111. Space Genes and Subway Scenes: Chris Mason on Planning Life’s Next Big Leap

[00:00:00] Chris: just explore, there's a fun aspect of getting on a liveaboard and doing scuba diving and going to vents and finding weird organisms.

[00:00:07] Chris: we can never understate The importance of excitement about science and also the hope that it endears to people to understand, Oh, the future will be brighter than the past.

[00:00:18] Erum: Hey, Carl, how's it going?

[00:00:20] Karl: I'm doing great Iram. How about you?

[00:00:22] Erum: Oh my gosh. I am happy to be back. New year, new me. How about you? Are you excited for 2025?

[00:00:30] Karl: I mean, aren't you glad to be back in your beautiful glorious normal life? Kids are back your kid. My kids are still here, but they're going to be back in school soon Your relatives have gone home or your home. Maybe you put away your decorations You emptied your closet And now you don't have to pretend to know the names of all the strangers that showed up at your family's house I know i'm happy to be back in the game

[00:00:54] Erum: Wow. Carl. Yeah.

[00:00:56] Erum: the holidays can be very stressful and we value our routines, It keeps us in a nice flow state, but, when the holidays and you have to be on all the time and Always doing something although half of us have been sick and we just couldn't do anything But it can be stressful.

[00:01:11] Erum: So, welcome back to the routine. Welcome back to the grind Here we are 2025

[00:01:17] Karl: So we're recording on january 7th And as is tradition the second week of january is the week of the jp morgan healthcare conference Which takes place every year? In San Francisco. So we're already seeing lots of announcements about biopharma developments. and a lot of people who we know are on their way to San Francisco.

[00:01:37] Karl: I've been a couple of times I've gone not to the conference itself, but to, satellite events because there's like four or five satellite events. And, I've met some of the people who've been on this podcast at some of those events. So, for example, John Cumbers has had events. People from Ginkgo Bioworks participated in those events.

[00:01:55] Karl: I met Christina Smolke from Anthea for the first time at one of those events. And our friend Jonathan Hasburg, Brian Korb, and the folks at Aster are going out there. So, quick shout out to them. I'm really looking forward to, hearing, of the developments. And actually, I should just say our friends, Sabria and I think Shelby Newsatt are also going out there.

[00:02:16] Karl: Julie Wolf probably too. So a lot of people we know are on their way to San Francisco.

[00:02:21] Erum: Yeah, all of ipharm are descending To the bay area

[00:02:24] Karl: Yeah.

[00:02:25] Erum: just going to be mingling and pitching and sharing the latest, hopefully listening and making connections that hopefully turn into great opportunities in biopharma, new drugs, new therapies. so everyone, you're going to be there, enjoy, have a good time and let us know any insights that you might find.

[00:02:43] Erum: it'd be great to hear what's going on. No, I'll be keeping my eyes on LinkedIn and. Maybe Twitter. I don't know, depending on who's on there. and hopefully people will be, sharing their experience at JP Morgan online and we can check it out like we're there.

[00:02:58] Karl: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's going to feel like we're there. the madness already starts, really this week. if you're doing any news, people have been out there pitching their, reporters on their news under embargo. The idea is always to have your news out before JP Morgan, because then it gives you something to talk about when you're there.

[00:03:17] Karl: So what that means is healthcare, biotech. Biopharma companies, CEOs go out to JP Morgan to mingle with investors, I was lucky enough to sit in on a call about decentralized science yesterday, which it's also investing in biopharma, but a different way of investing, not just in biopharma, but in science technology developments through the blockchain, something that we've talked a fair amount On this podcast, and we continue to have a great interest in it.

[00:03:44] Karl: We've talked to a number of DCI companies. Valley Dow was on here early on. We talked to Athena Dow. We've talked to Michael Fisher of New York DCI. what's interesting is all those companies that have. Decide tokens are doing very positively and the people who run the big crypto exchanges are very vocally supporting decentralized science, projects, it really bodes well for them.

[00:04:06] Karl: The call I was on yesterday was about the bio token, which is a Solana. Blockchain based token for funding new research. And I'm under the impression that was the guys behind it or the people behind molecule, which is one of the first really big, D side tokens. But here's the crazy thing about this.

[00:04:23] Karl: I don't want to dominate this conversation. Conversation Iran, but here's the crazy thing they're talking about. They're talking about developing agents, meaning these independent programs that you can ask a question to, and you would have an agent that could design with AI, a drug compound, and then work with other agents to de risk that compound and potentially get it tested.

[00:04:44] Karl: In vivo, meaning in animals, so we're really talking about a completely different way about doing drug development. If you're able to just ask an agent to connect with an A. I drug discovery company, of which there are many to design a compound for a very specific target that then you test. first, let's say digitally, and then are able to test in vivo, say in mouse models or something before you take it into full clinical trials.

[00:05:10] Karl: It seems Pretty crazy to me. What do you think?

[00:05:13] Erum: Yeah. it's very interesting cause I was just on a call with a few people that, you know, very well. and, they had one of their partners who's really into this space, join the call to share news of, BioDAO, which is a science DAO and also the bio token, which is the molecule DAO.

[00:05:30] Erum: And I think went live or it's going live on Binance. and that a lot of DeSci started on Ethereum, but now Solana is the place to be. I think Solana accounts for over 50 percent of crypto activity, today. and I just found this out literally 10 minutes before you and I happened this call.

[00:05:46] Erum: there's a lot of serendipity happening. The fact that, mentioning this and I heard about it, just very recently. I also ,heard the differences, there's decentralized science, which a lot of what Michael Fisher had talked about when he was on our podcast, and I encourage everyone to go back to that episode and listen to Michael Fisher, but a lot of the decentralized science, the decentralized part of it is still financial, and not necessarily data attribution.

[00:06:09] Erum: but I'm not even enough to be dangerous. I'm just repeating what I heard, but the decentralized science, but then there's decentralized AI that can Go into these different research domains and come up with new insights, which I'm not sure how more advantageous that would be unless it is again the attribution part of, where the data, was generated.

[00:06:30] Erum: but. again, this is what we talked about in our previous predictions episode for 2025 is when all this technology that has been, coming to fruition. The past few years are now converging and how they will do that in ways that are beneficial and hopefully not harmful. but. It's exciting to see that there's actual monetary value coming out of the Deci projects, and I think BiProtocol being the largest one with their market capitalization in the billions, I believe.

[00:06:59] Karl: Wow. That's amazing. I didn't know their market cap was that big I know I looked at it yesterday. as I was listening to the call and people were very excited so I just want to mention last year 2024 our themes were biomanufacturing in industrial biotech, And I think, of course, by manufacturing will continue to be a theme.

[00:07:17] Karl: I think we've barely scratched the surface of that, and I'm really excited for some of the episodes that we've got scheduled right now around bio manufacturing. But what other themes are you excited about?

[00:07:28] Erum: Yeah, I mean, big theme. think we started to get into microbiome microbiome meaning a consortia of different microbes that work together to create some functionality. we're very familiar with the gut microbiome and its powers of digesting our food, influencing our mood. but there are microbiomes all over the world, all over different animals.

[00:07:49] Erum: in different environments that do different things and to be able to learn more about how scientists and companies and research institutes are learning about the benefits of microbiomes. I think that's going to be something that will likely be a theme.

[00:08:01] Erum: Based on, who we have on our podcast, we have some great people coming up and, even all the people that we've spoken to previously, they're starting to consider the value of a microbiome versus just one microbe doing all the work.

[00:08:13] Karl: Absolutely. and one thing that we've had as a, I guess, unofficial theme, but we talk a fair amount about is space and space biotech. And I just want to point out that there's actually a lot of space news expected this year. We've got two unmanned missions that are going to land on the moon.

