125. The Synbio Symphony: SynBioBeta’s John Cumbers Harmonizes Biology and Industry

[00:00:00] Erum: John Cumber, welcome back to the Grow Everything Podcast. This is your third time here. It's the Threepeat. It's a Threepeat. Welcome back.

[00:00:10] John: Thank you so much. It's so good to be here.

[00:00:12] Erum: Yay.

[00:00:13] Karl: Oh, wow. John. First person three. Pete.

[00:00:15] Erum: It should be

[00:00:16] Karl: Yet it should be John.

[00:00:18] John: I love you guys and I think you're doing a great job, so I'm happy to come back and support the podcast, so thank you.

[00:00:23] Erum: No thank you. All right. Well, to us, you're Mr. Synthetic Biology and you have Symbi Beta conference. We are big fans. We, attend every year. We participate. We love it. you have described synthetic biology is having the potential to be the defining technology of the 21st centuries.

[00:00:40] Erum: So can you tell us a little bit more about what your personal philosophies are or life experiences that shape this philosophy?

[00:00:47] John: I got into biology. 25 years ago or so, and I was a computer scientist and I had studied computer science for my undergrad, and then I went to do a master's in bioinformatics at the University of Edinburgh. And when I turned up at the University of Edinburgh, I didn't have a clue what was going on. I didn't know what a gene was.

[00:01:08] John: I didn't know what a protein was. I had studied high school biology, but not very studiously. so pretty much, I was starting from scratch. I was 21 years old and I. Went down to the basics of what is a gene, what is a protein, what's going on inside of a cell? All 30 trillion cells inside of the body, all 20,000 genes and all a hundred thousand proteins.

[00:01:30] John: And the enormity and complexity of biology is overwhelming still to, everybody today. But the most amazing thing is what's going on inside of that cell, the. Central dogma of genes being read by these machines. Polymerase is, converted into R-N-A-R-N-A being read by ribosomes and ribosomes translating these sequences into proteins.

[00:01:53] John: And there's all sorts of, additions now to the central dogma and reverse transcriptase and things like that. But, in general, the magic that's going on inside of a cell was opened. Up to me and laid out. I think the people who I call the biologically enlightened who understand where all of this came from, 4.6 billion years of molecular evolution or biological evolution, we're this kind of inside club who get it and see what's going on.

[00:02:23] John: And I think once you're in that inside club, it's just the most mind blowing thing that. Life is what it is that a cell does what it does, that we have evolved to do what we do, and be what we are. So that's just all natural biology. If you now take that to the realm of synthetic biology, the vision is that we can now program the DNA to.

[00:02:47] John: Do whatever we want to do, whether that's to grow an acorn that could grow into a house, or whether that's to engineer an antibody that's gonna be a personalized cancer therapeutic, or whether that's to create a new super food that's going to taste like nothing you've ever tasted before. The future potential of. Bits and converting into atoms and us being able to engineer on the atomic scale is going to be, as I said, the technology to define the 21st century. And this is why I'm so excited about biology.

[00:03:23] Karl: So awesome. I mean, as you know, so are we. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing, And, have known about you forever is that you're really good about creating community and you've created this incredible community called SynBioBeta and you've connected biologists and technologists. normally you would think these people would clash and yet.

[00:03:45] Karl: In your community, they work really well. And over the last couple years we've really seen the enormous impact that AI is gonna have on, biotech, on biology, on synthetic biology. But it seems like these are such different worlds, tech and biology. What have you learned, or what insights have you gained of putting these people together because they think differently?

[00:04:05] John: I think that my background in computer science coming into biology and that enlightenment, that period that I had. has enabled me to translate between the two communities. When we first started SynBioBeta in 12, the very first event we did, I invited a bunch of investors to come and I didn't really know that much about investing at the time or investors, so I just picked some people randomly said, Hey, do you wanna be on a panel?

[00:04:29] John: and at the end of the conference, somebody asked me, what is SynBioBeta And I said, I don't know. I'm just bringing interesting people together and, letting them meet each other. What do you want it to be? What do you need? And they said, more funding. They said The investors that you had on the stage didn't have any money and, were talking down about the industry you need to beef up the investors at, next year's event. So I said, okay. we did two things to. Beef up the investors. We organized a very fancy cruise around the Bay Area and we invited all the investors that we knew to come.

[00:05:00] John: 'cause I thought, well, investors are rich people. Rich people like fancy boat rides. Let's invite them to come. none of the investors came on the fancy boat ride. of my friends did, all of the founders and all the CEOs did, and we had an amazing boat ride. it was huge amount of fun.

[00:05:13] John: didn't achieve the objective that we set out to achieve, but did build a lot of, community. The second thing that we did, which was much more of a success, was to create a course, and the course was called Synthetic Biology for computer programmers. And we taught that course at a number of venture funds around the Bay Area, including Founders Fund which is Peter Thiel's fund innovation Endeavors, which is Eric Schmitt's fund and, a number of other venture funds.

