Austen Heinz, founder of Cambrian Genomics, describes DNA laser printing that makes synthesizing DNA as cheap as reading it. His Glowing Plant project sold over a million dollars in seeds engineered with bioluminescent genes. He envisions a future where anyone designs living products using visual software, then prints and grows them.
Chapters
Let's get a show of hands. Who knows about DNA sequencing and how much it now costs to sequence a human genome? Anyone know? $1,000. $1,000. But last week, JP Morgan conference, Illumina announced the world's first $1,000 genome. We can read all you guys in the audience here for just $1,000. That's pretty cool because pretty much everyone is going to be sequenced at birth. We're going to know your genetic information, what diseases you're likely to get, and eventually, in the long term though, we wanna do something about it, right? Reading our code is a passive thing. I'm about to teach you an active thing, how to go from code that you read in nature to actually writing code and making things. So, Who knows about 3D printing? Everybody? Okay. MakerBot. You can make all sorts of interesting plastic things, anything that you want, any idea that you have in your head, you can make it into a tangible, physical reality by pressing a button. That's cool. But what about, you know, all these trees on the street? What about everybody here? What about the plants outside? What about every living thing on the creature? If we want to make that, how can we make it? That's what this talk is about. How can we go from an idea, an inspiration, to a physical, real, living product, right? So I invented a technology as a graduate student in electrical engineering called DNA laser printing. It's a means of making DNA for the same cost as reading DNA. The end of this talk— I don't know how much time I have. Anybody want to tell me? An hour. An hour? Wow, okay. I'm going to give you some technical details about how it works and show you some videos of the machines as they're running. So I'll give you a tour of my factory in San Francisco. But first, I want to get you excited about the applications of DNA laser printing and the access to free or nearly free biological bits. When I show you bits here, or, you know, the transistors that hold the bits, you know, in an iPhone, probably not a lot of people get excited about the idea of transistors. Who gets psyched about transistors? A couple people. Who gets excited about Uber and the other apps that are running on their phone? Probably pretty much everyone, because everybody loves the apps, what you can do with the technology, not necessarily the, the details of how, how that technology works. What I'm going to show you today is that you don't need to have a PhD in biology to be a genetic programmer, to code life. I'll show you how to use basic, simple visual tools to take pure imagination and make it real, how we've already done that before. So I want to introduce you to an idea I came up with called Creature Creator. Creature Creator is the idea that anyone in the world can become a biological engineering program life. So if you want to do it, how do you do it, and what's the paradigm for doing it? Well, have an idea, be creative. That's the most difficult thing because most people aren't. Have something that you want. So recently we started a new company called Glowing Plant. I invested about $10,000 in it. We shot a video, did a little underground marketing campaign. We did half a million dollars in 6 weeks from a simple video. We've done over a million dollars already in sales. This is just imagination and then making money and then using that money to make it real. So when you want to make a new creature, have the idea, Use software to find DNA, maybe in nature, manipulate it, change it, come up with several possibilities, print them all out, put them into something similar to the creature you want to create, express them, transform them, and then do it again. And do it again. So this was the glowing plant. Did anyone buy one? You can still buy it now, $40 for seeds, $150 for glowing roses. Glowingplant.com. Glowingplant.com, right? So I wish I— maybe I'll show you the video at the end of this, but it's a pretty powerful thing. I think me and my Israeli friend Omri were walking around, and we just were walking down the street. One day, and we said, wow, like, look at all these trees there. Look at— and, you know, look at this wall of ivy, the massive amount of surface area occupied by these plants. And then look at all these big, you know, wasteful street lamps, right? There's so much energy density in these living things, way more than in batteries, that we should harness that energy captured from the sun. and turn that into something useful. And of course, we've all seen the movie Avatar and seen how cool that is, right? So plants have been around a long time. Life itself has been around on this planet for about 3 billion years, right? But plants have never glowed in all those billions of years, right? We fixed that. This is the world's first glowing plant. How does it glow? Well, it runs this piece of software here. This is— I don't know, maybe this language is difficult for you to read, but it actually isn't. I'm going to break it down for you. So these are genes. These genes, this luxA, luxB, those are 2 proteins. Those— they're in a protein, which is what all life is. Are nanomachines. So little nanorobots that go about completing tasks. We've got, you know, 25,000 or so genes, and so we have tens of thousands of these little nanomachines running inside of us as a coordinated symphony, doing very complicated but very interesting things. So I'll tell you about this— these particular nanomachines. So LuxA, LuxB, these 2 little nanomachines, they link up. They basically form like a, I don't know, like a crab claw type device like this. Cuts like this, like a, and runs, you know, like that. This LuxC, LuxD, LuxE forms a chemical. So LuxA, LuxB form what's called luciferase, which is the enzyme that does this clippy action. Lux C, Lux D, Lux E produce a small molecule called luciferin. So that's why people call this the devil plant, at least the environmental people. So by clipping, by the luciferase clipping the luciferin, you're able to get light emission. The particular pathway that we're using here is from an organism called Vibrio fischeri, which is a marine bacterium. There's dinoflagellates as well in the ocean. And maybe you've seen some recent photos on the internet, but if you put your hand in the water, you stir it up, sometimes you can see the luminescence, right? Those are where these genes came from. Also, fireflies glow very brightly, right? And we're also looking at taking those genes and also expressing them. But this right here is just Vibrio fischeri running this plasmid. And you can see this is a very— I don't know if you can actually see, but this is basically a weed called Vibrio— sorry, called Arabidopsis. And it's small, but you can imagine, well, what if it was a giant vine covering a wall, or what if it was a tree? What if it was a massive redwood tree? What if we had a redwood forest of trees hundreds and hundreds of feet high glowing so that we could see it from space? That would be cool. What's really awesome about life in general is that it's so modular. You can take things from one creature and paste them into another, and with a slight change, maybe in what's called a promoter, or the sequence of DNA prior to the gene, you can get it to run. So without much modification, you can move things from one creature to another. Entire fields of biology have been created by doing that. And so if you look at Genentech, or the whole biotechnology industry grew out of a 300-letter sequence. So human insulin cut and pasted from a human into a bacterium to make insulin, right? That, that grew the whole biotechnology industry. Optogenetics recently was a single gene from an algae put into human brain cells. Everything in biology to date has been lucky and basically a joke. Everything has been find one thing, cut it out, paste it in, hope it works. And it usually always does because life is so similar. In the future, what's amazing is that we are no longer going to be limited by the existing biological bricks, our genes, in nature. We're going to be able to create completely new functionality from an imagination of a new capability that we want to using computational tools to be able to get it. So in the case of DNA, say using DNA nanostructures, you'd use CADnano RNA, a program called Eterna. In the case of protein, there is Rosetta, which is a protein folding technology that maybe many of you have used, Folding@home. Anyone run that in the background on their computer to compute protein folding? A few of you. There's also a gamified version of that now called Foldit. So Foldit is a game, and some of the best players in the world— I think the number one player in the world is a nurse, like a 45-year-old nurse in the UK. The second best is like a 14-year-old kid in North Carolina. So they're publishing papers in Nature, doing huge things, having absolutely zero scientific background, playing a game of moving shapes around and getting points. That's where the future is.
