187. One Small Step for a Microbe: Lynn Rothschild’s Leap from Astrobiology to Bioengineering at NASA

Erum [00:00:00] Hello, Carl. How's it going?

Karl doing great, Erum. How about you?

Erum I'm doing well. Oh my gosh, what an amazing time here in New York City

Karl Yeah, no kidding. the Knicks won,Knicks in five was the way it turned out. And as we record this, the city is getting ready for its first ticker tape parade in God knows how long.

Karl When are we gonna have a ticker tape parade for biotechnology?

Erum Oh, wow. Yeah. Nice transition there. So, so for first time listeners, this is the Grab Everything podcast where we talk about how biology is technology and it's transforming every industry. So, lots of fun episodes for you to listen to. People get hooked.

Erum But before we get into it, we've been busy I mean, people listen because we're always out in the biotech ecosystem talking to people, finding out what's going on, and we've had a bunch of events recently.

Karl Yeah. And not only have we had events, but, like we just said, the Knicks won,the [00:01:00] NBA championship, so there's a ticker tape parade going on.

Karl At the same time, World Cup is happening. and you were at a gala last week. People are saying that this is gonna be a great summer for New York City. What was the gala you were at, Iraam?

Erum Yeah. I went to the Brooklyn Children's Museum Gala. I go every year. So for longtime listeners on the pod, I probably talk about it every June-

Erum on this podcast. But it's great. It's a fundraiser to raise more money for an amazing museum. The Brooklyn Children's Museum was the first children's museum in the United States, and always great programming, very inclusive. It's a great time. this gala in particular, this, just magical. It has, brilliant hors d'oeuvres and drinks and everything.

Erum Everyone's dressed to the nines. Brooklyn's finest comes out, and we have a really good time. the gala that just happened, it was very hot. It was a very hot evening, and this is an outdoor event in a tent, and it was hot and humid. I was struggling there, so I didn't eat or drink as much.

Erum I drank a lot of water, for sure. Yeah. And I just had to sit [00:02:00] down. I was just like, "Whoa, this is really hot." And it was probably, I don't know, probably 88, 90 degrees that evening. It was just like a really odd, hot evening. I think it was right before a thunderstorm, so you know how it gets really hot.

Karl Where do they put the tent? I think of the museum as this kind of freestanding building, so I have a hard time figuring out where they would've put the tent.

Erum Yeah. They have an outdoor area. They have an outdoor area on the second floor, and so it was there.

Karl It's been a while since I've gone. My kids are aged out of it.

Erum Yes, they are. So- But

Karl it is a wonderful museum.

Erum Yeah. And yeah, it definitely has,elevated since, you know, 10 years.

Karl I'm sure. No, it's more like 15. Felix is almost 20, so yeah.

Erum Holy smokes.

Karl Yeah, exactly.

Erum They grow up so fast.

Karl They do. Yeah, and you d- you actually had a significant milestone with your son. Congratulations, uh, Adam, for stepping up. That's a big deal.

Erum Yeah, stepping up from pre-K to kindergarten, great graduation. The school is so great, they have, an amazing drama teacher, Ms.,

Erum Orsinger, and she, trains [00:03:00] these kids to do these amazing performances. Though it was like a three-act routine during- Oh my God ... the graduation, and they do a- did all the dances, all the singing, and it was like... a party at 9:00 o'clock in the morning. And that's what you get in Brooklyn,

Erum this is how we roll, just party all the time.

Karl All right. speaking about partying, several times on this podcast we've mentioned the growth of the peptides industry. People are, dose maxing on peptides. Did you see this Bloomberg article, very long article, on the peptide gold rush?

Erum Oh, I haven't read all of it, but I am so intrigued by this. What are the highlights?

Karl People got introduced to the concept of peptides through the GLP-1s, like Ozempic, Wegovy, these weight loss drugs that were initially developed for, diabetes, and then they figured out that they were good for weight loss.

Karl But then it turns out that there's all these other peptides, which are short chains of amino acids, that are very much health related. So for example, I injured my [00:04:00] shoulder. I went to go do physical therapy. I went to see a very specialized physical therapist, and she had, a list of the treatments that we would do, and at the end of it was peptides.

Karl And I'm like, why don't we just jump to peptides?" She's "No, you don't need that yet, but she's like, "I will tell you that the peptide stack is amazing, The results are amazing." I've so subsequently healed from my injury and have gotten a lot stronger in my shoulders, thanks to a lot of weightlifting and doing things that I don't normally do and that I've learned to add to my routines.

Karl But the big thing is that, There's no clinical data on most of them, so there's an opportunity right there. there's supply chain issues because many of them are coming from China, and people have to f- kinda compound themselves. And, pharmaceutical companies are freaking out because

Karl People are ordering these research grade chemicals from China and then injecting themselves with. And one of the things the physical therapist said to me, The problem is not the peptides, the purity is the peptides." and the article starts out by talking about these, companies that are in, Eastern Europe that compound and also check the purity of the [00:05:00] peptides that you're getting from China.

Karl "The problem isn't the peptides," she said. "The problem is when your trainer is selling you the peptides from the back alley of his gym." So caution people, and we want to hear from people who are using these peptides. We've mentioned them several times before. I'm fascinated by this. I'm ready to get me some peptides for injury, for saggy skin, for energy, but I'm not going to touch any of it until we know that there is more clinical research or more people have validated these things.

Erum Yeah. That's so interesting because there's, a market demand, but industry isn't rising to it, or it's rising slowly or just fragmented, and this is how it starts, right?

Karl Yeah.

Erum Customer demand, all the companies, whether they're CPG or pharma, they meet the consumer.

Erum What happened with GLP-1s, again, diabetes, but then when people were using it for weight loss, it met the consumer and created another product. And so I think it's very interesting. And also [00:06:00] just to clarify on the compounding, so compounding is when they mix the actual ingredients into pills or vials, and they mix the medication from scratch to fit specific patient's needs.

Erum just in case people didn't get that, and it's very interesting because this is formulation, It is formulation. and what else are they putting into this formulation because you can have allergic reactions to some, filler ingredients. There's a lot of different things that are happening, so it definitely needs to be regulated.

Erum Anything that- operates on the mo- molecular level, like really needs to be considered. It's not just going directly to one location and doing its job. There are side effects, and I hope that, peptides for all the promises, hopefully, they do get to the FDA. I'm looking at Claude here about this a bit more, and, RFK Jr.

Erum is a big supporter of peptides, and apparently FDA is expected to recommend legalizing [00:07:00] seven peptides for compounding pharmacies this summer with five more in 2027.

Erum interesting.

Karl Yeah, and just to add to, , two more points on the compounding. The way I understand it is people are getting shipped these peptides as a powder, and then that powder needs to be formulated, and you have to formulate it into a very specific kind of water. It's not distilled water, it's water that is pharmaceutical grade, so removed impurities.

Karl so formulating on your own is very risky. And already, you're taking the risk with these, compounds that are coming from China that you don't know what the purity is, and that's like a whole other topic. But, what I find interesting, not just this article, but I do get ads for clinics in New York City that are offering peptides specifically for men.

Karl So these are peptides for hair growth, for muscle recovery, and for other things that men might need. but this is all kind of black market stuff. And listen, I agree with you on the regulation, but I'm also a big fan of market demand driving consumer [00:08:00] behavior. And so,if regulation is gonna make it super expensive or it's going to, take it out of people's hands, I don't know.

Karl I think if people are willing to take the risk, we are kind of moving into a society where there is less regulation, and people do take health into their own hands. So it's a bit of a-

Erum Whoa, whoa, whoa, Carl ...

Karl do, it's a bit of a two sides to the same story.

Erum Yeah. Yeah, let's just, you definitely need regulations for-

Karl Yes

Erum drugs.

Karl Yes

Erum f- for sure because- And

Karl these are drugs, yeah.

Erum Yeah, these are drugs, and, people will take the risk. Clearly they are, and if they get sick or injured, then that puts stress on the healthcare system.

Karl Yeah, that's true.

Erum And so it's like it's unnecessary risk, and, like, our healthcare system isn't set up to support people just willy-nilly trying things.

Erum and hopefully Big Pharma sees this as opportunity to start making peptides. last week during, New York Tech Week, I did this, longevity global summit conversation with, an executive at, GSK, and we talked about longevity and pharmaceuticals.

Erum And- [00:09:00] again, the whole thing with pharma is that they want to create,drugs for age-related disease, but it's hard for them to frame it as, longevity therapy. But they can still, make different molecules and,say that it's meant for diabetes becauseit helps people lose weight and control their diabetes and everything.

Erum and they went through all the regulations, and so then people then were like, "All right. we know that it has, minimal side effects" although it does. GLP-1s do have side effects, and, there's,some pancreatitis- Muscle loss ... episodes are happening.

Erum Yeah, muscle loss. And a lot of mental stuff too. Yeah. Yeah, muscle lo- There's a lot that's actually going on with side effects. So it all needs to be regulated. It all needs to be discussed openly. and this is actually a great conversation to have on another episode about, just what is, biosafety in term- and security w- for, human use of drugs, and what does that mean, and what are the ethics, and yeah.

Erum Anyway. We'll put- There's a lot there ... we'll put a pin in that.

Karl speaking of regulation, you and I talked about this, but you're the one who flagged it in our, document to do these introductions. This new sunscreen ingredient, bemotrizinol. [00:10:00] Why did you flag that, Iram?

Karl I know we talked about it, but...

Erum Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is the first new active sunscreen ingredient cleared for the US in over 20 years.

Karl Which is crazy.

Erum Yeah, which is g- yeah, definitely crazy, and sounds like it performs, better than what's on the market today. some of the benefits is that it has true broad-spectrum protection, so it effectively blocks both short and long UVA rays, and that's what causes a premature aging of skin.