[00:08:30] Karl: One's going to happen this month. Then there's two new space planes. I didn't know about this until I looked it up. One's called space writer. The other one's called dream chaser. And, I think that space biology is going to continue to advance, but I think that's the perfect segue into our guest today.

[00:08:45] Erum: Dr. Chris Mason Yeah, absolutely. How long have you known Chris?

[00:08:49] Karl: I've known Chris as long as you have.

[00:08:51] Erum: Oh, I thought I've known him for such a long time because Chris Mason, wow, what an incredible individual. I'm really excited for everyone to hear our conversation because this man has been working on very exciting projects, when it comes to, space genomics, when it comes to understanding microbiomes.

[00:09:08] Erum: So another hint towards that theme, as well as. how humans evolve and how their genomics, affect their well being, but the first time I actually met Chris was at Symbiobeta, and he was talking about, Moonwine, which we didn't talk about in this episode, but he was talking about some of the experiments that they were doing with NASA, and it's just phenomenal.

[00:09:30] Erum: when did you first meet him?

[00:09:32] Karl: I think you and I may be better at the same time. I think we had said we were going to get Chris on the podcast a long time ago. He was an early target because he's local to us in New York. He's in the symbiosis. space. He had some work with people from jet space. so I'm very excited to have Chris on and to have him talk about space, genomics, genetics, and biomes in general.

[00:09:52] Erum: Yeah, so Chris Mason is not only a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, but he's an advisor to many biotech companies. from, Tempest Labs,

[00:10:02] Erum: Tempus is Advancing Data Driven Precision Medicine, so Chris is on the board of that. He also is affiliated with Colossal Biosciences, he's been working with a lot of organizations that collect different microbes, which we'll talk about more, but, Again, he is a Brooklynite, he's one of our neighbors, and we're really excited for this interview with Chris Mason.

[00:10:22] Karl: awesome. Let's let Chris take it away.

[00:10:28] Erum: Chris Mason, we are so excited to have you on the Grow Everything podcast. Thanks for joining us today.

[00:10:34] Chris: pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm here from a hospital lobby at the moment. So never mind the background and the garb, but really a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

[00:10:41] Erum: Yes. Yeah. We've been wanting to have you on the podcast for a while. We've seen you speak at SynBioBeta. We've seen your work over time, and your work spans the depths of urban environments, with a very famous subway swab project that was featured in the New York Times, to the vastness of space with genomics.

[00:11:00] Erum: So we wanted to know what drives your curiosity to explore biology across such different frontiers?

[00:11:07] Chris: Yeah, happy to elaborate. Ever since I was a kid, I've really loved the fact a single cell, for example, an embryo, when I learned that all the instructions to make every cell in the human body is present in that first cell, that still then and still today fascinates me endlessly, is that is an extraordinary amount of information.

[00:11:24] Chris: And, roadmap of molecular biology and cell structures and tissues in our bodies and the seed of cognition and genesis of dreams is all in that first cell, which is amazing. and I was a kid, we didn't even have the book of life. They've got a code yet.

[00:11:37] Chris: Matt, we were just getting some of that together. And then by the time I was in college, we had the first. Human genome, we started to actually be able to do genomics, but we didn't actually still understand all the components of the genome. And so that I think was, really what drove me to become a geneticist.

[00:11:51] Chris: What I think is the exploration phase of genetics, akin to very much like what we had in the 1400s and 1500s of just exploring our planet, and we're still doing that for genetics. But I think the really exciting thing is eventually we get to the creation the artistic side of genetics.

[00:12:04] Chris: We could even make art and structures and new synthetic circuits and really build genomes as a palette for creation and not just a discovery landscape.

[00:12:13] Karl: Yeah, it's really just that thought is so amazing and continues to blow me away the amount of information that is contained within a cell and the fact that we've got trillions of cells and in our bodies making up our bodies and they somehow work together most of the time is one of those things that is very inspiring to me and I think to our audience So one of the things that you've done, is you did this twin study where you study these two astronauts that were twins the kelly brothers one did not go into space the other one did can you tell us about the study and We're some of the surprises that you observed. We've done a fair number of space episodes. Your room is a huge space fan. I want to keep my feet on the ground, but, I'm fascinated every time we talk about space, I learned something new.

[00:12:58] Chris: Yeah, so our lab was one of 10 teams. It was actually a large, interdisciplinary and really national project, effectively, because many labs around the country contributed, but we were selected by NASA as one of the 10 teams and got to lead a lot of the genetics and the genomics and also RNA biology, looking at what happens when genes go into space, what gets turned on, what gets turned off, how does the body react to space and being in space for a year, So we got blood draws during the flight in the middle of space, dropped in Kazakhstan and repatriated, brought back to the United States.

[00:13:27] Chris: So we get, stool microbiome profiles, we did blood work, we did skin, look at as many layers of biology as we could. To really just prepare for Mars, we knew the body could survive a year in space because the Russians had shown that, even decades ago, but we didn't have a real good understanding of exactly what happens.

[00:13:42] Chris: so,

[00:13:43] Chris: there was no molecular or cellular or in depth understanding of what happens to the body during the year in space. does everything return back to baseline or not? So a lot of these questions from a more modern medical perspective had never been answered or even asked. So we, Really put an armamentarium of tools, methods, sequencing techniques, looked at telomeres, looked at proteins, looked at cytokines across many teams.

[00:14:05] Chris: And we found some surprises, like telomeres got longer in space, which was unexpected. So if you see that, normally they shrink as you get older, but actually these caps at the end of your chromosomes that keep the structure of your DNA intact got longer in space, which again was the opposite of what we expected because we thought the stress on the body.

[00:14:20] Chris: Would make it if anything shorter, but like most things in biology, it's more of a complicated story. So the average got longer, but also we did see more short telomeres than before. We saw a lot of evidence of DNA damage from the radiation, and we could also see distress on the body. That's probably what's driving, stress and response radiation is driving the elongation.

[00:14:38] Chris: So that was one surprising work we did with Susan Bailey. We saw a lot of genes that were activated, thousands of genes, what we often call the fireworks in space, a lot of activity. To regulate the immune system to respond to DNA damage. And then we also, could see that these returned back to normal.

[00:14:52] Chris: When we got back to earth, about 93 percent of them were back to normal within about five months, but not everything went back to normal. So there's a big question about how much of the body, remains this echo of being in space and how long it takes to return to normal, which led us to do followup work with space X and blue origin and zero space and others in the subsequent years.

[00:15:10] Chris: And continuing to work on NASA astronauts, trying to see how they change genetically. epigenetically what's happening to their bodies. So, there's only been about 700 people that have been to space and about, know, third of them are Russian, so we don't have a lot of data on them. there's just not that much data.

[00:15:23] Chris: So, like any clinical trial. we start with very small numbers to get a sense of what a drug is doing or a stress in this case, and we will slowly expand to learn more and then eventually look at better countermeasures, look at other ways to help them survive in space and eventually someday on Mars and elsewhere.

[00:15:37] Erum: Yeah. That's incredible. as you know, we had one of your good friends, Kate Rubins on the podcast, and we were able to talk to her a little bit about the work that she did in space, but one of the things we talked about was, the use of portable DNA sequencing tools in space, but how do you envision these types of technologies evolving and what role will they play in long term space missions and perhaps planetary colonization?

[00:16:01] Chris: yeah, we worked with Dr Rubens on these first sequencing and space experiment. We published that 2017. That was a very fun project for sure. We got to do testing 1st flight. With the sequencer and then get it up in the ISS. We've since flight certified as a follow up sequencer.

