when it's dreaming. Assuming that plants are sentient and assuming that we can tap into that sentience, what can we discover about what does the rose want? Like, what does it actually want and what does it need? And what are the roses dreams?

But do you think there's some correlation in terms of romance, in terms of the word you sometimes use, magic? Is there some similarities in what humans want and what roses want and what nature wants?

I think so. I think there is. And if I did not think so, oh, my goodness, this would not be a nice world to live in. I think we all want love. I recently read this beautiful letter that was written by Einstein to his daughter and was discovered. Einstein asked his daughter to wait 20 years until she reveals these letters. And so she did. It's just one of the most beautiful letters I've ever read from a father to his daughter. And the letter overall is imbued with a kind of a sense of remorse or maybe even feelings of sadness. And there is some kind of melancholy note in the letter where Einstein regrets not having spent enough time with his daughter, having focused on the theory of general relativity and changing the world. And then he goes on to talk about this beautiful and elegant equation of E equals MC square. And he tells his daughter that he believes that love is actually the force that shapes the universe because it is like gravity, right? It attracts people, it is like light. It brings people together and connects between people, and it's all empowering. And so if you multiply it by the speed of light, you could really change the world for the better. And I, I call me a romanticist. I know you are too, which is why I so love being here. I believe in this. I totally and utterly believe in love.

By the way, let me just excerpt from Einstein's letter. There's an extremely powerful force that so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others and is even behind any phenomena operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us. This universal force is love. He also the last paragraph in the letter. As you've mentioned, I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life. Maybe it's too late to apologize, but as time is relative that jokes to Einstein, I need to tell you that I love you. And thanks to you, I've reached the ultimate answer. Your father, Albert Einstein. Yeah, but that regret. I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart. Maybe that's a universal regret, filling your days with busyness and silly pursuits and not sitting down and expressing that.

But it is everything. It is everything. It is why I love that expression. And I forget who said this, but I love my daughter more than evolution required. Right. And I feel the same way towards my other half. And I feel that when you find that connection, everything and anything is possible. And it's a very, very, very magical. A magical moment. So I believe in love, and I believe in the one.

It might be the same thing, it might be a different thing. But let me ask you a ridiculously big philosophical question about beauty. Dostoevsky said, beauty will save the world in the Idiot, one of my favorite books of his. What is beauty to you? You've created. Through this intersection of engineering and nature, you have created some incredibly beautiful things. What do you think is beauty?

That's a beautiful question.

Maybe it is connected to the love question.

It is connected to the love question. Of course. Everything is connected to the love question. To me, beauty is agency. To me, something that has agency, it is beautiful. There is this special quote from Buckminster Fuller, which I cannot remember word for word, but I remember the concept which goes something like this. When I work on a problem, I never think about beauty. But when I'm done solving the problem and I look at what I've created, and it's not beautiful, I know that I was wrong. Okay.

Yeah.

He's kind of an agency that speaks to the objective function of the creation. Right. Whether for Bucky, it's useless or useful.

So this idea of empowerment that you talked about is fundamentally connected to.

It comes back to that. Yeah.

What's the difference? That you.