Erum And then the UVB rays cause sunburns. So it has that, and it has f- high photostability, so like the traditional chemical filters don't as much as now bemotrizinol. it doesn't break down rapidly when it's exposed to sunlight, so it maintains its potency and efficacy for longer.

Erum And it also for all of the formulators and people that are going to use this in their products, it requires lower concentrations to achieve high SPF targets. And it also doesn't [00:11:00] leave the white cast that happens with the traditional chemical filters. And actually, also mineral sunscreens cause the white cast- and then it is also, a large molecule so it doesn't absorb into the skin, which is, will keep it safe onto the skin.

Erum So,very, very cool and The company that, spearheaded this FDA approval was DSM-Firmenich.

Karl Oh, interesting.

Erum So yeah, thanks to them, everyone's clear to use this, and so we'll start seeing this on the shelves. It'll be marketed under the name like Parasol Shield?

Erum and it should hit the shelves and major skincare retailers later this year. So keep your eyes open for that and let's protect ourself. Practice safe sun.

Karl Yeah, I'm excited for this because I know we've talked about it before that a lot of people, they don't like sunscreen.

Karl They don't like the ingredients in sunscreen. You mentioned the white cast. I know I have that issue with some of the mineral sunscreens that I use, particularly w- particularly when I'm out on a hike. but a lot of [00:12:00] people, if they travel, they'll buy sunscreen abroad, like in Asia or in Europe, and I've done that when I've traveled.

Karl so I'm excited for this. I think we have said in the past Sunscreen is one of those, personal care and beauty areas that is really ripe for a lot of innovation. I think another one is dental health. So I'm very excited for this new ingredient and, congratulations to the DSM-Firmenich for spending so long to get this product out on the market.

Karl I can't wait to see it.

Erum Spending so long and spending a bunch of money, about $20 million to get this through, so.

Karl Yeah, it costs a lot of money to get through the FDA.

Erum Yeah. Yeah, so awesome. what else, Carl? What's up next?

Karl You wanted to talk about some of the reviews that we've gotten on Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, and I will say I love going through the reviews, but what I love the most is seeing when someone who we don't know responds to a review or a comment.

Karl I've seen that a number of times, and it just kind of warms my heart to know that our listeners are talking to each other, complaining to [00:13:00] each other, telling each other they're wrong, praising each other. So keep at it, people. What did you want to say?

Erum Yeah, exactly. it's wonderful to see that there's a lot of engagement happening on social and in real life.

Erum I was connected to, someone that- was someone that they're just a mutual friend, but when I met up with them, they were like, "Oh, I'm an active listener. I'm a huge fan of the podcast." This person's Christina Kotzi. So Christina, if you're listening, hello. Thanks for meeting with me and sharing, your experience listening to the podcast.

Erum one of the things she mentioned is that, she just loves that we are, talking about biotech, in a casual way versus something that's very dense when it comes to science and business. Because sometimes when you're running or whatever you're doing while you're listening to this podcast, you kinda just wanna take it easy.

Erum you don't wanna overthink. you just wanna, absorb the sound of our voices and what we're talking about and through the process of osmosis and it let us penetrate your subconscious. So [00:14:00] when you do wanna talk about biotech, something marvelous pops up in your mind because of our commentary, our guests.

Erum So thank you for listening. But yeah, one of the very interesting, engagement that we have on, on digital is through, on YouTube for the Mike Levin episode Which we'll have to put in the show notes, and you guys can check out the comments. And it's all over the place in terms of people just really loving Mike Levin and his commentary, and then people that are adding to it, and it's like, "Oh, well, Mike Levin's saying this, but here's another perspective.

Erum Here's an analogy." Mike Levin was talking about a book but couldn't pinpoint the title, and so there's a lot of people that, that are guessing what that book is. and then there's,of course, people that are like, "Oh, biology, like I'm worried that, we're trying to play God here," so there's, this, controversy on that side.

Erum But it's dense. it's very interesting to read. All publicity is good publicity, so people, let's continue the conversation, and today's episode will be one to talk [00:15:00] about.

Karl For sure. So two more things before we get into today's podcast. we were lucky enough to have dinner together, a- and listeners, we don't hang out together all the time even though we work together.

Karl But we were lucky enough to have dinner with a group of our friends in Brooklyn to go see Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction author, speak at Pioneer Works here in Brooklyn. Iram, what were the highlights for you?

Erum Yeah. first of all, the highlight was our friends. we have amazing friends.

Erum Ginger Dozier and Mike Dozier came up from North Carolina. Chris Mason joined us, who's an amazing scientist, did the twin study, one astronaut went to space, one astronaut stayed here on Earth, and he looked at the genetics and the differences. He also was the leader of the Subway Swab, where it's happened here in New York City first, and now it's all over the world in different cities, where people are swabbing their urban environments to find out what microbes live there and what these microbes are doing, and- putting it into a shared database.

Erum the data's also in a government database too that's [00:16:00] open and accessible called S- SRC, I don't know what it stands for. But something to look up if you guys are interested in what microbes are, out there and, what information that information looks like. also Dan Grushkin, founder of Genspace, founder of Biodesign Challenge, and Ray Cutland, who we'll have on the podcast soon.

Erum Ray, I know you're listening to this. We'll have you on soon. An amazing innovator when it comes to using biotech in personal care, beauty ingredients, and just anything. Thinking of how biology, honoring it, and using it for products. An amazing individual. And so we already had a really cool crew, but then we went to this event where we listened to Kim Stanley Robinson talk about, so many interesting things, and him as a futurologist, I like to say.

Erum a sci-fi writer. Been writing since when, Carl? the-

Karl I think since the- ... '80? Probably since the '80s, yeah. And

Erum he's- Since the '80s.

Karl Yeah.

Erum And, really talking about how he looks at what's going on today's planet and, obviously there's, some extrapolation. [00:17:00] and, interviewing people and looking at the news.

Erum And was talking about how in April of this year, the 50 hottest cities in the world were all in India And that's 120 degrees Fahrenheit-ish on one day. it's very, crazy. And he talked about there's this moment where it could be very hot and humid, and when that combination happens at a certain temperature, you can't escape, and that would cause hyperthermia.

Erum hypothermia is when you're very cold and you get sick and die. Hyperthermia is when you get really hot and sick and die. I felt that. Remember I was talking about how I was at the BCM Gala, it was really hot, and when he was talking about that, it resonated me twice.

Erum My family's in India, I have family in India, and I'm, Indian. And then, I had this one experience where I was hot and humid. I just couldn't feel, like relief, unless I, left that tent and everything. So it was very challenging.

Karl And he was telling that story in the context of his book, Ministry for the Future, which, he'd always been on the map, but I felt [00:18:00] like that particular book really opened the world up to his vision.

Karl And the book starts off with this kind of heat event in India, and it's like a mass death event, because of this hot bulb issue that happens. And it's a really pretty intense, beginning to a book, and it leads to the formation of this kind of, , I want to call it an NGO, but that's probably not accurate.

Karl It's been a number of years since I've read the book, that is called The Ministry of the Future, which is basically advocating for the people on the planet that are yet unborn so that we are protecting the planet. it's been a number of years since I read it. I'd like to go back and reread it.

Karl I was inspired by him because he also has a book called 2140, which is like a love letter to New York City, and that book's been on my shelf for years. And so now I'm actually gonna pull it off the shelf and read it this summer.

Erum Yeah, and it was great when he was talking about that.

Erum First of all, he was in New York, so who knows? Yeah. That was cool. He is Californian. Yeah. So he, came over here for this event. and one of his things, like I wrote this book, [00:19:00] and then even though I'm not a New Yorker, my job is to imagine the life of the other and in another time, 'cause he looks into the future.

Erum but he's "I don't have to be a New Yorker, like my job is to - really try to empathize with people and then create a story around it." And I thought that was,a very beautiful thing. And a lot of his work, he like he painted himself as an optimist, and that his stories, , hints towards social action.

Erum And, he wants to tell, the story better so that people can be inspired to take action in their every day so that we do have, a more optimistic today and future. So I really, loved hearing him. But then, we got to go to the VIP party afterwards, which was really nice, after this talk, and we got to spend time with Stan.

Karl You did. - I didn't because I'm an early riser and I usually go to bed early, so Carl is boring and he left before seeing Stan. But I had seen him before, and I did want to make one comment [00:20:00] about New York. I did remember that when, I'd seen him like four or five years ago when The 2140 came out, and he said that he really got so much of it.

Karl He's been to New York many times, and he talked about that , this week. But he also had an encyclopedia of New York which became like really his Bible for while he was writing this book. So I'm really looking forward to reading it and coming back and reporting on it, but he was early writing about synthetic biology to terraform Mars.

Karl he's written like space operas that, take place on spaceships that are, multi-generational. he has I think his first, set of books was like a California trilogy, which talks about like after climate disasters in California. He is considered to be like a utopian, science fiction writer.

Karl He did talk about Ursula K. Le Guin. There was a lot of stuff. we could go deep and just have a whole podcast on what he talks about and what he writes about.

Erum Yeah. Yeah, and he's a very down to earth person, so we got to talking. he was telling me how, when it was me, Chris Mason, and Ray were hanging out with him, and we're like, "Oh, we're like, the [00:21:00] biotech crew."

Erum And he was like, "Oh, I love biology. I love John Cumbers." He associated immediately synbio with John Cumbers, was so shout out to John Cumbers. and we just had a great conversation about, what he's working on, how he, thinks about biology. We were sharing a lot about what we've learned because, he has a very specific, research that he's done and, it's not about biology, so he has this, surface level i- idea of how it could help.