[00:16:14] Chris: We've been working on that with SpaceX and, Blue Origin and other commercial agencies are now also looking at using a technology that we've validated with NASA and ISS for some of their missions. So it's really exciting because as a geneticist, I love when there's sequencing of DNA and RNA happening anytime, anywhere for any reason.

[00:16:30] Chris: now that we can do it on earth, we can do it in remote diagnostic settings. We can do it in space. It opens up a large, really treasure trove of opportunities of what we could do, from a diagnostics perspective, of course, let's say if you get an infection, you could take it, sequence it, see what's there.

[00:16:43] Chris: If you're looking at, changes in your body and your blood, you could take a blood sample, sequence it, see what's present, if you have sepsis or if there's other, stress markers in the blood, particularly with RNA. You can look at radiation damage and DNA. You can actually measure 8 oxoguanazine, which is a measure of damaged DNA, actually, in the blood that you sequence.

[00:16:59] Chris: So you can have what's called biodosimetry or the measure of radiation in biology is something that you can also get from the sequencer. But I mean, that's just more on the human health and diagnostic side, which is of course wonderful. And we spend a lot of our time in that space, but I think some of the more intriguing applications are if you see a microbe that's growing, that's adapted, say in a new space station or in a new lunar.

[00:17:18] Chris: Or Mars, colony and you're wondering, what is this new organism? We can't figure out what it is. You can sequence it, analyze it. You can send the sequence back to Earth and then synthesize it and do more experiments on a Martian microbe that you characterize, for example, so it enables a way to explore the adaptations of life.

[00:17:34] Chris: Wherever you find life, and it's not just DNA, RNA, but also protein sequencers been shown the, for example, Oxford, and of course, one company working on this, , that they've shown it as possible to sequence protein. So you could imagine putting any molecule through these little nanopore detectors to see what's there, characterize it, send the data back to Earth to do high throughput experiments, and then, send it back to Mars or the moon to do follow up work there.

[00:17:54] Chris: So. It's not just a diagnostic device or it's really an exploration device and something that you could then use to better understand any life of any kind that you find

[00:18:03] Karl: Yeah, that is amazing. I mean, I remember a few years ago when Craig Venter showed us this DNA synthesizer that he, theorized could be placed on Mars where you could synthesize multiple organisms and use them. before humans arrived so that you can, build structures, build, whatever is needed for life there.

[00:18:22] Karl: And you've explored this in your book, the next 500 years, you talk about some survival strategies across planets. What do you see as being the biggest biological challenges for humans as we think about and actually become an interplanetary species?

[00:18:38] Chris: the good question is, of course, part of the reason I wrote the book was, well, somebody will say, what's your plan for the lab? And I said, we read the book. here's the plan for the next 500 years. Of course, I'll be dead for the vast majority of that time frame. But I wrote it because it's something I passionately believe in.

[00:18:50] Chris: think it's not something that we can do, but that we should do specifically, that we all can and should think about intergenerational plans. It's something I'd say, your birthright as a human being to have such a scope, such a vision, of course the plan can change and it might not stay the same, but the ability to plan and act intergenerationally and across centuries or millennia is unique to our species.

[00:19:10] Chris: Also our ability to understand extinction, as I wrote a lot in the book is. Also unique to humans, which I think gives us a unique responsibility towards literally all life in the universe, quite literally the guardians of the galaxy is what I argue that have become just through our cognition of being aware of extinction, that awareness is a duty, enabling awareness, what I call a deontogenic ethic or your genetic duty.

[00:19:30] Chris: In the book, but that point, so that means if we're exploring anywhere in the universe, what are the biggest risks to go around the universe and protect life or expand life? Radiation is still one of the biggest ones, but actually, once you get to a planet, it's not so bad. You can get underground.

[00:19:43] Chris: You can build other protective mechanisms, even though. For example, Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere. That's one concern. It does still have a bit of an atmosphere. It's 1%, but it's enough to help defray some of the radiation. You can go underground. The biggest risk for long term missions is just being between planets and not being on a planet.

[00:19:58] Chris: Obviously the gravity is one, but the radiation is worse. there's no planet protecting you half the time. So those are some big challenges, but I think. The other one is, resources being able to manufacture our own amino acids. we can't do that as an organism, but we should be able to make your own vitamin C.

[00:20:13] Chris: other primates and other mammals can make their own vitamin C, dogs and cats for examples. lemurs make their own vitamin C. We have lost that ability. we used to have it maybe, 20 million years ago in some form, but it's been gained and lost many times straight evolution.

[00:20:25] Chris: So certain things like this, when I look across genomes of different species, I think, why don't we have that? Or shouldn't we have that? it seems like It's an accident of history, which has been the case for evolution for all of its history.

[00:20:35] Chris: And now we have a chance to survey the landscape of features. and molecular structures and genetic circuits and say, well, should we add this? Do we need this on titan? Should we, not even add it, but also just alter it as needed. You can also do what's called epigenetic versions of CRISPR where you have used the guiding functions of CRISPR.

[00:20:51] Chris: But you don't actually break DNA or modify, you just turn things on and turn things off, which we have in our lab working for several cell lines. so someday you could do that in people and say, we'd like to just turn this off, turn this on, which has been done as a therapeutic for beta thalassemia and sickle cell disease already, basically using CRISPR as a therapeutic to change gene function.

[00:21:09] Chris: Basically, don't know if you're familiar with it, but one of my favorite, applications of this is turning back on fetal hemoglobin in adults to cure, problem with their adult hemoglobin. You basically take a gene that's inside you that's been silenced since you were a fetus, but then you bring it back on and that actually, cures the disease.

[00:21:23] Chris: So 10 years ago, it was total science fiction. but now it is a approved therapy. So it's pretty extraordinary time to live.

[00:21:29] Erum: Wow. And then you're talking about, the cells we were born with, but then there's also the microbiome, how can we leverage our microbiomes or introduce new microbes? And you have done extensive work. We mentioned the subway swab and where you mapped microbial ecosystems.

[00:21:46] Erum: So in that regard, what was some of the most surprising, awe inspiring discoveries that you made that made you pause and marvel at the unseen world around us?

[00:21:56] Chris: Yeah, many things. that study was inspired by my daughter, who you just saw. My daughter came by here. she was very young then, and Woodland did lick a subway pole, which inspired the study. most kids at some point put everything in their mouth.

[00:22:07] Chris: some teenagers do this too. That's a different problem with teenagers I've found, but most toddlers do this. I was just petrified because I wanted to know what had happened. And the microbiome as a field had been really advancing. And new methods for characterizing all microbes around us have been improving.

[00:22:21] Chris: one, I wanted to know what was there. And second was, there had never been a genetic map of a city that had been made. or did little information. So, I was curious for my daughter's sake and curious for science's sake. And thought, well, let's do a exploration of the New York City subway.

[00:22:34] Chris: I ride it every day to lab. I grabbed the pole with my hand. I think we've all been in public transit at some point, on a bus, on a subway. there's the wet seat. Sometimes there's a moist seat. do you sit there? Do you not sit there? There, there these, moments of personal internal crisis where you think it looks clean, but is it clean?

[00:22:48] Chris: Is then the pole is wet or warm or moist. or it's sticky. There's a lot of adjectives that you don't want associated with your morning commute. but a little private moments we all share. So I thought, I don't wanna just look at one or two stations. So we went to every single one of the 468 subway stations at that time.

[00:23:03] Chris: There's a few more now for New York city and so I'll be every single one of them in triplicate and also did a few waterways to build a profile of what's present in New York city. And my favorite thing is actually that half the DNA, take all the fragments of DNA, billions of fragments of DNA. We sequenced them, put them into a large database structure, map them to every known species.

[00:23:21] Chris: half the DNA matches no known species. And that was then and now still what fascinates me. That means that literally every time you grab what's on the ground next to you, probably what's, on your shoes, , take any swab from almost any place. And on average, half of it will be unknown.