[00:05:41] John: we ended up educating the tech investors about biology, about the central dogma, about what is DNA, what's a protein? it was incredibly successful. founders Fund ended up investing in a number of companies, including Bolt Threads, innovation Endeavors, Inc. Include, ended up investing in a whole number of companies, including Simon Gen.

[00:05:59] John: And we'll talk about some of, the successes and failures of the industry later on, I'm sure. but in that regard, it was successful in educating, tech money to pay attention and get excited about biology.

[00:06:10] Erum: That's amazing. Yeah, I love that story of the past and. I mean, for me, I came to sin by beta about, four years ago I actually attended. So just to hear a little bit of this history and how it evolved is really exciting to hear. I've waited long enough. I mean, I'm really excited to talk about space.

[00:06:26] Erum: that's something that for the listeners, they know that it's my favorite topic space. Biotech space, bio manufacturing, and you bring a lot to that. have this experience at nasa, but would love to learn what's new, what's going on in syn, bioo and space exploration and potential off world settlements.

[00:06:45] John: We actually just had a call yesterday with the astronaut Tim Copra who spoke at Symbio Beta two years ago, and we just announced yesterday also that Kate Rubens is coming back to Symbio Beta.

[00:06:57] Karl: We love her.

[00:06:58] John: She's

[00:06:58] John: the astronaut that sequenced, DNA on the space station with, George Church, while George wasn't there, 'cause George doesn't like to travel.

[00:07:05] John: but, she's coming back to talk about, what she's working on in terms of the intersection of biology and, space technology. And then Tim Copra is leading one of the initiatives for one of the private space stations that NASA is funding. And he's looking for partners that want to. Use low earth orbit and a space station out there for biological research and biological experiments.

[00:07:30] John: So I think there's some interesting signs that biology's gonna be an important player in the future of space. I mean, I've actually, not recently, but I spoke to Elon Musk about this, at C CFU a few years ago. and said, what do you see as the role of biology, in space? And we were talking about life support and, need for bio-based life support. And actually, when I was at NASA and I was there for seven years, I was working in the life support division. particularly we were looking at food production. We were looking at wastewater recycling, biomaterials production. I think the ultimate vision for synthetic biology in space is this idea of being able to synthesize.

[00:08:09] John: Any organism to do whatever you want in real time to adapt to the environment that you find when you are in space. So evolution has taken, billions of years to adapt these organisms to particular environments. Well, we end up landing on Mars and needing to, figure out how we can grow potatoes in the perchlorate soil.

[00:08:27] John: well, we haven't got billions of years to evolve. To those conditions. So, let's use AI to design organisms and I'm incredibly excited about the role of AI now in biology. In particular the EVO two model, which was a partnership between, Nvidia and ARC Institute. Patrick Hsu we actually have, Brian, he from Stanford, who's a co-author of the EVO two model.

[00:08:47] John: He's gonna be giving a talk at beta. coming up, but now you can take in whole genomes as context windows for the AI models, and you can now design whole genomes, as well. So, the dream alive, in terms of the progress towards whole genome synthesis and whole genome design and synthetic biology.

[00:09:07] John: And that opens up then the beautiful opportunity to design organisms for any environment that you want to go, including space.

[00:09:14] Karl: Do you think there's any low hanging fruit that we should work on that are gonna make, getting into space or, what's gonna happen on these space stations happen faster? Mars is close distant dream, but the space stations might be faster.

[00:09:27] John: I am actually pretty excited about the humanoid robots first. I think that's the low hanging fruit. a starship full of humanoid robots to, figure it out. They can build a biolab, I mean they can do everything. , actually they can do the synthetic biology thing, design the organisms they can till the land, remove the perchlorate.

[00:09:44] John: so I. Think that's gonna be where the big, exciting advance comes from. I think it's still gonna be a while before we're wanting to. Take biology there. But now that I think of it, I, guess I've gotta update my mental model because these humanoid robots weren't on the horizon, they are now when I was at nasa.

[00:10:03] John: And so I always used to think that biology was gonna be the last thing that you would take because you cannot rely on it. It's, unreliable. right now it's, not robust. I mean, in certain situations biology is amazing at what it does, but would you want to. Be on a space station on Mars with.

[00:10:21] John: Algae food is your prime, supply of food. Probably not. You'd probably feel more comfortable, with frozen ready meals than relying on your, Contaminated culture of spirulina that's sitting on the side of the space station. I don't mean to be down on biology, but that was my view is like, it's too risky to take it as your primary source.

[00:10:43] John: But now with humanoid robots, Yeah, if they can set up the growth chambers and stir tanks and the bioreactors ahead of time and demonstrate, look at that. This system's been running 24 7 for 12 months now, and these humanoid robots have produced the spirulina bars. They're just waiting for you to unwrap and eat them.