Erum But we were telling him about, what a lot of astrobiologists are doing, which we'll talk- Yeah. ... about in a minute. And, he was talking about, there's a lot of perchlorates on Mars, and we were like, "Oh, we know Erica Benedictus, who's working on bacteria to help, detoxify or, I don't know, use the perchlorates and, break them down into other products."

Erum he was like, "Wow, that's so fascinating." So if that comes up in his next book, we gave him a little bit of information there, but we will hopefully we'll have Stan on the podcast soon, and we can talk to him more. So Stan, if you're listening, I don't know if you are.

Erum [00:22:00] Probably not. Actually, I did tell him about it, so let's see. But if you are, hello, and we'll talk to you soon on the pod.

Karl since, so much of his fiction has been about space and space travel, and that's what we're gonna get into today, I think this is worth mentioning that we had a big event last week.

Karl SpaceX went public, the largest IPO in history. I read a deep dive on SpaceX, the company, the kinds of things that they're doing, what their plans are. It's very impressive. I'm still a little bit, dubious of the whole thing because of the valuation, and, SpaceX makes most of its money from Starlink.

Karl added xAI onto it, and Grok, and those are, like, money furnaces. They burn a lot of money. But, it's very exciting that we live in an age where we are really building this space economy, something that we've talked about before, and that a lot of people are interested in it, and enough people are,investing in it.

Karl This was, like, a side conversation I was having with Chris Mason about the people he knows who are working at SpaceX, and "They've got the [00:23:00] smartest engineers of any company." So very impressed by that.

Erum Yeah, I think, the controversy though is just how the company is structured. obviously Elon Musk is a controversial figure, so you know, that kind of- makes people concerned.

Erum and obviously the magnitude is just, jarring and, how many people are using this as a grift, like, just putting money in and taking money out and taking money from people who, have more of a long range or, it's hopefully not people that are putting money in that probably shouldn't be, And, if there's a loss, because everything is very speculative. and like, if you look at the SEC filing, which I did not do, I just hear other podcasters talk about it, but, the goals are very ambitious, which, of course, it's Elon Musk, but- It should

Karl be, yeah

Erum getting a million people on Mars, it's very big. will he even see it? h- his family, his kids might. okay, that's great. but yeah, it just... wow, 2.5 trillion market capitalization. That's just insane. I don't [00:24:00] think they expect it to go that high. and the current share price is $190, but the IPO offer price was 135, so good.

Erum Good for them. I just excited for the effort and see what comes out of SpaceX in terms... Besides, the satellites and everything, but you know that there's gonna be a lot-- Hopefully, there's gonna be a lot more research. Hopefully, they put some of that R&D money into astrobiology. Hopefully, they give some money to our guest today to do some of their research and work and help really bring space to life.

Karl Yeah. I know we've said it before that, anything that happens in space ends up working here on the planet. What's great about all the space research is it's a very constrained, very challenging environment, and, Earth is not as challenging, but it can be. So, today's guest is Lynn Rothschild, who is a research scientist at NASA Ames and a professor at [00:25:00] Brown University.

Karl She's an astrobiologist, as Irum was saying, and we're super excited to have her on. she has been an inspiration for so many of the people that have been on the podcast, so many of the people that we know very closely, like John Cumbers, who worked with Lynn at NASA Ames. And, she's extremely passionate on, the origin of life.

Karl How do we take life off planet? she's passionate about the physical environment, and how do you use synthetic biology to enable space exploration? So, I think with that, let's let Lynn take it away.

Karl Dr. Lynne Rothschild, we are so happy to welcome you to the Grow Everything podcast

Dr. Lynn Thank you so much. It's really a pleasure to be here.

Karl I'm gonna set this up and then ask you a background question. So today it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to put,

Karl a single can of Coke into low Earth orbit.

Karl It's very expensive. And so the most expensive thing about space these days isn't the science, it's weight.

Karl let's start there. Once mass is the enemy, what [00:26:00] should we be actually be putting on a rocket, and can you tell us how you got into this intersection of the life sciences and space?

Dr. Lynn Sure, and I think the two questions are really,

Dr. Lynn intimately entangled because it is so expensive.

Dr. Lynn The number I've been using for decades and still is approximately true, is it costs about $10,000 to launch a can of Coke into low Earth orbit, and at that point, what do you have? You have a can of Coke in low Earth orbit. You're not even on the surface of the Moon. And,

Dr. Lynn briefly last year, I've been flirting with,

Dr. Lynn being on one of the CLPS missions, and I know that the cost for a NASA user is $850,000 to get a kilogram to the surface of the Moon, and that's with a NASA discount.

Dr. Lynn That-- You in the public,

Dr. Lynn it's a million. So

Dr. Lynn this is the $850,

Dr. Lynn thousand dollars a kilogram bargain. So it's really expensive at this point to get there, and I know there's lots of talk, "Oh, the price will come down. It'll be,

Dr. Lynn practically free," and so on. But it's never gonna be free unless you have a space elevator because we're having to go [00:27:00] against Earth's gravity well, and that takes a lot of energy.

Dr. Lynn So on a spacecraft, you see these big things on the launch pad, most of it is jettisoned in the first minute or so, and that's because this is fuel to get out of Earth's gravity well. So very little of it's the payload, so you have to be very judicious in what you choose for the payload. It's gotta be as low mass as possible because it's taking room from something else.

Dr. Lynn think of a human itself was, is multiple kilograms. And so if I,

Dr. Lynn have a piece of equipment, for example, in my lab that weighs,

Dr. Lynn 300 kilograms, it's a big

Dr. Lynn heavy piece of equipment, I don't think twice about it as long as I have the bench space. When I go into space, I want it to be three grams instead of 300 kilograms because it's now taking room from something else.

Dr. Lynn So we need to think of what can we bring with us that is very low mass. If you wanna think of it as low weight, you can, so low mass.

Dr. Lynn and what would be even better is if it could get [00:28:00] most of its mass when you actually need it. And what am I describing right now? The one thing I can think of that can do that is life.

Dr. Lynn Now, I'm a biologist, so of course I'm a little biased here, but it's the one thing that knows how to replicate itself. It knows how to fix itself when it mutates. It knows how to be modular. You can program it now with synthetic biology.

Dr. Lynn we don't run

Dr. Lynn on petrochemical inputs, so we don't need to worry about going to a gas station We don't need to be plugged into the wall for electricity or nuclear power or anything like that.

Dr. Lynn And,

Dr. Lynn even better is we make more of ourselves. So if the raw materials to make more of life are found off planet, so say you're taking primarily water and some minerals from, say, the moon or potentially some organics as well on Mars, you can send up very little upmass and then grow it at destination.

Dr. Lynn I guess that fits in with your [00:29:00] podcast, Grow Everything. So you can grow at destination, and that way you can break this whole problem of the upmass. So I firmly believe that life is the key to breaking this problem of upmass, among many other things. Life, I believe, is the answer for space technology

Erum Oh my gosh, I'm so excited to talk to you.

Erum I love biology, I love space. I've heard you talk before. I'm so excited.

Erum to help our listeners understand what's happening in the space world right now. Just from where you're sitting, can you just give us a high-level status report on,

Erum who's doing what, maybe some new innovations-

Dr. Lynn Yeah, there's a whole lot,

Dr. Lynn of really exciting things going on.

Dr. Lynn you're probably aware

Dr. Lynn that NASA right now is rearranging to really focus on the lunar missions,

Dr. Lynn going forward to having not just,

Dr. Lynn visiting now and again, but having a sustained human presence.

Dr. Lynn But starting with the Artemis missions, we've all just seen the Artemis II, which was really exciting. I don't know how many of your viewers were around,

Dr. Lynn during the Apollo missions. [00:30:00] I will admit that I was around.

Dr. Lynn I was a kid then, but it was extremely exciting, and everyone basically on Earth today, with a little luck, is going to, in the next few years, see that for

Dr. Lynn themselves,

Dr. Lynn humans again stepping on the Moon.

Dr. Lynn But more than that, we need to plan not just for a visit.

Dr. Lynn I think I'm already on record saying that if you're just going for a 10-day round trip visit, you can pack a few peanut butter sandwiches and you're good to go. But if you're gonna have a prolonged presence on the Moon, and then ultimately going to Mars, which is an obviously much longer trip, then we need to really think about how you become self-sufficient.

Dr. Lynn And so a lot of the basic technologies that we use to stay alive,

Dr. Lynn including things like, it sounds silly, but washing our clothes so that we don't get a lot of germs,

Dr. Lynn medicines, food, our clothing, um, the oxygen we breathe, a lot of those things are taken care of for us on Earth, like the oxygen, thanks to [00:31:00] photosynthesis, and a lot of these others are well-established protocols.

Dr. Lynn humans have been wearing clothes for thousands and thousands of years. It's just a matter of what kind of clothes and what's in style this millennium.

Dr. Lynn things like cleaning clothes, again, been done for thousands of years. It just depends,

Dr. Lynn what the style is. The, turns out the ancient Romans cleaned clothes with urine and so on, but we won't go into any with that.

Dr. Lynn so we've changed it, but we do have preexisting methods for taking care of our needs on the Earth. Some of them can be translated to space, but I do believe that this is a really amazing opportunity to rethink a lot of this and start from scratch and say, "What would be really cool? What would be a way to do this with a low mass situation?"

Dr. Lynn Plus, what we haven't talked about is having to be able to store things reliably, because it's not like going to the local grocery store and you just buy the fresh food. If we're talking about prolonged [00:32:00] human settlement, whether it's Moon or certainly on Mars, you're talking about a certain transit time.

Dr. Lynn And so things have gotta be able to be preserved or make them fresh, make them on site. And so that also ties in with being able to get around this conundrum of what happens if you forgot something. I used to do a lot of field work, and you don't wanna do the, "Oops, I forgot to pack," routine when you're on Mars.