[00:23:34] Chris: Sometimes it's 80%, sometimes it's 20%. But, on average, under our fingertips, there's so much left to discover of species we've never seen before that are literally on top of us, next to us, under us, all around us. And I think that again, I came to the 1400s and and people leaving on ships to go explore places in the early 1000s, Polyponnesians exploring the ocean, setting out in a canoe in the Pacific Ocean.

[00:23:56] Chris: Be like, well, we don't know what we're going to find, but we're heading east. that's extraordinary. the courage. to do that, but now you can just do that with a sequencer and a swab, So the idea, it requires almost no courage and just a little bit of money. So it's, an extraordinary capacity for discovery.

[00:24:09] Chris: That's ubiquitous and exciting. And so it's exciting because you can discover new species. Okay. That's interesting. The virus is bacteria, the fungi. But from that, you can mine potential new antibiotics. You can mine new small molecules being made by these microbes. You can learn what is essentially the biochemistry of this world around us and begin to co opt it or put it into synthetic biology systems and start to tinker with it and see if you can use it as a new drug and a therapeutic, enzyme.

[00:24:33] Chris: So it's very exciting. every time we grab swab, I'd say I bring swabs with me everywhere I go, just in case I see something mysterious.

[00:24:39] Karl: Yeah, I remember that study, and I know that there were some known species, which I'll have you talk about, that were surprising, but as soon as you said half the species are unknown, I was like, oh man, they walk among us, the aliens, are already here, we just don't know, that they are.

[00:24:55] Karl: so I mean, talk to us about, what were some of the surprising species that are known that you found? And this got a lot of press, it sparked a lot of curiosity. How is it that you personally think about communicating, both the beauty and benefits of, these invisible ecosystems of the public?

[00:25:13] Chris: Yeah, so beauty and the mystery and the exploration, I think, you just touched on. that is one point, is you want to get people excited about what science can do, what you can discover, there's a lot of potential, and that every time you look at, any surface, anywhere, that there's a lot that you can, learn from it, but at the same time, we found some, aureus, different strains of that were on surfaces, some of them looked like they had markers, for example, antibiotic resistance markers, which at the time seemed scary, but now that we've done enough studies, Are actually quite ubiquitous.

[00:25:40] Chris: So, time we say, Oh, my gosh, every surface has tens or hundreds of antibiotic resistance markers. It's everything resistant to antibiotics within cultured and validated. Some of these that they are resistant to antibiotics. We've learned since that's actually very common almost everywhere, like every receipt, cushion.

[00:25:55] Chris: Every subway pole has some bacteria that not only carry resistant markers, but are probably resistant to antibiotics, but they're not after you. They're just trying to survive in the environment. The benefits of more data and more time has shown that while you will find these, they're not uncommon and they're not even higher than what you'd find like in a soil sample or in a gut rumen sample from a cow, for example.

[00:26:14] Chris: So we've since had much more data to give context to these numbers significance, which is that they're not that significant in terms of a health risk. We did also see some strains that every algorithm that we ran thought that it was bacillus anthracis or anthrax. but really it was because it was a new species that somewhere between what we say now is likely somewhere between bacillus thuringiensis or bacillus anthracis.

[00:26:36] Chris: And of the or how you define a species is messy for bacteria, especially for certain strains where they have very little genetic differences between them. And there's only a plasmid or a small piece of DNA or something small that separates true, say, pathogen versus something that's just a very, really closely related species that's probably not pathogenic.

[00:26:54] Chris: So, a lot of that came out, almost real time and some of the analysis of the data 2015, but since then has become some of the standards now that are now used by the FDA and a group called IMSA. So we've learned about the importance of how you do your sequencing, prepare your samples, how you do your analysis.

[00:27:08] Chris: And these are all now standard tools and markers used by the FDA and Argos Group, for example, and others. but at the time, shotgun sequencing, random surfaces in 2015 was relatively new. And so we learned a lot in real time about how you do the best practices and how to analyze them.

[00:27:23] Erum: We have one of your students, Elizabeth Henef on the

[00:27:26] Erum: pod.

[00:27:26] Chris: A postdoc case, he was postdoc in the lab, at NYU. Yeah, she has her own lab. Yeah,

[00:27:29] Erum: yeah,

[00:27:30] Erum: Yeah, And we talked a little bit about that and, about the subway swab. And, one of the things I had asked her was, you guys collected all this data and it's been since 2015, almost 10 years. and now there's been many more, bacteria and microbes that have been, characterized.

[00:27:45] Erum: have you guys thought of, reanalyzing that data to see what else you can find?

[00:27:50] Chris: Yes, so there's actually a postdoc We just started redoing that now because many databases have improved, new tools exist. We can do also assemblies and other mapping methods. So we're in the process of that now. And what's actually pretty exciting is because we published that paper in 2015, I was inundated with many other labs and said, Hey, what does Stockholm look like?

[00:28:08] Chris: Or what does Hong Kong look like? Or other cities? So now we have a consortium of people I called Meta sub, which is the metagenomics of subways and urban biomes of people have been looking at wastewater hospitals, urban environments where microbes live and thrive and move. And we've been doing this as a coordinated consortium, but, really.

[00:28:25] Chris: effort by everyone who just loves swabbing. So it's a really, unique group of people who just loves swabbing public surfaces, which looked weird before the pandemic, after the pandemic, you swabbing in a public surface, people like, eh, that looks about normal. So one of the silver linings of the awful pandemic is it has normalized.

[00:28:41] Chris: Public swabbing efforts, if you will, and has improved understanding of urology and molecular biology, I think, for a lot of people. So there's maybe some silver linings there from a dark cloud. we're in the process of reanalyzing data, by next year we'll have about 20 cities that all have about 10 years of continual swab data, so we'll have a longitudinal genetic profile of Earth, or at least in the cities we'll have that, which is something we're excited to get to the 10 year mark, and then sequence them all together.

[00:29:05] Chris: And then make a large comparison, release all the data publicly and everyone take a look at it. And it should be a really extraordinary data set for the longitudinal dynamics, both DNA and RNA viruses moved around our planet. a good thing about shotgun sequence data is every time you reanalyze it, you'll get a little bit more information, which is as our databases improve, as our improve.

[00:29:23] Chris: continually, it's an evergreen source of information. almost every shotgun sample that anyone takes, which I think is pretty. Exciting, which you don't get with targeted methods like 16S or other tools, you get very little to no information when you reanalyze it, basically.

[00:30:31] Karl: glad you mentioned that this has become a global volunteer effort and that there's multiple urban environments and subway systems involved. I'm curious, before we switch topics, but have there been any surprises? especially post covid you mentioned that covid makes swabbing almost normal.

[00:30:49] Karl: People don't look at you weird. If you're swabbing in a public place, have yet to see someone doing that. But, if you're swabbing places like, I don't know, the Barcelona subway versus the Tokyo subway versus the Moscow subway. are they all basically the same?

[00:31:02] Karl: Are there differences? some insights before the report comes out.

[00:31:06] Chris: Yeah, we've seen something for Tokyo has almost no DNA. We can pick up. It is very clean. Other places are very hard to get DNA. Low yield, New York City has plenty of DNA. It doesn't mean it's more dirty or clean. It just means There's more and less DNA and it because more bacteria is not necessarily more dirty.

[00:31:21] Chris: It could actually be better for you. which is one of the most common questions against like is it worse? What's the worst city? And I always have to say, well, what do you mean by worse? because more bacteria is not necessarily bad in some cases can be very good. So I'd say, but someone do definitely give us more and less DNA in terms of just the yield because it's clean more.