[00:10:59] John: that's a different story.

[00:11:00] Erum: Yeah, especially if the spirulina bars tasted a filet mignon or whatever You talked about super foods that taste delicious that we've never tasted before, so that in tandem. with creating, nutritious, lightweight food, would be interesting. But I'm curious why humanoid robots?

[00:11:17] Erum: Why not just robots that can be programmed to do the task? why do they have to be in human form? Because that also seems like it be heavy.

[00:11:26] John: it's a good question. I'm just thinking of the optimist prime, human form and they're doing

[00:11:32] Erum: What's Prime I mean, I know it's the transformer thing, but

[00:11:35] John: Oh, sorry. It's not Optimus Prime. It's yeah. Optimus, robot from Tesla. that's the name of the humanoid, robots that Tesla's producing. and then Elon, Probably about a month ago, said, the end of next year, I think he said the end of next year, his timelines always slip.

[00:11:50] John: But the end of next year, a starship full of these, Optimus robots, I think that's the name, are gonna be landing on Mars so that's happening and that's gonna be there way before, a biological system would get there.

[00:12:03] Karl: Yeah. So let's transition the conversation a little bit because you're talking about, Humanoid robots and slow progress. and you have mentioned, in the past that synthetic biology's progress has been slow, and we've seen fits and starts.

[00:12:18] Karl: I think of the, alternate protein food space as being particularly challenged. and funding has been challenging, but yet the technology continues to advance at that exponential pace. But if you could remove one. Major bottleneck that would hinder the advancement of synthetic biology?

[00:12:35] Karl: What would it be? and why?

[00:12:37] John: Yeah, if there was one major bottleneck that I'd remove, I'm not sure. It's a bottleneck that I'd remove because I think That the synthetic biology workflow of the design build test, learn this loop that we go around, it's pretty successful and it's been a great model that the industry's been following for a number of years, we get to a bottleneck at each part of the cycle.

[00:13:02] John: At one point, it was build. Synthesis of DNA was a problem. It used to cost $4 a base pair. Now it costs 10 cents a base pair. So the barrier, has been reduced. then it was, test, well, now we've got cheap DDNA, we need now high throughput automation to be able to test it. And so we went from, 96, well plates to 384, well placed to 1024 well placed.

[00:13:23] John: So we and high throughput. testing and micro droplets and micro joules and, droplets and things like that. so we move with the automation equipment and then it's design. Well, let's now go back to designing the genes and the genomes. And we've had drag and drop interfaces and, combinatorial assembly languages for biology.

[00:13:41] John: And now da da you have, things like EVO two whole genome designs. So design is no longer a bottleneck. We're now gonna have AI that can design a gazillion genomes. So, maybe we're back to the build bottleneck now, and you're seeing new DNA synthesis companies come online like, Elegan and Ansa that are doing enzymatic, DNA synthesis.

[00:14:04] John: blue Ribbon Bio is another DNA synthesis company that's coming online and they are competing with the incumbents like Twist and IDT and Thermo Fisher. So you're seeing innovation in the, build, that's gonna drop the price, increase the availability of whole genome synthesis. And then probably we'll be back at the test bottleneck.

[00:14:24] John: So I don't have any one in particular, but where's this going? Well, it's going to the rapid iteration of design build test, where I can actually program a bacterial genome on my desktop. hit print. Boot it up in the lab and run a test and see what it does. Whether it produces the flavor of the filet mignon spirulina that I wanted or, not.

[00:14:44] John: that's what we want to get to where we can program biology as rapidly as we can program an iPhone.

[00:14:50] Erum: Yeah. And thanks so much for that. I mean, it really helps think about it in that process. so then in this case, I was gonna ask about what area of synthetic biology do you see as currently underfunded? do you think that's DNA synthesis or is there other parts of symbio where if he gave you. $10 million to put towards one area of synthetic biology, which probably isn't enough, but what area would you put it into?

[00:15:15] John: I'd probably look at putting it into I think about events and community. And so the community that I'd like to build is called Bigger Data for Biology, which brings people together, puts them in that design, build, test, learn loop, and then says, let's all take a giant leap. Together so that we're not getting at a bottleneck in a year about the next one, and then the next one.

[00:15:41] John: Instead, let's lay out a 10 year horizon. Let's lay out a 10 year timeline of where we wanna be and let's all try to move together in. Lock step to try to get there. And therefore everybody's predicting and, trying to see where the test people are gonna be and where the build people are gonna be. because when you get those disparate groups in a room together, one of them will say something like, well, of course we can't build.

[00:16:08] John: a whole bacterial genome for less than a million dollars. and then somebody else would say, why not? What's the bottleneck? And they'll say, well, the bottleneck is in the droplet size. And then somebody else will pipe up from the tech automation group and say, that's not a bottle size. We just made that up because we didn't know what droplet size to use, so we just put.