Dr. Lynn you better be able to be self-sufficient. If you forgot your wrench, you better be able to make a new one.

Dr. Lynn so you've got the problem of what's there, being able to store it, having it reliable, not forgetting things. And so because there are only so many raw materials we have that are useful, particularly if you get to things like food, which has to be built on organic carbon chemistry like we are, you really have to think very carefully about where your inputs are going because Mars and certainly the Moon are very [00:33:00] different planetary bodies.

Dr. Lynn the way I look at it is it's basically the ultimate in sustainability.

Dr. Lynn I've started calling it extreme sustainability because we're not just following, "Oh yeah, we're putting X amount of garbage in the landfill." It's like, where did every last carbon atom go? When they're on ISS, they worry about where every

Dr. Lynn water molecule goes.

Dr. Lynn This is what I, again, I consider radical sustainability. You really have to think about the whole system and where everything's going

Karl I love that. Radical sustainability.

Karl I think people could adopt that here on Earth and learn a lot from that concept.

Dr. Lynn That's sort of usually what I say at the end, is I very much hope that some of the innovations that we're working on do ultimately radically change life on Earth. It's really hard to be an inventor on the Earth. I feel sorry for people who have to do that because invariably you're displacing something that's already there.

Dr. Lynn So think of even the sewing machine. People were already hand sewing, so you have to show

Dr. Lynn that's better. Or a car. People were already taking trains [00:34:00] and horses and so on. Why should you switch to a car? You have to somehow wedge out other existing solutions. Whereas if you're going to the Moon or Mars, the existing solution is to take it with you and throw it away.

Dr. Lynn And so it's a simpler, in a way,

Dr. Lynn a bar for me to beat. And once again, there is no petrochemical industry on the Moon or Mars. I think the plans are currently for having nuclear power on the Moon at least, but that's not there yet. We can't count on that as the infrastructure until we actually see it and it goes online.

Dr. Lynn So

Dr. Lynn we don't have that infrastructure, and it gives us this fabulous chance to rethink things and start over maybe in

Dr. Lynn a better way that we can then develop for space and bring back and help revolutionize planet Earth.

Karl I love that.

Karl so

Karl let's go a little bit into a different part of your background.

Karl You for years studied how life claws its way through the harshest places on Earth. Boiling acid,

Karl frozen deserts, radiation that would really kill the rest of us. Then at [00:35:00] some point, you turn the question around. Instead of asking

Karl how does life survive extremes, you start asking, "How do we put life into those extremes so that

Karl it works?"

Karl Can you give,

Karl our listeners your bio, some background, and let us know

Karl when did you think that turning that study into a tool?

Dr. Lynn Sure.

Dr. Lynn I'm so glad you asked that,

Dr. Lynn because really I, got interested in biology when I was a kid and looked through a microscope, so I'd always wanted to study protists, as my dad used to call them, little wiggly things.

Dr. Lynn So they're bigger than bacteria, which means that they've got personality and,

Dr. Lynn it's just like this fantastical,

Dr. Lynn fantasy world when you look through a microscope.

Dr. Lynn and so I thought I was gonna spend the rest of my life doing that, and when I came to Ames, I was already trained as an evolutionary biologist,

Dr. Lynn and as a microbiologist.

Dr. Lynn And at that point, we were starting to get into exobiology, the search for life elsewhere, which ultimately became an astrobiology program, which I was heavily involved in setting up sort of the end of the [00:36:00] '90s.

Dr. Lynn the way I looked at it is it was really evolutionary biology writ large. And you're right, I spent a lot of time working in extreme environments and writing about it and so on, and

Dr. Lynn understanding the limits for life.

Dr. Lynn And so that was my career as a scientist, which I still am. And a scientist looks at the world and says, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing," and studies how it works. And that's fantastic, and there's more than enough that is in the universe for any scientist to spend the rest of their life doing. So it's not like I was bored or anything.

Dr. Lynn But,

Dr. Lynn about 20 years ago,

Dr. Lynn our center director at the time, Pete Worden, directed me to start a program in synthetic biology for the agency, because his thought was that biology, particularly synthetic biology, which was starting to really become,

Dr. Lynn prominent on the, certainly the national radar screen, and I would say the international as well,

Dr. Lynn UK and various other places were already starting to get into it.

Dr. Lynn how we could use this for human exploration. I may have even said something like, "I don't do humans," but,

Dr. Lynn when your boss tells you, [00:37:00] go do it.

Dr. Lynn so

Dr. Lynn I then

Dr. Lynn flipped and realized I was now looking at the world as an engineer. So an engineer doesn't look at what nature has wrought. An engineer looks at the world and says, "What can I make new today?"

Dr. Lynn What can I do that would be useful? And for a bioengineer, it's taking those tools that nature has wrought and as

Dr. Lynn a baseline or an inspiration and go from there. And that's when I started thinking, "Okay, I know a lot about the diversity of life,

Dr. Lynn know something about how they work and so on, and where they can live.

Dr. Lynn What can we take from that to then help with this human infrastructure? Do we really need to bring up a steel habitat for people to live

Dr. Lynn on the Moon and Mars? Do we really need to just dehydrate food and take this for the rest of their lives? What about medications? Can you really make something last forever?"

Dr. Lynn Or at some point, do you say, "Hmm, a lot of these are actually made biologically on the [00:38:00] Earth already. Why not take some of those technologies that nature has invented, for want of a better word, and take them with us?" But the problem is a lot of these great technologies, like making wool, I got a wool sweater on right now, or cotton, I've got a cotton shirt on, or leather shoe I've got on my feet, but you can't see.

Dr. Lynn All these are great biomaterials. The problem is we're not gonna take cows with us. We're not gonna take sheep with us. We're not gonna take fields of cotton. But

Dr. Lynn A lot of these could be produced at the cellular level, so what about getting an organism, let's say, like an E. coli, something that's microbial maybe, or maybe a fungus, to produce these materials for us.

Dr. Lynn I call it raiding nature's hardware store and exploiting it. Some of my lab feels I should not be using the word exploit, but I really do believe that's what we're doing. We're taking a look at what nature has wrought and said, "Okay, what can we take advantage of? What can we use either as is by putting it in [00:39:00] a different form factor, or maybe printing into something completely novel, or maybe tweaking it a little bit to make something that has never evolved and would never evolve naturally without us?"

Dr. Lynn We can take, say, the machinery of the ribosome that's in your cell making proteins.

Dr. Lynn maybe we could make something else with it.

Dr. Lynn there are all sorts of really wild, far-out ideas, but that's what I started thinking about is, okay, if life is the answer What could we do with that once we think about life as a technology?

Dr. Lynn Not everything that I look into

Dr. Lynn is an answer. It may not be the answer, but I think other things it is the answer. And as you can probably tell,

Dr. Lynn I'm someone who loves early stage innovation, as we call it in NASA.

Dr. Lynn I love the new ideas. I love thinking of five ideas by lunchtime.

Dr. Lynn But,

Dr. Lynn that doesn't mean that all of them are good ideas. And so what I like to do

Dr. Lynn is come up with the ideas. We like to test the ones in my lab and get them going to see if, as they say, if there's a there there, and if [00:40:00] there is and turns into a big,

Dr. Lynn 20-year program, that should go out to other people in the agency or maybe go to private industry or maybe a startup takes it and runs with it, because I'm a government worker, so

Dr. Lynn I can't do startups and so on.

Dr. Lynn But,

Dr. Lynn I can certainly think and do innovations and get patents

Dr. Lynn and hope that these things are developed, and then I'm on to the next cool idea

Erum Wow. Yeah.

Erum you're among great company because we love to come up with new ideas.

Erum we don't get a chance to test them all, but we do like to talk about them here on the podcast.

Erum Of course. And some of the applica- yeah. And some of the applications you mentioned,

Erum are very fascinating. I'd love to hone in on the idea of bringing medicines

Erum up in space travel. And,

Erum there are these long missions that are projected, and medicines do expire. There's no fridge up there.

Erum you've talked about how we cannot just ship drugs and ship the factory, but what can we do? And that,

Erum talked about bacteria could brew it on demand. So walk [00:41:00] us through that. How does it work on space, and then how could it work here on Earth?

Dr. Lynn I think people don't realize that a lot of drugs are already made by bacteria.

Dr. Lynn So for example, insulin.

Dr. Lynn anyone who's taken insulin probably in the last 30 years, it's been transgenic.

Dr. Lynn it's much more efficient. You don't wanna kill cattle and all that sort of thing,

Dr. Lynn And even something like aspirin was originally isolated from, I think it was the bark of a willow tree, but we don't chop down willow trees now to get

Dr. Lynn our aspirin, believe me.

Dr. Lynn and so a lot of things are already made by bacteria. And I thought, "Hmm, this is complicated." But it turns out there's a class of drugs in particular that we started to focus on, and I have to immediately give credit to my colleague Phil Williams, who's a pharmacist at the University of Nottingham in England.

Dr. Lynn and he's the one who said, "I think that you should develop an astro pharmacy." And I said to him, "I know nothing about pharmaceuticals." And he said, "You can make a protein in the lab, can't you?" And I said,

Dr. Lynn Of [00:42:00] course, everyone can make a protein." He said,

Dr. Lynn then you can make a drug." And so what I hadn't realized is that many drugs today are proteins, and that includes, for example, insulin.

Dr. Lynn And so these, oddly enough, are the easiest ones for us to make, and they're the hardest ones to keep stable. So many of the drugs that are currently being certified by the FDA are peptide-based drugs, and even with refrigeration, as you hinted, they're often not stable for even as long as six months. And if you figure a trip to Mars is about six months to get there, about a year and a half to get the planets realigned so that you can have a six-month return, that's two and a half years.