[00:31:38] Chris: We think, we've seen also certain cities have more, antibiotics that Matt more than others. also mirrors what is the over the counter drug use of those antibiotics. So actually from swabbing a subway surface, you can infer To a reasonable approximation, what drugs people are taking in the city and particularly antibiotics, because the resistance markers track with and mirror that which is taken for the antibiotic use of the population.

[00:32:00] Chris: So that's a surprising feature. But we've also seen Tokyo has the most unknown proportion of the amount of data we get. It's the most mysterious. City. So don't know what it is about Tokyo, but it's both the least amount of DNA, but the most amount of mystery. So that's interesting so far. And that going to be coming out, hopefully in about a year or so, and is it because it was isolated for a few hundred years when they were more of isolationist country?

[00:32:21] Chris: Is that a factor? Is it because of the climate? Is it because of the sushi? we really don't know. So a lot of this is first phenomenological, but it's interesting just to see in a pure exploration capacity, things you pick up about the world around us. And so, so far, Tokyo is our most intriguing city, I'd say.

[00:32:36] Karl: one more thing that's super interesting about that is when you say people ask, which is the worst. So, that's subjective. But I wonder if you could track somehow, percentage of hospital admissions or certain kinds of infections and then correlate with that with the microbiome of the subway, that whole thing about, like, It's good to have a dog, because dogs are dirty, it improves your immune system to have the dog, so if you're in a dirty subway, maybe that makes you healthier, and maybe it does turn out that New York City, because it's so dirty, is actually a healthier place to be, and the population is more healthy because they're exposed to all the dirty bacteria that are around them all the time.

[00:33:11] Chris: Yeah, something called the hygiene hypothesis, which you're referring to there is, you know, you need to have exposure, especially when you're younger to antigens in the environment to build your immune system. the best examples of that clinically originally was, again, a phenomenological discovery.

[00:33:23] Chris: Look at kids in Israel versus kids in the United States. And the allergy rates for peanuts were really, orders of magnitude higher generally in most counties in the U. S. versus Israel. simple question. It's like, well, it seems otherwise, somewhat genetically similar populations seem like they're similar societies.

[00:33:38] Chris: Why is it so much different? And it was because there's a part of the most common Israeli snack is this peanut buttery little chewy snack for all toddlers.

[00:33:46] Erum: Bomb us.

[00:33:47] Chris: Yeah, I got exposure to these little peanut snacks, whereas it was much less common in the US.

[00:33:51] Chris: And actually, if you get anyone with peanut allergies in a classroom, no one can bring peanut butter sandwiches. Like it's really like a quarantine situation. But ironically, that is the worst thing to do to reduce the long term risk of peanut allergies. It actually is better to have a continual low level exposure, and then you're much less likely to have a peanut allergy, even if you've started having a peanut allergy when you're, say, one or two years old.

[00:34:10] Chris: There's two different New England Journal of Medicine papers in 2015 and 16 that showed this, and now it's The therapy, if someone has apeanut allergy you can try it is to give the basically low dose of the hygiene hypothesis is now in some cases well validated and clinically established practice.

[00:34:23] Chris: So, so it is, time I said, the best thing to do with newborn babies is to roll them on the floor of the New York City subway like sushi, which is an interesting mental image. And so I that headline is still out there. You can still find that. And so it is, but what I meant by that, of course, is.

[00:34:37] Chris: you need the exposure. don't know if necessarily rolling them like sushi is the best way to do it, but exposure is definitely good.

[00:34:44] Erum: Yeah. Or lick more poles, lick more

[00:34:46] Chris: You're like,

[00:34:47] Chris: that's right. That's right.

[00:34:48] Chris: So, our daughter has no allergies and she is otherwise very healthy and never had medical problems. So maybe there's a, there's a connection.

[00:34:54] Karl: I can see the headline, Columbia professor suggests, York City newborns to be rolled on subway floors. Outrage ensues.

[00:35:05] Erum: That's incredible. Yeah, the Tokyo thing's really interesting. We had Yuji Suzuki from BitBiome, come on the podcast and they do single cell sequencing and they have an effort to characterize as many microbes as possible, and they do work with the University of Tokyo. So I wonder what can come of that.

[00:35:23] Erum: eventually, but just wanted to mention that, and of course, get your thoughts. But the actual question I have is in your view, what is the most overlooked or underappreciated area of biology today that could transform our world if it was studied deeply?

[00:35:38] Chris: Hmm. it's a good question. So that's what's one of them. I'd say is single cell microbial profiles have been historically hard to get, but now technology is getting more mature that lets us do that. weird places. We have a project called the extreme microbiome project, which looks at unusual places on earth or even the space station to characterize the microbes and potential resistance markers and new biology.

[00:35:58] Chris: So, underexplored is sometimes just underexplored places. we have 1 paper that was about Lake Hillier, which is this pink lake in Australia that has poly extremophiles. So they're both halophiles as well as those appear to be, of tolerating pH as well as So, I think looking in unusual places is, I think, unexplored by definition because we haven't been there.

[00:36:18] Chris: And seeing how microbes have adapted to some of these extreme environments. I would also say, least, one of the least appreciated, or least studied is actually, I think some of the, Long range synthesis questions for DNA. This is something that's technically difficult, but we hope will be improved.

[00:36:32] Chris: But, concomitant with that, you would like software that could tell you, which pieces of which DNA you'd want from any given species that will put into a newly designed genome and how it would work like that is actually a big unmet question since I was a kid, that's part of the reason I became a geneticist is to better understand that we still don't have a true sense of that.

[00:36:52] Chris: We have it for E. coli and some microbial species, but, for mammalian complex genomes with chromatin and gene regulation, a lot of these bigger questions are still unanswered and sometimes just require brute force high throughput profiles of many cell types before you can learn the secrets and the trends and the codes their genomes.

[00:37:11] Chris: , maybe what's underappreciated on export is some of the, data that would be need to be put into an algorithm that would let you design a genome from scratch. I view it, as I said in the beginning, a little bit like that is eventually the dream is that people will be able to write like you would a short story, write an organism and then synthesize it.

[00:37:26] Chris: it's not here yet, but it is not too far away. I don't think, so think we should say, let's presume that we can get there. In 10 to 20 years, at least for microbial species, we're even kind of there now. but then you start to get to more complex species. How would you, figure out what it can do once you've synthesized what media would you grow it in, what new resources would it need?

[00:37:44] Chris: if you create something that's sentient, you're probably responsible for it, much like if you create a child that becomes sentient, it's your responsibility until they become 18. So if you make a new species that has sentients, are you responsible for it whole time, or just until it's 18, potentially?

[00:37:57] Chris: So there's Interesting questions like that. And that also links to things like de extinction efforts where full disclosure, I'm on the board for Colossal Biosciences, which is trying to bring back the woolly mammoth among other species. And some of those same questions come up in those meetings in the boardroom as well.

[00:38:10] Chris: When we bring it back, what's the best, most ethical and responsible way to do so? What are our responsibilities for it? how do we do so? that's the top of my head of interesting areas of science that we're working on now that raise big ethical questions, but I think inevitable ones.

[00:38:22] Karl: I feel like we could do a whole podcast just on that because, we've done a fair amount of work on the messaging lab side with different DNA synthesis providers. and then we've had Andrew Hassel and we've talked to a number of people who are working on, GP, right, the genome writing project.

[00:38:36] Karl: And there's so much going on in that space where this idea of being able to just, pull from different genomes, put them together and, either create just a new organism or create organisms that can work together to build something different is right now might seem like science fiction.

[00:38:51] Karl: It seems like beyond our capabilities, but hopefully you're right in 10 years for microbial and maybe in 30 for, multicellular organisms. And that brings up this next question, because you talk about biology as being both this ancient technology and this future toolkit.