[00:16:27] John: 10 bigger leaders. so get the people talking to each other and laying out a framework and challenging their assumptions. So it's not a particular technology that I'd fund, but it's a community, that wants to move towards programmable biology and wants to move there to together in a pre-competitive phase so that we can have the whole industry, walking in lockstep.

[00:16:48] John: I think that would be wonderful.

[00:16:50] Erum: Yeah, I mean, is this a little tease to what's to come? It's in SynBioBeta this bigger data for biology. Is this something that is currently being worked on?

[00:16:58] Erum: Sounds

[00:16:59] John: It is something that I'm noodling on with a particular government agency that, is also interested in these kinds of topics. But, what we did launch this year at SynBioBeta is com, something called Hyperscale Bio, and that is our new AI bio community and we have about 20. AI founders and CEOs and executives coming both from the big pharma world.

[00:17:24] John: We have, Kim, Branson from GSK, who leads their machine learning. We have Andrew Phillips, from Sanofi who, leads their drug discovery, AI drug discovery, and we have a whole ton of AI bio CEOs like Raphael Townsend from Atomic ai, and, Alexander z Zini from a Zeda who's working on machine learning for enzyme design.

[00:17:47] John: we also have the CTO of Microsoft come in to talk about their investments in ai. That's, Kevin Scott and he's gonna be doing a fireside chat with Drew Andy on AI and bio. So. About a third of the conference is all about AI and bio this year, and that's a big area that I'm most excited about.

[00:18:03] John: we also have human biology. We have planetary biology, and we have tools and technology. So all the pieces are there. there's about 40 different breakout sessions going. So you're interested in any one of those particular topics, like the design, the build, the test to learn, you can find your tribe and connect with them there.

[00:18:19] Karl: Yeah, I have to say that, I'm super excited about the hyperscale, sessions or that idea. I think I was a little slow at first to, I think Erum you can back this up. I was a little slow to embrace the AI wave. And yet now every day we're doing something and I just see how it's transforming our thinking around, biology

[00:18:40] Erum: I think you were very fast compared to a lot of other people,

[00:18:43] Karl: okay. Well thank you. I feel like, I was really slow.

[00:18:45] Erum: now you talk to AI more than you talk to me, and we have a weekly podcast, so.

[00:18:50] John: But I think, everybody feels that way. Everybody is intimidated by it because, I don't know about you, I don't understand the models, I don't understand what's going on under the hood. I'm using them as a consumer. I know it's a huge. wave of innovation happening. but yeah, there's some really smart people working on some amazing different kinds of models that are feeding in different biological data and spitting out some amazing results.

[00:19:13] John: So you've gotta try to keep up with it. but I think it is intimidating to most people. , but that's why we've got so many of the people coming and. Doing breakout sessions. So there are technical sessions where you can go and meet with these people and they'll lay out the models and they'll talk about what they're doing.

[00:19:27] John: And, there'll be some hands-on sessions where you can look at some of these tools and how to use them. I think it's natural to be intimidated by any new technology, , but you've gotta embrace it. yeah. Last night I actually was loading a non-internet dependent version of Ollama on one of my laptops so that I can start to play around with it without being dependent on the internet and see what would happen. which is a huge leap for me ' cause I'm always like, I wish I knew how my Windows laptop worked just a little bit more, even though I usually work on a Mac.

[00:19:56] John: And does that not have any guardrails? Can you make a biological weapon with it?

[00:20:00] Karl: well, so here's the thing, the way you test it. you would install it as an administrator on a Windows or Linux or Mac laptop, and then you ask it how to steal a car, which is something I'm fascinated by for a lot of reasons, but we won't get into now. And, listeners.

[00:20:19] Karl: I'm not stealing any cars. This is a hint for something that's gonna come in the future. so It didn't gimme the answer, I watched a guy on YouTube explain how to do it. So I must have done something wrong with the installation because it said, I'm not able to answer this question.

[00:20:34] Karl: It gave that kind of answer, so I have to go back and tweak it a little bit. And the first step is to go in and install it on your laptop, and then you actually can install it onto a thumb drive and then you no longer have to depend on the internet connection. nothing to do with biology there, just Carl nerding out a little bit on.

[00:20:50] Karl: what can I do with a independent, large. language model, which is actually very large. actually amazing because I think from a, data size, it's maybe less than half, gigabyte, but it's got like 70 billion tokens. It was trained on 70 billion to some crazy number like that, which I still don't really understand.

[00:21:09] Karl: But anyway, let's, talk a little bit about. Emerging technologies. We're talking about artificial intelligence, there's quantum computing. these things are impacting synthetic biology. what are the ways that we're not talking about those enough?

[00:21:24] John: I am not an expert on quantum computing. We talk quite a lot about AI and the impact that's gonna have on the field. I am always looking at what's next and what's coming down the pipeline. so I'm curious on your take. what are you most excited about in terms of these technologies and where do you see the intersection with synthetic biology?