Dr. Lynn And that's not including the fact that the engineers all want you to load stuff on the spacecraft a couple of months in advance. So say you're talking about three years of drug that's only good for six months, even with refrigeration you might not have that, is really sort of out of bounds. So

Dr. Lynn When I say we, the,

Dr. Lynn flight surgeons are not able to [00:43:00] take advantage of all these great drugs that are coming online.

Dr. Lynn Plus, as I alluded to, you can make most drugs biologically anyway. So we started by focusing on those and making a very tiny system where we program bacteria to make the drugs like other people do, but we're specifically trying to do this in bacteria that we can keep stable for long periods of time without refrigeration.

Dr. Lynn And then when they are launched into space and there's a need for that drug, you reactivate them, you give them some culture medium, you give them a few hours to grow up, start making these drugs, purify the drug, and,

Dr. Lynn in my dream, the astronaut is

Dr. Lynn now saved. So there's been a solar particle event, for example, so the astronauts have radiation exposure.

Dr. Lynn They've got about 48 hours to be able to take drugs. They should be able to make and take our drugs in well under the 48 hours if everything goes as planned, and they're saved. But they don't need to keep these large supplies of [00:44:00] drugs on hand that are going bad. Now, maybe there's some things they're gonna need all the time, and it's gonna be like, "Oh, it's the first of the month.

Dr. Lynn It's Sunday morning for making drugs,"

Dr. Lynn so that we have our supply. I don't know how this is actually gonna work. And obviously, if you've got a tablet that is stable for five years, it would be silly to remake it in, in space. But what we're doing is allowing the flight surgeons, and therefore the astronauts, to access a much wider variety of drugs than they would ever be able to consider otherwise.

Dr. Lynn In fact, I said to the flight surgeons, "Imagine you could use all these drugs." And it's like, "Oh, wow, that would be amazing."

Karl Yeah,

Karl that's amazing. Now, earlier you talked about,

Karl shopping nature's genetic hardware store, which I love that analogy. And,

Karl an example of that perhaps would be,

Karl you've talked about how much it costs to send things into space.

Karl and instead of maybe hauling a bunch of mining equipment to an asteroid, you'd grow it there. You might have a, proteins that grab a specific metal out of the muck, leaving [00:45:00] everything else behind. How close is that to reality, and what does it do to the economics of getting metals either in space or on Earth?

Karl maybe on Earth here in e-waste or something like that.

Dr. Lynn Right. I'm so glad you asked that question because that's, in a way, the project that I think has the best,

Dr. Lynn opportunity to really revolutionize planet Earth, but maybe I shouldn't pick favorites. It's like,

Dr. Lynn trying to pick favorites among your children.

Dr. Lynn fortunately, I have one boy and one girl, so I always tell my son he's my favorite son and my daughter is my favorite daughter. But anyway,

Dr. Lynn oh mom.

Dr. Lynn anyway, the thing is that I've been to some of these mines, and they are big industrial operations with lots of heavy equipment and so on. But it turns out that the biomolecules in every cell in your body and every other organism are really good at binding specific metals.

Dr. Lynn So for example, our hemoglobin is red because we've got iron that binds oxygen, or chlorophyll in a plant is green. It's got magnesium that binds oxygen, so on. [00:46:00] So we have these different biomolecules, including about half or so of your proteins in your body that very specifically bind to metal. So I mentioned that we bind,

Dr. Lynn our hemoglobin binds iron to bi- to be able to bind oxygen.

Dr. Lynn If you don't bind iron, say your hemoglobin wakes up one morning and decides to bind silver or zinc or who knows what- ... we wouldn't be having this conversation. You would be dead. It is not an option. You have to bind the same metal for the same biomolecule 100% of the time or else. And

Dr. Lynn it occurred to me that if we could take advantage of it, that's the kind of specificity that any chemical engineer would just die for.

Dr. Lynn And so why not take advantage of the specificity of life? So I should say that most people, when they start talking about biomining, they're talking about a very old technology called bioleaching. Organisms are also good at changing the pH of the environment. And so if you change the pH of [00:47:00] certain mine outcrops, you can help leach out, for example, copper.

Dr. Lynn And so that kind of biomining has been in practice actually for,

Dr. Lynn I believe since the ancient Romans.

Dr. Lynn don't quote me on that, but it's,

Dr. Lynn sort of that approximately that sort of timescale with,

Dr. Lynn newer refinements. We're talking about something very different, where we're surgically going in and binding metal XYZ.

Dr. Lynn And since I'd like to do a thousand things,

Dr. Lynn as you might imagine, I'm not one who's gonna spend the much of my life on metal Z. I'm trying to develop a system that could do any metal that's tunable. And so what we did is develop a system where we bind,

Dr. Lynn peptides, short proteins, to the outside of cells, and one side they bond to something like a fungus or paper or whatever.

Dr. Lynn The other side, you pick a short string of amino acids that binds to a specific metal, whether that's copper or zinc or cobalt or,

Dr. Lynn whatever. But you can change it. You can swap out these [00:48:00] proteins, and now you have a filter. In fact, we have a paper, and we have a patent that was granted,

Dr. Lynn about a year and a half ago on that specific thing.

Dr. Lynn So I think of it

Dr. Lynn as you, you're talking about growing everything, the name of your podcast. You can literally grow filters to mine metals or,

Dr. Lynn you could tune it to something that doesn't bind a metal, could tune some- bind something else. We did a little bit playing with binding,

Dr. Lynn paper actually to fungi, which was kind of fun.

Dr. Lynn you can do all sorts of things, but it's a tunable platform, and it's something that I do believe firmly that could,

Dr. Lynn easily revolutionize life on Earth. You could use it, as you mentioned, for mine tailings.

Dr. Lynn we particularly have been interested in e-waste over the years because it's something that's applicable both to space and the Earth.

Dr. Lynn I always say to people, if

Dr. Lynn you wanna find the ingredients for a cell phone, what better place than a dead cell phone?

Dr. Lynn if you could grind it up, pull out the metals, and,

Dr. Lynn reprint it. And so we did have a little project a few years ago doing exactly that, where we ground [00:49:00] up an integrated circuit, we pulled out at least the copper, and then we reprinted an interconnect with it with a plasma printer.

Dr. Lynn And so it's the sort of thing that's paving the way for end-to-end recycling systems. And once again, the economics may not work out right now to do it on Earth.

Dr. Lynn the sustainability impetus may be there, the environmental impetus, but the economics may not be yet on the Earth. But it all comes together when you're talking about space because there is no alternative.

Dr. Lynn There is no Apple Store around the corner or Best Buy or whatever. You better be able to figure out what to do with it. Now, integrated circuits are low mass, but they go bad in radiation, and radiation is certainly a problem in space. And so if you could reprint an integrated circuit with the helpfulness of biology,

Dr. Lynn particularly something that's tunable, so you don't need a separate process or a separate plant for each metal, but you basically can use the same one, how fabulous that might be

Erum Yeah.

Erum Wow, I can listen to you for hours. This is so fascinating to me. This is such [00:50:00] an education. We've been doing this for four years, and I'm just, like, learning so much. This is great.

Erum I'm excited to talk about- You're very- ... this next thing because-

Dr. Lynn Yeah.

Erum Oh, of course.

Erum so this next thing, I've heard that your students built something they nicknamed the Hell Cell.

Erum It's where you take an ordinary bacterium and stack on every superpower you can borrow from nature at once. So surviving- ... drying out, radiation. Yep. Brutal cold. Tell us a little bit more about this and,

Erum what did building a synthetic extremophile teach you that studying natural ones never could?

Dr. Lynn So, in fairness, we have not built,

Dr. Lynn the King Kong hell cell yet. Just to be clear, I do not have something in my pocket that is going to take over the world. Oh. Okay? But- Damn it. But you've gotta have-- You--

Dr. Lynn you may be grateful for that. But

Dr. Lynn you wanna have a big vision, and,

Dr. Lynn I really like having the vision that you aim for.

Dr. Lynn You may not ever get there, but you need to have the big vision. If you're just going one little teeny-tiny baby step at a time, you're never gonna change the world, right?

Dr. Lynn the [00:51:00] idea was that life is harsh off-planet.

Dr. Lynn in fact, there's a range of environments on planet Earth, and yet we have found life in basically every place we've looked on the Earth, including the clouds.

Dr. Lynn And obviously, it takes unique capabilities to live in all these different environments. And so that almost was dovetailing from my former life as a full-time astrobiologist.

Dr. Lynn I had been asked to write a piece for "Nature" in, oh, about 25 years ago on life in extreme environments and search for life, so I was

Dr. Lynn heavy onto the extreme environments, and people sort of expected that I was this walking book, Guinness Book of World Records.

Dr. Lynn Okay, what's the highest temperature? What's the lowest temperature? What's the highest salinity? And then I was pushed into synthetic biology, and for those who are contemplating switching fields, which I had not been contemplating, but was sort of asked to do,

Dr. Lynn you obviously should start with your strengths

Dr. Lynn and then work on your weaknesses.

Dr. Lynn And at that point, from where I could see the land,

Dr. Lynn my strength was knowing [00:52:00] something about the diversity of life, not just E. coli or yeast.

Dr. Lynn but also the fact that I knew something about the limits for life, and since we were going off-planet where the

Dr. Lynn the environmental conditions were gonna be very different, what could we learn from the limits of life here?

Dr. Lynn And maybe we could take them. So, the way I

Dr. Lynn describe that to people is, say you're going on a camping trip up into the Bolivian Altiplano, where we did a lot of field work for a while.

Dr. Lynn this is up at a higher altitude than in Chile. You're up where,

Dr. Lynn you dream about getting a little more oxygen.