[00:39:05] Karl: I love your analogy of we're still in the 1400s of exploring the oceans. But what does it mean to you that biology is both an ancient technology and future toolkit? And how do you see that duality shaping biotech innovation?

[00:39:20] Chris: yeah, another example from the 1400s would be just exploring the coast of the rainforest and then finding rubber trees. And now rubber is everywhere, just explore, there's a fun aspect of getting on a liveaboard and doing scuba diving and going to vents and finding weird organisms.

[00:39:35] Chris: we can never understate The importance of excitement about science and also the hope that it endears to people to understand, Oh, the future will be brighter than the past. So I think those are 2 other intangible aspects that I want to just highlight for the science.

[00:39:46] Chris: but the very tangible parts of getting rubber trees or, getting a product that you can use in society. is something that we've seen already a lot with manufacturing broadly and even by a manufacturer, you could argue rubber is really part of that, but by manufacturing of, say, pharmaceuticals or, making it so you get a machine that creates food for you or medicines is still in its early stages, at least from the side.

[00:40:08] Chris: But it's very powerful. So I think it means that, the best kind of technology is the one that you don't have to think about because it works all the time. It's ubiquitous. and, biology is still, something that has aura about it, even vitalism is, the philosophical term that there's a belief that, life is different from inanimate objects because it is, has an insolvent or something is, an feature that is not just chemistry or atoms.

[00:40:29] Chris: Our energy, but as literally something, ethereal. And so That belief is still pretty common, but I think it a bit of I guess a reduction in magic or mystery around life if it starts to become, productized and just like a widgetized of what yeast does which happens with beer.

[00:40:42] Chris: I mean, we all have beer today and that's yeast doing a job or, you can look at what gets done with lactobacillus and cheese. there's plenty of places where we make things and we eat them and we're not worried about the. bacilli that are making us food or anything. We just eat it.

[00:40:54] Chris: there will be, I think, on the one hand, a loss of mysticism about life, but then, I think a greater increase in the amount of, mysticism of what you can make. we may have lost a sense of mystery about life, but we've gained an applicability and really a toolkit of what new things it could do.

[00:41:09] Chris: And, this has happened accidentally through history where bacteria share DNA all the time and they get new features. We don't think twice about it. We get annoyed when they pick up antibiotic resistance, but we don't get mad at them. And so I think just systematizing and expanding.

[00:41:21] Chris: The sharing of DNA and the utilization of it, will be great. It'll make so many more opportunities for people those will be jobs that people will have to build software for it, to build the production tools, to validate them, to sequence them, to characterize them, all the work that's done today.

[00:41:34] Chris: A lot of it's in the biologics and manufacturing, say antibodies, for example, synthetic cellular structures. These are all areas where. It happens today, but just at a limited scale. So I think when it gets bigger and productized and systematized, I still think there's a dream that when kids had chemistry kits, someday there'll be kids, synthetic biology kits where they can put together and, make their own little organism.

[00:41:52] Chris: probably small ones first, cause we don't want them to do anything dangerous, of course. so that's the hope I think for the

[00:41:58] Erum: the future, perhaps a kit to make a dragon. That's something that Carl's been talking about, how to make a dragon. Carl, was it a lizard? what was the animal baseline animal?

[00:42:09] Karl: so it's two animals, blue belly lizards that are ubiquitous in California, but then an animal that doesn't exist, which is a mutant frog that mutates, thanks to some, acid rain in the Southern

[00:42:20] Chris: future and then resist to do something. Yeah. But even in a like blue lobsters, I don't know, but there are blue lobsters. They're extremely rare. But they're beautiful we had a project actually with Elizabeth Hanna with Dr.

[00:42:28] Chris: Hanna trying to make, genetically engineered morning glories. That would have the color of the olympics for the olympics was a very hard project when you did not succeed I think it's great to have projects that are almost impossibly large Or preposterously difficult because it forces you to try and solve something that you don't yet have the tools for But necessity is the mother of invention.

[00:42:46] Chris: That's the way you get the new tools. So I actually I like to hire people from my lab that have almost no fear of really impossible ideas because, mostly they don't work, sometimes they do. And even if they don't get to the end goal, you get tools, products, ideas, data from them, et cetera.

[00:42:59] Chris: So I think like a bit of fearlessness people in the lab.

[00:43:02] Erum: Yeah. And probably the reason why you're on the colossal board. I mean, that's such a crazy ambitious idea. we had talked to Alexander Titus about it, and just talked about it in general, just to have this grand vision and all the tools that could come out of it, like an ex vivo womb, all these different things.

[00:43:16] Erum: just like the moonshot, All the technologies that happen.

[00:43:20] Chris: can also have given universal oocyte, for example, an egg that would work for any mammal would be a huge boon for couples that are infertile or having problems, reproducing all the side benefits are pretty massive, even though it's not just conservation and de extinction, it is the technology has a lot of legs and applications.

[00:43:36] Chris: that's part of my enthusiasm the team is great there. And a lot of the founding team and the current team, and really extraordinary what's being done. There'll be a lot of. announcements coming soon from it, but it really is, what I imagine about biotechnology in the future is that you were creating all these new tools that could help in places we hadn't originally intended, but suddenly give us new hope for many medical applications and life,

[00:43:54] Erum: Yeah. Absolutely. so. I have a question. might have touched on this, but your wealth of information, if you could fully decode one biological mystery tomorrow, be it cellular, genetic or planetary, what would it be? And why?

[00:44:08] Chris: fully decode. if I could know the function. Of every piece of DNA or RNA anywhere in the universe and how it would function in each context, that was kind of large, but if I could do that, then you could build a software to make any species for any environment.

[00:44:23] Chris: So that would be what I would like, but that is a big undertaking. So I think, but that's what I would love if we could, I feel like this, we're trying to get to over the course of the next few decades. So if we could have it all done today that we could get from the discovery to the design phase, which would be great.

[00:44:37] Karl: that's just a small, small wish. Chris Mason.

[00:44:42] Chris: That's, I'm a geneticist. That's what I dream about. I guess that's what I would like. I

[00:44:47] Karl: Okay, well, so speaking about big projects, the earth. Biogenome project and these other big, large scale sequencing efforts are developed to catalog life's code. what's one discovery that you've seen so far that has really left you in awe or inspired?

[00:45:04] Chris: from the environmental perspective, think, you finding new, enzymes actually from rubbish or from subway pools or from a Dublin bathroom. One of them came in a new polymerase actually we found there. So finding new tools in random places has been very exciting. touched on before the amount of unknown DNA that we're still figuring out, and we don't know what it is yet, so I think, some of the work, that Sam Sternberg has done, actually, a bit in the Swiss Feng Zhang, and others have looked at new CRISPR systems. New gene editing and gene modification systems, that some of the Omega systems, for example, finding entirely new paradigms of either virology or bacterial defense systems or that themselves could be co-opted.

[00:45:38] Chris: that's been pretty exciting. Just discovery of, things that were just teased out of the data that were there, which is how a lot of the original CRISPR systems were found too. It's, well, this is odd. It's repeating. Why is it doing that? from salt marshes originally in the 90s, it's really odd data sets like that.

[00:45:52] Chris: that's been pretty exciting seeing and I wrote about this a bit in my first book is that I'm sure CRISPR will not be the last. And as we now know, it is not at all. There's many kinds of gene modification systems, that are out there. there's the offense, but CRISPR is supposed to be very easy.

[00:46:05] Chris: so I think we'll find a lot more of them and that they could continue to expand the toolkit for molecular biology. that's an environmental context, one of my favorite things is actually, we took genes from tardigrades, these stuff and put them into human cells and we've started to add more and more genes into human cells to get them radiation resistant.