[00:21:45] Karl: I think Erum is more educated on the quantum side than I am. I'm still a doubter there, but as with ai, I'll probably become a quick, Evangelist for it once it becomes readily available. for me, what's exciting about AI and biology is just, biology continues to be this black box and AI will make it easier for us to teach people about it.

[00:22:06] Karl: It's gonna make it easier for us to understand it. It's gonna make it easier for us to engineer it. I think a lot of the things that we take for granted. when it comes to biotech are really hard to do physically and when you can like, solve those problems. On a computer with AI before you actually hit the lab.

[00:22:23] Karl: I think those kinds of things are gonna move things a lot faster. And then when you combine that with design tools I'm thinking specifically around material design, being able to design materials on an atomic level so that you are getting very specific performance characteristics that don't exist in nature.

[00:22:40] Karl: I'm super excited about that as well as. reexamining what the toolkit is that nature has given us. where are the places like the ocean and all these trillions of microbes that we don't understand that all potentially have tools that will continue to advance our knowledge for engineering biology.

[00:22:56] Karl: So I'm excited about all that of general,

[00:22:59] John: One area that we have represented at the conference this year is non-canonical amino acids. Have you been getting on that bandwagon?

[00:23:08] Karl: No, not at all. But I know that Drew had written about, me amino acids or mirror, we know someone in that space who's developing mirror therapeutics. and their effects the lab. stunning, the kinds of results that they're getting.

[00:23:22] John: So there's a company called Constructive Bio out of Jason Chin's lab at the University of Cambridge, and they just raised, I think they just announced $76 million just this week. Jason is giving a keynote at the conference and the CEO of Constructive Bio, Ola Eski, she's gonna be speaking as well.

[00:23:42] John: it's a really, really. Platform. So non-canonical amino acids are being used right now in these GLP one inhibitor weight loss drugs. the way that these weight loss drugs work is that they bind to GLP one and they prevent it from being degraded. GLP one is. The molecule that tells your body and your brain that I'm full. So when it is degraded, it means that you are hungry. these GLP one inhibitors bind to GLP and prevent the molecule from degrading. So you stay hungry for longer. What the companies have done, the pharma companies that are making these inhibitors is made these inhibitors with non-canonical amino acids, which are these non-natural amino acids that the body finds difficult to break down.

[00:24:35] John: so because the body finds it difficult to break these things they bind and stay around for longer, which means you stay full for longer. So it's a really cool innovation Right now, these non-natural amino acids or non-canonical amino acids are a pain in the ass to manufacture because you need to synthesize the enzyme or the protein amino acid at a time using chemistry.

[00:25:02] John: You can't synthesize it using biology, and this is where constructed bio comes in because they have got a completely engineered genome. I think it's a yeast genome. And they've done the thing that, George Church was doing in e coli, which is to remove the, I think it's the amber stop codon So edited the genome to take out one stop code on, so it's no longer stop code on, but instead they're using it to insert a new amino acid protein that they're making. this is a big deal because. you can now make these non-canonical amino acid based drugs using fermentation, feed the bug sugar, spit out the protein.

[00:25:40] John: You don't need to make it using chemical synthesis. And so it means that the bottleneck and the expense of these, GLP one inhibitors is vastly reduced because you can make them through fermentation instead of chemical synthesis. So it's gonna be a really interesting talk and, it's gonna be a really interesting future because.

[00:25:57] John: It's not just these weight loss drugs. Once you add non-canonical amino acids, you have practically unlimited chemical diversity that you can make in these proteins. That's gonna be huge for drug development, but it's also gonna be huge for novel materials, which is one of the other applications that you've said that you are excited about.

[00:26:14] John: So it's a big deal. this whole new paradigm that's coming around, these non-canonical

[00:26:19] John: amino acids.

[00:26:20] Karl: Yeah, I wanna go back to this question because I think I want you answer, what are you excited about? when it comes to emerging technologies like AI or Quantum in their application to biotech, because we talk about this stuff all the time. It's good to have John here because he's thinking about it from a different point of view, and I think I went off, I want you to go off a bit.

[00:26:40] Erum: Okay. Well, I mean, I say like, one of the things that you said, Carl, was that, biology's a black box, but AI too is a black box. John, you mentioned that, like, oh, I don't really understand it. A lot of the CTOs don't understand how the AI works as well, when it comes to that black box and the hallucinations and why it does that.

[00:26:57] John: That's a good point. there's black boxes talking to black boxes, and I think that, , quantum can do something here. a lot Happening around the corner. We need to have a quantum track. It's in bio beta. Novo Holdings has a quantum chip challenge or who's working on quantum.