Dr. Lynn You're taking the,

Dr. Lynn the altitude sickness tablets, et cetera, et cetera. So, you're up,

Dr. Lynn around 18,000, 19,000 feet, so, you know, 6,000-ish,

Dr. Lynn meters. So anyway,

Dr. Lynn you're way up there and,

Dr. Lynn not everything can survive.

Dr. Lynn it's harsh radiation and so on, so you start asking yourself, "Well, what does it take to live in really harsh radiation?

Dr. Lynn What are the tricks that are used?" And it turns out there are a [00:53:00] couple of tricks that we use, and particularly organisms that are very good at that. Which of these could we just boil down to maybe a couple of genes and therefore put in someone else's toolkit? So what I was starting to say is, when I go to Bolivia, there's certain things I pack in my backpack.

Dr. Lynn It's a high altitude desert, so I know it's gonna be cold at night. It's gonna be potentially hot during the day. I'm gonna need a lot of sunscreen. I've got particular things I put in my backpack or in my suitcase. If I'm going to do field work in the Rift Valley in Kenya, where we've done a lot of work on high pH environments, it's a totally different set of things that I put in my backpack.

Dr. Lynn It's gonna be hotter and it's gonna be muggier. You're not gonna be worried about cold nights. You might be worried about lions and,

Dr. Lynn tigers and bears and that kind of stuff. It's a-- and snakes. It's a t- you know, and high temperature thermal springs.

Dr. Lynn it's a totally different set of things. So if we know that we have to bring different things to survive in different environments, surely organisms do [00:54:00] too, and what if you could simplify it so it's like thinking of what you put in the backpack?

Dr. Lynn Oh, yeah. I mean, at one point when I was doing a lot of trips to one of these places, I'd have sort of this core set of things I always took.

Dr. Lynn When we were up in the Altiplano y- I needed my sunglasses and my sunblock and,

Dr. Lynn I say a coat, and you'd have those things together and your long johns.

Dr. Lynn And the others, you'd have this other module. What if you could do that except instead of the clothing, you're talking about a genetic module? Well, it turns out that there are a lot of organisms, for example, that live at very low pH, and they all basically have the same solution, and that is keep hydrogen ions out, so you can keep your internal environment pretty much constant.

Dr. Lynn And so you think about, well, proton pump. Maybe that's not that hard to evolve a proton pump. Maybe you could take a couple of genes that would allow an organism that never thought about making proton pump to make a proton pump, and therefore be able to suddenly live at a lower pH.

Dr. Lynn [00:55:00] the only one that's really kind of tricky to do that with is high temperature, because the organisms that live at the very highest temperature, these high temperature archaea, really have re-engineered a lot of their cells.

Dr. Lynn so cell wall lipids,

Dr. Lynn proteins and so on, to be able to survive at very high temperatures. So we haven't really been able to crack that in an easy way, but my goal has been to try to find

Dr. Lynn modules of genes, backpacks of genes that you could just add to a generic or platform organism that you then would use for biomanufacturing or other sorts of biological technologies off-planet.

Dr. Lynn So that's the Health Cell project with the adult version, but

Dr. Lynn the students and my iGEM team,

Dr. Lynn the, I guess it was the,

Dr. Lynn Stanford Brown team 2012 called it Health Cell, and I love that name. I've used it at the White House over the years. Everyone loves it except my postdoc, and so I'm sticking with Health Cell.

Karl you can't open a screen these days without being bombarded by information about AI. And in biology, it's [00:56:00] super interesting,

Karl drug discovery, protein folding, materials design. Your lab sits at this really

Karl interesting intersection of synthetic biology and space constraints, which seems like the perfect place to throw AI at.

Karl Are you guys using AI, and if so, how's it accelerating your science or not?

Dr. Lynn like everyone else, I, Google for answers, and that's a whole lot faster than going to the library.

Dr. Lynn I am old enough that I remember sitting in the basement of libraries trying to look up things, and we have so much faster access to information.

Dr. Lynn But I don't think

Dr. Lynn that's what you're really getting at, and that's sort of AI for designing a protein, for example, a peptide that could bind to platinum.

Dr. Lynn we played a little bit with that about 10 years ago and found that in the,

Dr. Lynn 10 years ago, that the naturally occurring motifs that had evolved over time worked better than the ones generated by AI.

Dr. Lynn But this is, it's totally different now. It's 10 years later. There's so many more technologies there. So I'm,

Dr. Lynn at the stage that

Dr. Lynn I'm not gonna shut [00:57:00] down for five years and try to catch up with the kids.

Dr. Lynn I do understand that it's important, and so with a little luck, I did have a, postdoc applicant this year who is a specialist in bioinformatics, and so hopefully everything will go well, and I will have him in my lab in the next couple of months, and so we will really be able to explore where that's useful.

Dr. Lynn And by the way, it's not just useful for the space exploration, but also for the astrobiology.

Dr. Lynn I remember, again, when I was in grad school, the big thing for really understand microbial evolution was doing ultrastructure. And you could spend hours on a Friday night, and yes, I did have class seminars on Friday nights,

Dr. Lynn debating whether that particular extra microtubule in the flagellum of a protist indicated that it was related to something else.

Dr. Lynn And you would sort of end the session at 10 o'clock by saying,

Dr. Lynn I still think I'm right and you're wrong, but of course we will never know." But

Dr. Lynn with now the bioinformatics, which is really,

Dr. Lynn all sort of part of AI, we now have a much deeper [00:58:00] knowledge going with the molecular data and then adding the AI component of who's related to whom, which is also extremely important for NASA for understanding the evolution of life on Earth and understanding being able to search for life.

Dr. Lynn And as I said, in my case, I try to fold them all back into the technologies as well to get life off planet Earth.

Erum Yeah.

Dr. Lynn So-

Erum Wow. S-

Dr. Lynn so yeah, really cool stuff and,

Dr. Lynn I really hope that we're able to start bringing that into my lab in a more serious way.

Erum Yeah. Yeah, and this requires a lot of collaboration,

Erum and your career looks less like invention and more like an orchestrator's conduct- conductor.

Erum An orchestra's conductor.

Erum you brought together synthetic biologists, aerospace engineers, RISD designers, and a room full of undergrads to build one impossible thing together. So can you talk to us a little bit more about

Erum did space force you to become a conductor, and what do people building biotech companies get wrong about space innovation?

Dr. Lynn [00:59:00] I love the idea that

Dr. Lynn you're calling me a conductor, because I do play a couple of instruments.

Dr. Lynn so-

Erum Oh,

Dr. Lynn nice ... so love that.

Dr. Lynn everyone has their strengths, and I was saying when you really need to,

Dr. Lynn lead with your strengths and work on your weaknesses. And I've learned during my career that one of my strengths actually is being able to see different threads that might fit together.

Dr. Lynn And so I see,

Dr. Lynn someone's CV and they say that they've spent a summer as a bricklayer, and you think,

Dr. Lynn what does that have to do with anything?" But that was one of my students,

Dr. Lynn when we first started doing iGEM, the very first team in 2011, and it turns out he didn't know that at the time, that we had intention of trying to make,

Dr. Lynn bricks using microbial calcite precipitation to build habitats off-planet at that time.

Dr. Lynn So having someone who

Dr. Lynn had actually expertise in bricklaying was really important. And sometimes,

Dr. Lynn maybe I'm too kind because I look at everyone's CV that's sent to me and I [01:00:00] think, "Ooh, that little bit could fit in this giant puzzle," and it's sort of a,

Dr. Lynn shifting group. And

Dr. Lynn it's like a game of Tetris,

Dr. Lynn running a lab, at least the way I do.

Dr. Lynn and again, most people I know are very focused on one thing, and they push the bounds, and they get the Nobel Prizes, and they get into the National Academy and all that. And thank goodness there are people like that, and then there are people like me who are better seeing, "Oh my gosh, there's that thing that's being done over there that could be used for that."

Dr. Lynn So for example, right now we're trying to work on

Dr. Lynn a flight mission to get some of our experiments on the Moon, and we would dearly love to have a very tiny camera And so I googled what's the world's smallest camera. It turns out it's used for arthroscopic surgery. And I just love leveraging medical expertise because they've already gone through a lot of hoops to be able to use this on a human,

Dr. Lynn including the reliability and the miniaturization and so on.

Dr. Lynn And if we can leverage that investment and then [01:01:00] move that into a flight instrument, how cool would that be?

Dr. Lynn again,

Dr. Lynn I see this as a game of Tetris. I have different expertise in my lab at any given time. I've had astronomers, I've had engineers, I've had synthetic biologists, I've had,

Dr. Lynn all, all-- and,

Dr. Lynn bulk of them are biologists, but all sorts of people.

Dr. Lynn And the flavor changes and

Dr. Lynn you're cha- you're torquing it and you're changing the composition and the emphasis and so on. But to me,

Dr. Lynn that's my strength and that's what I love doing, and hopefully we've made contributions that way that maybe another lab might not have

Karl I love that.

Karl it's like you're playing off of different people's strengths and putting them together, but you're the one who sees what

Karl the possibilities are.

Karl I really do love that.

Karl I think Hiram and I would do very well in your lab maybe. Maybe as long as I'm not on the bench, I would- ... yeah, I'd be okay.

Dr. Lynn Well, you know,

Dr. Lynn you need people who can do public relations as well and, you know- Yeah ...

Dr. Lynn you're doing my lab a favor by inviting me on your podcast, so

Karl Thank you. So one of the things you've talked about several times,

Karl during the course of this [01:02:00] podcast is that going to space is not a camping trip.

Karl particularly if we're gonna go to Mars, it's years of flight.

Karl even if we think about,

Karl going beyond Mars and going to other planets, we might be talking about generational spaceships.

Karl We have to raise kids in space.

Karl you

Karl have to hand a mission off across generations. And right now the target is in the 2030s to get to Mars, but is that real? And does the biology of that scenario, what human life actually looks like,

Karl across that,

Karl continuum of several years, does it change what you're building?