[00:46:20] Chris: One of my favorite things is just the plasticity. of moving genes from trait from one species into another. Now, you often have to do codon optimization to make sure it'll work within a new system, but other modifications, but my favorite thing is just seeing that work in the lab is that, taking a hardy tardigrade gene and getting it working and protecting against radiation damage, exciting.

[00:46:38] Chris: It means you could purify the protein, you could transfect it, you could, put it in another context. And get a, trade from one species to another. Now it's going to be hard to make, fire breathing and then make a dragon, for example, that's still hard. But I think again, the goal, even if the goal is not attainable, trying to figure out how you would get as close as possible, bearish fruit.

[00:46:55] Chris: And so I think, now if the point where you are making fire breathing dragons, you have to debate whether you release them or if make one, should you make any others, But then, you we have to separate tactical questions from the ethical questions, which are, can you do something versus should you answer, which are both important, but want to look at them separately in different lenses.

[00:47:10] Erum: Yeah. Yeah. And let's talk about that a little bit. So, in your recent book, the next 500 years, you touched on Planetary scale, genetic engineering, first, what is planetary scale mean? And how do we ensure that ethical deployment of such powerful tools as we expand to other worlds?

[00:47:25] Chris: Great question. It is not a small or simple or, it can't be overstated. scale of what's being done when you say I want to terraform Mars, or I want to get planetary scale engineering or. Some of our large scale projects and those that are in the field is looking at a genetic questions from a planetary scale, like the Earth biogenome, like Terra Oceans, for example, MetaSub does this in cities, but the, big questions about can and should you do it?

[00:47:49] Chris: I'm gonna answer second question first. We should do it, period. there's not a should we do it? we have to do it. And there's two facts. I remember the examples. The first one is the ozone layer. Whenever the, started to appear in the eighties, we realized there'd be a massive threat to humanity and life on earth.

[00:48:02] Chris: If we had no production of the ozone layer. The global community came together and we resolved that problem. So that was a case of planetary scale engineering of the atmosphere that was successful, but we have not been as successful for just looking at carbon dioxide globally. It's been longer, it's harder, it's less prevalent to the atmosphere.

[00:48:17] Chris: some people are happy to wait other people want to act immediately, which has been confusing considering we saw the ozone crisis based on similar scientific. validation and consensus, but that's think a tactical question we can and we should engineer the atmosphere and we already have.

[00:48:32] Chris: I'd say. So the question is now, how do we do it again? And we would think about sending organisms to another planet. You could do that to terraform the planet, you could do it to preserve information, you could do it just so you'd want to explore, so the first point is that we have done it, we did it with ozone layer, the second point is that we have to do it also because at some point the sun will engulf the planet Earth, the oceans will blow in about a billion years, if we're still here and we have a perfect planet, then it's the exact same ppm of CO2, all the oceans are bullet into space. It won't matter if we have perfect CO2 levels if we're still physically here. So the thing that animates me every morning is just thinking about the beautiful, wonderful sun, but getting bigger and hotter and engulfing our planet, which means there's just a cosmological fact.

[00:49:10] Chris: We cannot stay here forever. So, existence perceives the essence of anything that comes after it. So we have to, at some point. Go to Mars. We'd have to go to the moon, go farther and eventually make our way out of the solar system. Now we have some time, we have about a few hundred million, maybe a billion years, or so, but that's not that long and that assumes nothing else goes wrong first, asteroid hits us.

[00:49:29] Chris: We destroy ourselves, other calamitous events of the planet have happened before. we have to hope that we can make it, but I, think. We're the 1st species in the history of life to have this awareness of extinction of ourselves or other species or the frailty of life. So that's the 2nd reason why when people think of planetary engineering, they get a little scared because it sounds big and it is big and it sounds like we could do it wrong.

[00:49:50] Chris: And we might do it wrong, but we have no choice. To walk away from it for those reasons of that we can do it and have succeeded and we'll inevitably need to do it if we want to go live on Mars.

[00:50:00] Erum: Yeah, and the one thing that's really interesting that you're talking about is the efforts that you're working with, NASA, but then there's all the commercial efforts. talked to Dr. Kate Robins a little bit about the Artemis mission and the mission to create a moon base there.

[00:50:12] Erum: you had mapped out in your book really beautifully all the different, missions. But can you talk a little bit more about what's going on the commercial side?

[00:50:19] Chris: Great question. So this was, four years ago, there wasn't much to talk about in the commercial spaceflight sector. There was very little happening. But then in actually 2021, the first all commercial crew went into orbit with inspiration for mission led by Jared Isaacman and the great crew there.

[00:50:33] Chris: so we had a really great opportunity to work with the SpaceX medical operations team to build out profiles for their crew members, set up technologies for flight, and build it from the ground up, of a little, research program human spaceflight, which has since expanded to several more missions that Polaris has done.

[00:50:46] Chris: We just finished collecting samples for this fall, which also was a private mission that was five days the first spacewalk by a private crew. So people now just having the capacity to go up into space, buy themselves some seats or go buy a whole mission. there's a lot of private companies building space stations.

[00:51:00] Chris: So there's really an exciting time in the next few years to look at lower Earth orbit. Also go to the moon. You can be a lunar architect. That's a job that exists today, which is kind of amazing. It's not a kid's job. It is a legit job where you're thinking about structure that are going to be built on the moon in the near future.

[00:51:16] Chris: that's extraordinary. so I think the commercial spaceflight sector is He's really driving a lot of this. SpaceX is probably the most obvious one, but of course there's blue origin. then both of them, both SpaceX and blue will likely be on the moon in the next five to six years, maybe a little bit less, and then also there's Sierra space, there's, even Jaguar, there's other companies, a lot of companies, the traditional players too, like Lockheed Martins and others, but in Northrop and, but there's a lot of activity with new players that have tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in play or in contracts. That make it so space is really activating and so we just published the summer of the space omics medical atlas or some of the package nature that looks at a compendium of all publicly available human and mouse data that have been anything that's ever been to space, including the twin study inspiration for some other mission data.

[00:51:59] Chris: And there's a whole website for it and data portal, several data portals that we publish. and it's been a kind of a hypothesis generation machine is what we like to call it because you can look at a gene or look at a protein and think, well, does this go up in space? So there's change in space.

[00:52:10] Chris: What does it look like in a mouse? What does it look like in a dissected mouse tissue or a piece of a human skin? and in organoids, for example, so all these different layers of biology, we can now map out and compare between missions, which is very exciting.

[00:52:21] Karl: that's amazing. All right. So, Chris, you've taken time out from a really busy day, which we really appreciate. I'm sure we could talk to you for hours. So we're going to have to have you back on again. But let's just say you could take a lens, from 500 years in the future, and humanity has succeeded to become a multi planetary species. What hope do you think future biologists will look back at our era and They'll say that was the defining biological achievement of that era.

[00:52:49] Chris: I think when, people look back, say several hundred years from now At where we are now, they'll see this inflection point to really empirically a suddenly sharp exponential increase in the number of flights that was not possible until a lot of the modern flight vehicles and suddenly a lot more objects being sent into space and crews and then Concabinant with that also is the discovery of all these different exoplanets where we now can get to Object in a space we can engineer organisms to possibly survive there and we know which plants we could send them to.

[00:53:14] Chris: There's now several already discovered what appear to be pure ocean worlds. Should we send some funky octopuses over there that could go hang out and survive? I wrote about that a bit in the book. And I think what's exciting is by a few hundred years from now, this may be happening where the synthetic biologists are working hard thinking about ways to send creatures that could survive on a planet might take a while for us to get there.