[00:27:13] Erum: so when you have this type of computation, what can it tell you about biology? 'cause biology operates on quantum levels and you think about photosynthesis. I remember at SynBioBeta last year, the year before. drew Barry. creates these, biological simulations that are very, accurate.

[00:27:29] John: And then when he was shown simulation, he put a placeholder for quantum effects. He's like, I don't know how to simulate this, but was like this little light that was shining. He's like, I don't know how to simulate that, but.

[00:27:37] Erum: If you have quantum computing, you could simulate that. So I think that's going to be really interesting to see how much more of a understanding we'll have of biology and how much more we can do on a quantum level with biology. And what can that reveal, will it reveal that we live in a simulation?

[00:27:54] Erum: I don't know. I mean,

[00:27:56] Erum: I don't, I. But at least we can know, we're evidence we're, these very smart monkeys, we wanna be able to see things 'cause we have eyes eyes are our confirmation. I mean, obviously have other senses, but, eyes are our main one. So we need to see the data and say, okay, yeah, it's true, we're a simulation.

[00:28:15] Erum: But, I think that's gonna be really exciting when Quantum comes on and, if you wanna do a quantum track. Holler at your girl, John, because happy to.

[00:28:24] John: So we had a session last year on quantum biology. 'cause there's a quantum dao, I can't remember the entrepreneur's name. Her first name is Clarissa, I believe. she ping us this year about quantum bias. So there might be, breakout on the session that's gonna appear. as I said, we have about 40 breakout sessions, so I can't unfortunately keep track of them all anymore.

[00:28:42] John: But, there might be a quantum session, on the agenda already.

[00:28:45] Erum: Yeah, I'll keep my eyes peeled for it they're having one, I'll be sure to go, unless it's happening the same time as Kate Rubin's otherwise, yeah, that. Cool. Yeah. So, we went deep, but let's go back up to our world of just living in society and there's a lot of. Cultural change that really still needs to happen to get people thinking about biology and that it is core to everything. This podcast is called Grow Everything. can people affect this cultural change within society?

[00:29:19] Erum: I know you've been working on some things to really bring syn bio and biology into the mainstream versus right now. SynBioBeta is really industry focused and bringing different professions into symbio. But what about other people?

[00:29:33] John: Yeah, it's been my dream for a long time to bring other people into this. I mentioned at the beginning of the show that I think 10% of people are biologically enlightened that they get it, they're part of this inside club. I don't want that to be the case. I want it to be a hundred percent of people are part of this, club.

[00:29:52] John: It's no longer an inside club. so. we started, I say me and my, co-founder, Thatcher Mines, executive producer. We started an animation studio last year. It's called The Biological Enlightenment Studios, and the goal is to make a Pixar animation studios for biology. And Drew Barry is one of our advisors.

[00:30:10] John: He is the. Person that you mentioned who's making the biological animations, and since the last time we spoke about it, we've brought on a few other advisors as well. George Church is advising us and also Galen Sussman, who is the producer of the Pixar movie, oui.

[00:30:26] John: I. we've really started to build up the credibility of the team and the advisory team.

[00:30:31] John: we've raised a pre-seed round and we just put out a job posting yesterday looking to hire a writer. we're looking to hire a writer who has a biological mind. They're part of the biologically enlightened. also, we've been applying for some production grants as well, and on one of the.

[00:30:48] John: Grants, we got three letters of support from three Nobel Laureates as well. So we've really just been building up Yeah, the credibility of the organization and the team and doing some fundraising. And the goal is that, by 2027 we'll be launching this, 25 minute short, , called Lee's lab all around this little girl.

[00:31:07] John: Growing up in the Borneo jungle, trying to understand how it is that a firefly lights up at night and talking about the bioluminescent, enzyme luciferase and how it works and visualizing

[00:31:18] John: it as well.

[00:31:19] Karl: That's amazing. Congratulations on the progress. I.

[00:31:22] Karl: love hearing that.

[00:31:24] John: Thank you. It's exciting. Yeah, it's a labor of love and, I'm just so passionate about it.

[00:31:29] Erum: Yeah, it's absolutely necessary. I'll say.

[00:31:32] Karl: Yeah. No, I mean, we all have kids of different ages. Mine are basically grown. and they've all been exposed to biology. Some like it, some do not. Iam teaches me something new every day about her kids

[00:31:45] Erum: Ooh,

[00:31:46] Erum: Lab. I love it. What a Yeah. animation. John's showing us the animation.

[00:31:51] John: This is the Little

[00:31:52] John: Girl science fraction for Curious Kids.

[00:31:55] Karl: Yeah.

[00:31:55] Karl: Very cool.

[00:31:58] John: it's designed, for my kids as well, but by the time it comes out, they're probably gonna be too old to appreciate it as a child. But like all good Pixar movies and Disney movies, it's the kids that watch it, but it's the parents that end up getting hooked and educated as well.

[00:32:12] John: So, yeah, so I'm

[00:32:13] John: pretty excited about that.