Dr. Lynn Oh, definitely. And I will admit that I saw the last episode of the season of For All Mankind a couple of days ago, and so I- ...

Dr. Lynn do go back and forth thinking, "Okay, is their vision really the realistic one or is mine?" And you look at it and

Dr. Lynn I don't want this to turn into a critique of For All Mankind because I love the fact that they have an astrobiologist as a hero and,

Dr. Lynn it makes someone like me think actually.

Dr. Lynn it, just like Jules Verne I think inspired a [01:03:00] lot of,

Dr. Lynn the science that came and the technology that came after him, and Da Vinci and,

Dr. Lynn all these greats.

Dr. Lynn and

Dr. Lynn Star Wars and,

Dr. Lynn Star Trek and all these things have inspired scientists. It sort of goes,

Dr. Lynn both ways.

Dr. Lynn but I think that it's a bigger problem than people realize.

Dr. Lynn space is really hard. The radiation is really hard, and the gravity is really hard on the human body. There are a whole lot of other things too, but although I don't normally do humans, of course-

Dr. Lynn it's really, really tough on these astronauts.

Dr. Lynn most of them come back after long-duration missions and they can't stand up straight. They've completely reoriented. There's been a change in the fluid flow in their bodies. Their eyesight's not as good.

Dr. Lynn it goes on and on and on. And so I think that the key to really having these long-duration missions ultimately is gonna be some artificial gravity or we're gonna have to face the limits

Dr. Lynn of humans

Dr. Lynn and sending someone to the Moon or Mars for the rest of their life without artificial gravity, [01:04:00] I don't think is gonna be possible.

Dr. Lynn unless there's a,

Dr. Lynn maybe a medication that can be taken that, that does the trick or something. But,

Dr. Lynn that's something that's gonna have to be dealt with. Now, radiation's more up my alley and there's talk of,

Dr. Lynn we're worried about radiation shielding in the habitats my lab's building.

Dr. Lynn I think you had Chris Maurer the architect that I worked with

Dr. Lynn on before, and he's done some really amazing work on the designs, but we've always been very aware of the potential with, of radiation being an issue.

Dr. Lynn and so one possibility is you build your habitat in a lava tube. There may be ways to be able to protect yourself even better from radiation, and you just have short sorta tease out into the surface.

Dr. Lynn But it is, harsh environment. You have to think very hard about these sorts of things. And then,

Dr. Lynn also the infrastructure that I've talked about before, having

Dr. Lynn the medication and so on. But I think that really gravity and radiation are gonna be the big ones that humans are gonna have to worry about, assuming that we can provide them with the [01:05:00] infrastructure, the clothes and water and the food and so on.

Erum Yeah. Wow.

Erum I just- And

Dr. Lynn oxygen.

Erum Yeah. And oxygen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the things, and just like- The easy

Karl things.

Erum The easy things and just-

Dr. Lynn yeah.

Dr. Lynn I joke- Yeah ...

Dr. Lynn I occasionally have talked to people in the military,

Dr. Lynn about joint interests and funding and so on, and they say, "Well, you know, we deal with extreme environments, too."

Dr. Lynn I said, "Oh, give me a break." You get gravity and- ... you get gravity and oxygen. We don't get those. And it's like, yeah, okay.

Erum Yeah.

Erum yeah, just

Erum the whole idea of thinking of generational space travel is such an, for me,

Erum an amazing thought experiment.

Erum It

Dr. Lynn is ... but of

Erum course, it's

Dr. Lynn not easy. It is. Yeah. But that being said,

Dr. Lynn dear departed Barry Blumberg, who had the Nobel for discovering hepatitis B and the vaccine and was our first director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, used to liken astrobiology, and I think space exploration, as a multi-generational enterprise, very much like building the cathedrals in Europe, that it took hundreds of years, and so no person who laid the first stone [01:06:00] imagined that they would be there when it was finished.

Dr. Lynn But as I tell people, particularly me in the second half of my life, that,

Dr. Lynn I'm not that generous a person. I do wanna see what the answer is, and so I realize that some of these will be multi-generational, but I will do everything I can to accelerate them, because I'm not one who wants to go to my grave thinking, "Oh, it'd be great if my students or their students or whatever finds life somewhere."

Dr. Lynn I,

Dr. Lynn I wanna know now. I wanna see humans back there now.

Dr. Lynn I s- I still have a lease on life. I had a grandmother who made it over 100,

Dr. Lynn but I don't wanna sit around.

Dr. Lynn It's funny, the older I get, the less patient I am about doing these things. It's like, let's just do them.

Karl I love the impatience.

Karl I love it.

Erum Yeah, let's get to work, people. Let's go.

Dr. Lynn Yep,

Dr. Lynn and we're in a very exciting time because we have the private industry, we have the national space agencies, we have a reinvigorated NASA,

Dr. Lynn and I think all of them working together. I just was at a meeting in,

Dr. Lynn Luxembourg a couple of weeks ago on space [01:07:00] resources, and I was really amazed and thrilled about how many commercial partners that we're starting to develop,

Dr. Lynn in Europe.

Dr. Lynn There were also national agencies there from Japan and from the United States, of course NASA, and,

Dr. Lynn European Space Agency, Luxembourg Space Agency, which I got to visit, and so on.

Dr. Lynn it's an international game, and there's so many more players now than there were before, and so the opportunities are really there, and

Dr. Lynn I think this is a really exciting time. If we can keep up the momentum,

Dr. Lynn it's really gonna be amazing the next 20 years.

Erum Oh, that's amazing, and

Erum let's talk about what can happen now. So of everything in your lab, the grown houses, the brewed medicines, the metal-grabbing proteins, and even the enzyme that does laundry in cold water, what shows up in ordinary person's life on Earth first, and does it arrive as something boring and industrial or something that people actually want?

Dr. Lynn good question. I would say

Dr. Lynn the thing that's probably closest to [01:08:00] showing up in someone's house is what we call mycotecture. So it's building with fungal composites. And Chris Maurer is one, but I think there are a couple of other architects who are looking at

Dr. Lynn making boards, for example, out of that.

Dr. Lynn Now, we've thought about this and are in,

Dr. Lynn a collaboration with Starlab, which is one of the private-public partnership of a new space station to go in low Earth orbit.

Dr. Lynn the problem is to get something in a space station, it needs to be flight qualified. And so they want to know, for example, how flammable it is, because obviously you don't want to catch fire in space.

Dr. Lynn honestly, you don't on the Earth either. Outgassing is a huge problem that we don't think about as much on the Earth, and that's

Dr. Lynn when you change into low gravity and you change into the environment of space, are there,

Dr. Lynn chemicals in the glues and so on holding things together that are then going to be toxic for the astronauts to breathe?

Dr. Lynn And since this is a fungal,

Dr. Lynn [01:09:00] wood composite rather than having plastic and glues and so on, we think it's gonna do much better. So we have to do that kind of testing for space, but actually you have to qualify materials to use it in a house too. And I think that at this point, that's the biggest hold-up to people using them in houses rather than virgin wood planks and so on

Dr. Lynn or particle board, is that we need someone to do it and get permission, and so then they can cite back, "Well, the,

Dr. Lynn zoning code or the building code for this city allows it," or this state or whatever.

Dr. Lynn I think right now it's more in the experimental stage because no one has actually proven that you can do it or gotten whatever permits that architects have to get and so on. But I think once that's done, there's huge opportunities. You can grow these very quickly. It's very cheap.

Dr. Lynn We've shown the low flammability, the low outgassing, et cetera, et cetera.

Dr. Lynn But on top of it, you think about a wood board, and it looks like,

Dr. Lynn you might have wood paneling behind you. A tree is, long and skinny and [01:10:00] vertical So say you wanna build this gorgeous arch.

Dr. Lynn you might be able to take a sliver of wood and bend it and,

Dr. Lynn there, there's sort of workarounds, but you really can't--

Dr. Lynn unless you're gonna wait years, take a tree, and convince it to grow in an arch, and then harvest that one tree to make the perfect arch.

Dr. Lynn However, fungi, the fungal mycelia, these little hair-like structures that really are the main body

Dr. Lynn of fungi, we think of the mushrooms, but that's just the fruiting body, that's just the sex part. But these hairs will grow underground, and many of them will eat wood and bind it and so on, but they'll just keep growing until they run out of nutrients.

Dr. Lynn And so if you put them in a container, they will just grow to fill the container. So now it doesn't matter if you make this gorgeous arch or an S shape or some kind of really sexy,

Dr. Lynn shape. I'm thinking of the Guggenheim Museum as I say this.

Dr. Lynn you're not

Dr. Lynn bound by tree straight boards, and so you could do some really amazing things with architecture that you couldn't do

Dr. Lynn [01:11:00] with planks of wood from a tree.

Dr. Lynn So I think

Dr. Lynn that really could change a lot of things, and it's also a lot cheaper. And again, Chris

Dr. Lynn has gone forward and made

Dr. Lynn a demonstration house in Namibia.

Dr. Lynn hope that he talked to you about that.

Dr. Lynn it's really been amazing. I think there's just so much that could be done,

Dr. Lynn immediately with that.

Dr. Lynn And there are companies that are looking less at making wood per se, but other fungal biocomposites. Ecovative in Upstate New York,

Dr. Lynn which has been very kind to us over the years, working with us

Dr. Lynn on helping make

Dr. Lynn a body of a biodegradable drone, for example, has looked a little bit more at the,

Dr. Lynn spongy materials for packing and so on.