[00:53:33] Chris: But what if we could extend life outward? Now, this is a flagrant violation of planetary protection, right? Because people think, well, what if there's life there? of course you want to protect that life that is there because if life has value, it would have value anywhere. And I think very much it does.

[00:53:46] Chris: But danger of those that what if you wait too long, for example, on our planet, we waited another five, 600 million years, then it took longer for life to have formed here. It would probably form too late because then would get too hot and get engulfed by the sun. So most planets under most other solar systems have a window, a key window where life could form, it can be made.

[00:54:03] Chris: interesting to think about, and I think what might actually happen is in a few hundred years that people are looking at, we've mapped out all the nearby planets, we've perfected some of the flight trajectories in the synthetic biology. And we're sending little seedlings out to help prepare the planets, for life.

[00:54:16] Chris: Now, probably we'd want to check and make sure there's no evidence of life yet, because then it's too complicated or dangerous to send life where there already is life. But if we have been monitoring planets for decades or centuries, and we looks like it's habitable or possible life, but there's no evidence of life as far as we know it, then it opens up the store of, working to preserve life and even expand where life could exist in the universe.

[00:54:36] Chris: And I think that is. Creatively interesting. I think it is a manifestation of our duty that's unique humans. and we'll lead to hopefully, new adaptations, new discoveries, and also help us better understand the universe and see where life can go. So that's what I would hope. And it's kind of where I got at the end of the book, I'd say, is what we hope will happen.

[00:54:52] Erum: Nice. That's incredible. Ganymede! We got to go to Ganymede, too. Not just exoplanets, but moons.

[00:54:59] Chris: I know I never get any love. I never get any love. It's a, it's a

[00:55:02] Erum: the moons.

[00:55:02] Chris: too much about Titan.

[00:55:04] Erum: Yeah. Yeah. There's so many. My son's so interested in space. And then I discovered there's 140 moons of Saturn and 90 some so far. Yeah. It's just like,

[00:55:13] Erum: okay, there's a lot. There's a lot we can explore. Yeah. And then there's life on there. There might be a way to have a symbiotic relationship. Maybe they can help.

[00:55:23] Chris: they could have the Europa Clipper is on its way, So we might know about that pretty soon. And there's a lot of other extra biology kind of plans that NASA and he said to try and find other possible life. And so I think that's the exciting thing is that maybe in a few hundred years, we will have found variations of life that you couldn't have fathomed can now that managed to a different kind of nucleic acid structure or different substrates for proteins or even just different kinds of molecules that underlie life.

[00:55:45] Chris: And so that, what I think we can tinker on this planet for a long time, but it'll, probably change our expectations when we go to other planets. I mentioned

[00:55:51] Karl: Yeah, Chris, thanks so much for taking the time today. We really appreciate you coming on the grow everything podcast. we want to definitely have you back on in a few months after this big publication about the, urban genomes is published. I think it'd be great to come on and talk about it and we look forward to running into you, in New York at biotech, events and, can't thank you enough for taking the time.

[00:56:14] Chris: pleasure. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to come back anytime and love what y'all are doing. So, yeah, keep dreaming and keep up So thanks so much. Pleasure.

[00:56:26] Erum: Iram, what did you think of that interview with Chris Mason?

[00:56:28] Erum: I think we need a lot more time. we didn't really dig into all of my questions that I actually have about his book, The Next 500 Years. talking about what can transpire, millions of years into the future, I think the farthest was 800 million years into the future. It's mind bending, and to think of it in a very thoughtful scientific way it's for me fun. it's just a great, way to be able to imagine. I mean, that's why we're humans. We can think about the future. Chris Mason has done that very well in his book. And of course, in our interview with him.

[00:57:02] Erum: he talks about, deontological ethics, which is the theory where you place emphasis on the relationship between duty and the morality of human actions. So he's saying that it is our moral obligation to colonize different planets, just staying on earth and all the different, risks that we have.

[00:57:21] Erum: Beyond just the anthropogenic activity of, climate change, and, we're not really doing a good job taking care of our environment, we need to ensure that human civilization, as well as other animals, that we continue to progress far into the future.

[00:57:38] Erum: it's really deep. I do again. We clearly recommend that you read chris mason's the next 500 years, link in the show notes, but wow, what a treat to finally have him on

[00:57:48] Karl: Yeah, I love that he said that, when it comes to biology, we're still in the 1400s in the area of exploration. But I think that we're moving a lot faster when it comes to, this idea of being able to use biology as a toolkit. So I love that. we always say, when we talk about the work we do, we talk about biology as a technology, which is really the most ancient technology.

[00:58:11] Karl: But it is also like the future, toolkit. It offers solutions to problems that we haven't even. understood and like you said, being able to use biology as a way to get us on other planets and, as that is our moral imperative, I think, is incredible.

[00:58:25] Erum: yeah, speaking with chris, You have to think about all the systems across all different scales and how they interconnect right? He's talking about genetic health, but then also talking about subway systems cities and then different regions of the planet and then different planets.

[00:58:42] Erum: it just goes, bigger and bigger and bigger. And how are you able to, understand the dynamics between the scales and then engineer the different scales. how do you engineer on the smallest scale? Yeah. To have an effect on our scale, on the human scale, but then on the global scale, and then, galactic scale, I guess, but I feel like my mind, and I don't know if this is a rabbit hole, but I'm going somewhere with this in my brain, I'm just like, all right, Carl, I think I just need to go and sit and look outside the window and think for a while. Because it's so deep.

[00:59:13] Karl: yeah, I mean, there was, a lot of deep thoughts in the, interview. And I think, like you said, we should have Chris on again. I mean, he just makes it clear that, microbial life is incredibly complex. the diversity of microbial life is staggering, and it continues to be invisible to us.

[00:59:29] Karl: But then what does it look like when we're able to engineer it and use it at a mass scale or a scale that we can see. And I it's the same thing when we think about, terraforming, what does it look like to be able to take microbes that basically terraform this planet as well, but put them into other environments where they're going to do their duty terraforming.

[00:59:49] Erum: yeah, that's exciting. I you can think about it on different planets, but thinking about it here on earth, how do you create more climate control? right now it's kind of out of control but let's start doing something. And so it just sounds like all the research he's been participating in that continues to Acquire more data and more tools Is going to provide a lot of insights from meta sub to the earth bio Genome project to the work that's happening at colossal.

[01:00:15] Erum: Chris Mason is such a gravitational force when it comes to how We understand how to engineer microbes, what microbes exist, and how we can, collect them and, use them in a smart, intelligent way. So, yes, we need to have him back on. We could just do, a whole week of Chris Mason, because there's just so much that we didn't even dig into.

[01:00:34] Erum: I was looking at his background. we'll put his LinkedIn just so you can see. all the affiliations he has and we can just deep dive into each one, but I cannot wait to speak with him again and continue to observe the work that he's doing and maybe one day, participate It's I mean, he sounds like a great person to work with as well and we want to thank chris mason for coming on and hopefully we see him in the neighborhood

[01:00:57] Karl: Yeah, just one last quick, shout out to Chris and his lab. last time I saw him live, which was at an event at CURE, Chris was there with his number of students and he was about to run the New York City Marathon and apparently was going to be taking blood samples along the way. I don't know if that meant every five miles, every five minutes, whatever.

[01:01:14] Karl: we actually didn't even get into it, but his grad students were like, Hey, do you go to the gym? And I was like, yeah. And they're like, okay, can we take your blood? And I was like, of course, in the interest of science. So, anybody from his lab is listening, I'm ready to have my blood drawn before, after, during my workouts.

[01:01:31] Karl: so I think, we leave the episode with that note.

[01:01:37] Erum: That's the call to action. So please check out our show notes. Thank you so much for listening and stay tuned for the next episode of the grow everything podcast.

[01:01:45] Karl: See you later.