[00:32:14] Karl: Yeah. Yeah, I am too. So, John, it's hard to believe this, but it's been almost, eight years since we published. What's your bio strategy Let's talk about bio strategy for a minute. I was on a call the other day with a bunch of Rutgers consulting students who wanted to talk about bio strategy, and you introduced me to the idea and we ended up writing this book together.

[00:32:34] Karl: Erum was one of the editors on the book in the background. if you had to design a bio strategy for a more sustainable society, what would that look like? What would be key elements of that strategy?

[00:32:44] John: One of the key elements would be distributed biological manufacturing. This idea that you don't have to have these giant centralized, , facilities with shipping and logistics for stuff, but instead if you've got CO2 or if you've got corn and you have. Energy and water, then you can have a small scale fermentation. Plant that can produce whatever it is you wanna produce. Think of it as a, craft brewery. every factory now is a craft brewery, but instead of brewing beer, it's brewing materials, or it's brewing pharmaceuticals, or it's brewing food products. that's I think at the core of a bio strategy.

[00:33:26] John: And it's interesting with. All of these, tariffs and Trump wanting to bring back manufacturing to America, let's bring back Biomanufacturing or let's bring Biomanufacturing, because as McKinsey says, 60% of global inputs can be made with biology. Let's rethink, the bio strategy for the US economy.

[00:33:46] John: Think about local. Production and local distribution. that's I think at the core of, what I think the globe should be doing around Biomanufacturing. Why is it that I'm still, throwing away my trash and into three different recycling bins and they're being hauled off and, in general, not being recycled, at least, not in a way that I think makes sense for all of that biomass and where it could go.

[00:34:10] John: so we just seem to have inefficient systems for physical goods and manufacturing, and I'd love to be able to close the loop on all of those.

[00:34:18] Erum: Yeah, John, you are in a position of influence. You are speaking to all of these other influencers that can spark change and. Can we rally around a subsidy for biomanufacturing? 'cause a lot of what has helped industry in the United States has been government subsidies.

[00:34:36] Erum: Do you see any line of sight in that? I know right now we're in a world of flame throwing and slashing and burning, but to rebuild, is that something that we can rally around? Do you think it can happen? Do you think it's necessary for us to build and subsidize the bio manufacturing?

[00:34:51] John: I am sounding like a broken record every time I, talk about this because if we. Tax, the thing that is causing air pollution, causing climate change. If we taxed CO2 being sucked up out of the ground and burnt in terms of oil and coal, if we put the real economic cost to the public of that pollution, then biology.

[00:35:17] John: Would be competitive already and it wouldn't need subsidies. So that's my wish. , is that we don't need to subsidize, it can compete fairly. We've just fairly put the cost of pollution of CO2 into the equation. That would be where I think we need to go.

[00:35:35] Erum: That would be nice.

[00:35:36] Karl: Yeah.

[00:35:37] Erum: I don't know in the next few years, but hopefully

[00:35:41] Erum: sooner not happening in the next four years now. yeah.

[00:35:45] Karl: Okay. So me change the subject a little bit. we think a lot about, unconventional ideas in biotech, and synthetic biology, but what unconventional idea in syn bio excites you, but maybe is considered too radical or impractical based on current standards.

[00:36:02] John: I am definitely very excited about longevity. Again, I've been through a somewhat trough of disillusionment thinking that just biology is too complicated. The brain is too complicated. We're never gonna, Have radical life extension, which is The main reason I got into biology in the first place.

[00:36:19] John: I believe that humanity's gonna be living forever at some point in the future. I just don't know what point it is. Let's rally around this in terms of trying to fund aging research and try to understand it so that we're the last generation to die. And recently I come across a number of, , entrepreneurs and thought leaders who have been talking about the idea of replacement. And I dunno if you've been following this or not, there was a book written by John Hebert, who's now a program manager at ARPA H called The Replacement Theory of Aging. the Replacement Theory of Aging says if you can replace your body bit by bit. through cell therapies, then you should be able to live as long as you want.

[00:37:00] John: Particularly looking at the brain, John's research showed that you can inject new neuronal stem cells. Into the brain and you can have them integrate into the existing neural networks and show that they are functional, that signals can travel between the old neurons and the new neurons. He hasn't yet shown that, you can replace the function, but there is precedent showing that neurons have.

[00:37:26] John: Plasticity. one example that he talks about, from his, research is a patient that had a tumor growing in their, prefrontal cortex, the size of an orange. And so it grew slowly over few years, I think, and as it grew, the neurons around the tumor ended up replacing. The function of the neurons eaten by the tumor, so the patient was still normal, they still had all of their normal functions, but when you look at them in an MRI, you could see that the functions that should be taking place here are now taking place on the periphery here.