Dr. Lynn a colleague of ours at the University of Alaska took a DOE grant and made,

Dr. Lynn a composite that's more like styrofoam, and

Dr. Lynn the reason for that was that fishing is a huge industry in Alaska, and styrofoam is a huge problem with the environment. And so if you can make this fungal wood foam that functions like styrofoam, I don't know if I mentioned the [01:12:00] fact that it's really great at insulation too, when you make these biocomposites.

Dr. Lynn It's not only better for the environment,

Dr. Lynn it's cheaper, and it's something that could be used in space.

Dr. Lynn we wouldn't necessarily- Yeah. Yeah ... have to use wood. Yeah. We could use other sorts of plant matter.

Dr. Lynn I really hope that a lot of our biomining takes off.

Dr. Lynn I think

Dr. Lynn that's really important. But even if it does, even if it revolutionized the mining industry and recycling metals from e-waste and so on, it wouldn't be something that someone would notice right away.

Dr. Lynn It would be,

Dr. Lynn mining is something that's in the background. People think about getting their new tech toy or whatever. They don't think in terms of, "Oh yeah, we've got to get the platinum out, and we recycle it for the catalytic converter," or whatever,

Dr. Lynn it's something that they would not-- it would not be on their radar screen.

Dr. Lynn and I think that was the question, what would be on their radar screen? I'm just saying that there's one other thing that we're just-- we're writing a proposal on right now, so you didn't say it, but textiles.

Dr. Lynn it's something that's

Dr. Lynn interested me.

Dr. Lynn during COVID,

Dr. Lynn I got over my hatred of sewing from home ec when I was a kid [01:13:00] and started sewing, made this shirt and so on and so forth.

Dr. Lynn And so I've started getting more interested in textiles, and there are one or two other people around the world who are starting to use synthetic biology for t-

Dr. Lynn textile production too, and we have very specific needs in space where you want it antimicrobial and so on. So

Dr. Lynn we're thinking hard about that in the next couple of weeks,

Dr. Lynn what we could do,

Dr. Lynn merging these that might revolutionize textiles either for the built environment or outside or potentially even clothing and other soft goods.

Dr. Lynn So

Dr. Lynn all sorts of possibilities, and that you would know about right away.

Erum Dr. Lynn Rothschild, thank you so much for coming on the Grow Everything podcast. We would love to have you back on, and maybe we can talk about For All Mankind, 'cause it is one of my favorite shows. So perhaps if you're free on a,

Erum another Friday or afternoon or something, it'd be great to have you back on.

Erum But we really appreciate you coming on.

Dr. Lynn I would be delighted. This has been so much fun.

Karl Thank you so much.

Erum That's a wrap.

Karl Iram, that interview was so fantastic. Give me your hot take on Lynn Rothschild. [01:14:00]

Erum Yeah. Like I said, I could listen to her for hours. just the imagination, like your mind has to really paint a picture of what's going on in space. for me, hearing her talk was like watching a movie in my mind, but like a space movie in my mind.

Erum space isn't just a research project. What, she's working on, what a lot of people are working on, obviously with the SpaceX IPO, is that, space can be a core manufacturing system that makes long-term missions possible.

Erum So all of the different space stations that need to be set up, whether it's on the moon or, getting to Mars, how do you build those stations? And even just like other space stations, that are just floating in space that helps you really, travel, but also how do you harness, the sun's energy?

Erum how do you wrangle different,asteroids and mine them for different minerals that, we don't have on Earth, or we've depleted a lot, or we just don't wanna extract on Earth as much? how do you make it all possible so that we can grow our economy?

Karl Yeah.

Erum And I think that's a wonderful thing that she brought to the table.

Karl I know [01:15:00] you're a fan of For All Mankind. I don't watch that, or haven't watched it yet. I had watched all of The Expanse, and in watching that, I felt very humbled, by what is necessary for us to go off-planet and to create this space economy.

Karl It's gonna be trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars once we start to really unlock that. But all the technology that enables space travel and living in space Will translate to things that we can do here on Earth to, help with climate change, help with construction. Lynn framed, sustainability as a constraint in space because every gram, every molecule, everything matters.

Karl what we consider to be radical or extreme sustainability isn't in space because it is the most extreme environment. And it's interesting to have this, to do this commentary after seeing Kim Stanley Robinson, because in a way he was kind of like,space travel's gonna take a really long time because it is so challenging.

Karl Space is such a hostile [01:16:00] environment." But then again, we are with Chris Mason, who's been thinking about the next 50,000 years, and Chris is talking about how do we engineer humans to make them able to withstand the challenges of space.

Erum Yeah. Yeah. Oh man, we are so fortunate to talk, with all these leading thinkers.

Karl No kidding.

Erum It's so incredible. 'cause we also had Chris Maurer on, who is a architect working with Lynn, and one of the most striking ideas, is that you're not sending a finished product onto a rocket or, onto, a space shuttle.

Erum The idea is that you send biology with a robotic system, and that it can make medicines, materials, and tools on demand when you need it, when you're in space, so it can start growing afterwards. And then, you know, thethe whole thing of course with weight, you have to be very cautious of that, but biology, microbes, they're very lightweight.

Erum Obviously you need to feed them, but you could feed them other things, obviously, humans eat food and then there's waste, and waste, bi- biology's great at breaking that [01:17:00] down. There was no waste until we industrialized everything. it's a very interesting design paradigm to think through what the finished product could look like, but you basically have a, one microbe, a seed to start.

Erum can we start making products like that? AndI think of those, child toys where it's like, a sponge-like material. It's, in a capsule, and then you just, like, put it in a thing of water and it expands and it becomes something. But it's, the sponge that expanded with water.

Karl Right.

Erum that's the idea, right? with Chris Maori, we talked about how, they created that concept of a rocket ship that had this in- foldable, habitat that had, bacteria in it, and that when it landed, it would inflate.

Erum And it's like, okay, it's just really cool, and I just love this design concept and, Lynn being, the leader of thinking about how you could do that is amazing, and it's blessed that we got a chance to talk to her. What else did you think about the pod?

Karl we've been lucky in that we've had a number of space people on.

Karl Varda, they're doing drug manufacturing in space. We had Kate Rubins, the astronaut. We had Erika DeBenedictis, and each [01:18:00] one of them triggered a different part of my brain in terms of thinking of these design constraints, like you mentioned. Erika talks about sending microbes to Mars that would feed on the perchlorate, clean the soil, enable the creation of a soil microbiome that you could then grow things in, and then take that perchlorate and, what it remains, and use that to build,greenhouses that would be ready for humans when they got there.

Karl And I think it's a little bit of a different vision than, the SpaceX vision, where they're gonna send, a bunch of Optimus robots up there to build these habitats. But regardless, you're not gonna send humans first. there probably is thinking about that.

Karl I think that would be a suicide mission because,you're not gonna come back, and you just have to be prepared for life on Mars. But the way you prepare for that is by sending those microbes up, having them do the work, having the robots work with them to build the structures, and then you can start to send people up who are going to build and populate that planet.

Karl So I really [01:19:00] appreciated, Lynn bringing all of that stuff together and getting some insight into the way she thinks.

Erum the great thing was, we started talking about, how is this all possible? How do you actually do this? the science is great, the vision is great, but how do you actually get people to work?

Erum And when we asked a question about, Lynn being a conductor and orchestrating everything, and she was like, "Well,I see myself more as a Tetris approach."

Erum Yeah, to, to, to innovation. and what she was talking about was a breakthrough can come from seeing how very different disciplines converge, and how the skillsets fit together like Tetris, then you just clear it out at the end.

Erum It's so satisfying when you play Tetris, everything fits, and it all works. but it requires a collaborative effort, requires multiple disciplines, and when you have that come together, you come up with some genius solutions, right? it's just beautiful to see. And so it's great that someone like Lynn is at the helm of bringing innovation together, especially when it comes to space and biology.

Erum I really hope that the commercial, space flight organizations, consult with [01:20:00] Lynn, take it into consideration, and actually implement more biology as technology, rather than just digital and steel. It would make things a lot more helpful for humanity and other organisms and life if life is used to support life.

Karl Yeah. Exactly.

Erum It's not hard. Yeah. And I'm feeling like I'm taking crazy pills. this isn't, rocket science. It's, so- Rockets, they're good at rocket science. So- Maybe they need to do biology science.

Karl Yeah. it's like you're saying it's not hard. I think it's extremely hard, and it's design constraint, and that's where the joy of engineering this stuff is.

Karl I super enjoyed this interview, and I'm really looking forward to having Lynn come back on so we can continue that conversation.

Erum Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And with that, got some quick pieces of news and some things we wanna share. Wanted to share a wonderful podcast that we've come across, The Smart Tea Podcast.

Erum Let's listen from them

Karl And for those of you who are on LinkedIn, we do have a Grow Everything page [01:21:00] now. Become a follower. What we learned is that for us to really leverage that page, we need to have at least 150 followers. Maybe by the time you listen to this, we will have those 150. But if not, please do follow, anyway and,support us on LinkedIn.

Erum And finally, we've gotta give a shout-out to our friends at World Biomarkets. Big conference happening in Omaha, Nebraska this September. Carl and I will be there. You should come. Promo code is GrowEverything for 25% off. Just come. We'll be in the heartland. It'll be great. We're gonna learn about commercializing biology.

Erum It is going to be fabulous for anyone that's in industry, everyone that wants to commercialize, and also people that wanna break into the industry. There's no better way to break into the industry than talking to the people that are building it and seeing them face to face, eye to eye, live at a conference.

Karl And I'm looking forward to having some Omaha steak and hopefully some Omaha,beef steak tacos.

Erum We'll m- we'll make sure you get that, [01:22:00] Carl. Yeah. Don't worry. I'm on it.

Karl All right. So thank you for tuning into the Grow Everything Podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please do reach out to us.

Karl Our contact information is in the show notes. and do not forget to subscribe to our Substack. Let's grow.

Erum Let's grow