[00:38:05] John: And so those neurons have demonstrated plasticity, be able to adapt around it. So what this indicates is, hey, yeah, if you can inject your own stem cells and now you can turn, skin cells into neuronal stem cells, inject them into your brain, you can have a new set neurons. so it's this idea of the ship of thesis, which is this ancient myth that if you replace.

[00:38:27] John: Parts of the ship bit by bit. Is it still the same ship? now you can potentially do that with the human brain. And this isn't just science fiction. There's actually a company called Aspen Neuroscience The founder of Aspen is a woman called Janine Loing. She's actually gonna be speaking at SynBioBeta and Aspen.

[00:38:45] John: Neuroscience has a clinical trial for Parkinson's disease right now, early stage onset Parkinson's disease, where they are injecting the neuronal stem cells into patients, to replace damaged, dopaminergic neurons that are not producing enough dopamine and causing the effects of Parkinson's. So that's already happening. I'm very excited about the idea of brain replacement. And then the second thing I'm excited about is the idea of body replacement and being able to grow, a brainless clone of yourself so that you can have replacement body. this also isn't.

[00:39:15] John: Science fiction, there's something called, anencephaly, which is a horrible condition where, an embryo develops without the cortex. most of the time, the parents choose to abort the embryo and not bring it to term. But some people who are opposed to the idea of abortion, even though they know that this.

[00:39:34] John: baby is growing without a cortex. They still want to, bring it to term. So they have delivered these babies. Now, the really interesting thing is that despite this baby not having conscience, it, it has no brain. So therefore there is no, consciousness inside of it.

[00:39:51] John: but it has a brainstem. And it's the brainstem that controls growth and development the core functions of, breathing food going through the system and things like this. there are cases that people have been kept alive by families, through. Development through growth, through puberty, 40, 50-year-old bodies that have no brain inside of them.

[00:40:14] John: They even exercise them, to keep the muscles from wasting away. this exists. So, there's a few companies out there that are working on this kind of thing, means that, In theory, you could have a spare body, you could have a clone of yourself that's grown, no consciousness.

[00:40:28] John: so I think it removes a lot of the ethical, considerations. clearly there's a lot that we should discuss and it's illegal clone a human, in the us. but imagine that having a a, brain as clone and then. It's an engineering problem to now do a transplant of your brain and spinal cord into the new body, which isn't an easy thing to do, but the reason I'm excited about it is because it's an engineering problem, not a scientific one.

[00:40:51] John: so I just think it's very, very exciting where that could go.

[00:40:54] Karl: That's amazing.

[00:40:55] Erum: Yeah, that's how I guess you live forever. just keep going to a new body. as long as, and you can replace your brain. I mean, I did hear your body naturally does replace it cells, except for the brain, it replaced cells every seven years. the cycle of cell death and cell birth.

[00:41:10] Erum: so looking at that system, it would be really interesting. that's exciting. So we're almost towards the end of our conversation, but we'll love to hear a little bit more about. what's going on SynBioBeta hyperscale. I'm very excited about that. else?

[00:41:24] Erum: get us excited about going, Zvi. I'm already excited because have the inside intel.

[00:41:29] John: Well, we have some really talking about neuroscience. We have, max Hodak coming to speak. Ed Boyden is coming to speak. we have Kate six from the Department of Defense. She's gonna be coming to talk about the Department of Defense Biotech Initiative, Dean Kamen from the advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute is gonna be giving one of the keynotes, and we have two important sessions on longevity that I didn't mention.

[00:41:52] John: One of them is with, Brian Johnson, the guy who's measuring everything about himself and Peter Diamandis as well, who wrote a new book a guidebook on longevity. So I'm very excited about all of the sessions that we have and all of the keynotes that we have. It's just gonna be, I think, the most interesting eclectic event that we've ever done.

[00:42:11] John: as well as all the big pharma companies that are coming, talking about drug discovery and ai, all of the DNA synthesis companies that are coming, announcing their new, innovations and new product launches. and then Pat Brown and, Matteas match from NotCo are gonna be speaking about the future of food as well.

[00:42:28] John: So it's very diverse, very interesting. Of people, people all around planetary health, human health and, hyperscale bio.

[00:42:35] Erum: Oh my gosh, I'm so excited for it. SynBioBeta this year starts May 5th, Cinca de Mayo. John, will you be singing with a mariachi band?

[00:42:43] John: Maybe we haven't decided what my musical performance yet will be, but, that's always a good contender.

[00:42:48] Erum: Yes, please, please. I cannot wait for that. That's what I'm most excited about. Butjust wanna thank you so much for waking up at the crack of dawn to speak with us and tell us about SynBioBeta this year, your perspective, your experience. It's always a joy to have you on the Grow Everything Podcast.

[00:43:03] John: You are very welcome, so nice to chat with you and I look forward to seeing you in a few weeks.

[00:43:08] Erum: Excellent. Okay.

[00:43:10] John: Thanks everyone. Bye-bye.