And my big question for you is, can biologically inspired engineering help us face some of our world's toughest challenges, not just in human health and disease, but also for the environment and for sustainability?

I'm Insoo Hyun, Director of the Center for Life Sciences and Public Learning at the Museum of Science in Boston.

Today, my guest is Don Ingber, founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

Today, we chat about biologically inspired engineering, what is it and how can it help us solve some of the world's toughest problems.

So, Don, thank you so much for joining us today.

You are the founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

And that name itself is fascinating to me because biologically inspired engineering is a term that I think is new to many people.

It's an inviting phrase.

It kind of suggests that engineering is not just cold, hard math, but could be actually inspired by the world around us.

Could you tell us a little bit more about this concept of biologically inspired engineering?

It's not a very new concept, but please unpack that.

You know, when we started about 15, 18 years ago, we were tasked with thinking about an institute that would that would basically create the engineering of 30 years in the future.

And so we looked backwards and we saw that engineering has transformed basically all fields, you know, medicine, engineering, manufacturing, industrial production.

We realized that the boundaries between all the disciplines were breaking down.

Physicists were collaborating with biologists and chemists and so forth.

We realized that we've covered an incredible amount of about how nature builds, controls manufacturers from the nanoscale up.

And so we basically thought we could flip it on its head.

Now we could actually leverage biological principles to develop new engineering innovations.

This is what I called at the time biologically inspired engineering.

And I think it's really proven true.

If you can talk about nature almost like as a person, nature is an incredible engineer.

It's an incredible builder.

Could you imagine trying to build a little creature that starts off as a caterpillar, make it spin a silk cocoon and transform itself into a butterfly?

To actually engineer something like that would be remarkable.

I mean, the nature knows how to do it on its own.

I know it's a self-organizing, self-assembling system, but it also builds in stages and it's built and it basically leverages bits that were used before, almost like cassettes that it puts together and combines in new ways and builds hierarchically for more complexity.

And these are design principles.

You know what I mean?

And so often times, you know, in a sense you can think of a car as many modules that they put together, but nature does it through, you know, biocompatible materials that are manufactured, you know, with water as a base, not using harsh chemicals.

And that uses living cells to basically create the blueprint and build it by collectively with other cells.

There's nothing like that manmade systems.

But people are now able to begin to use living cells and reprogram them, reprogram them to create artificial materials that can integrate with cells and guide them in different ways or combine manmade materials with living cells kind of by a hybrid materials, and to take the advantage of what cells can do, but also the advantage of what manmade materials can do.

So it is you know, you're absolutely right.

Nature does it like nobody else.

And that's why we're inspired by it.

Yeah, a lot of people might think that engineering is kind of boring and is cold, but when you say it's biologically inspired, I mean, it kind of sorts of bring a warmth, an accessibility to engineering.

It's truly the melding of biology and engineering.

And within that comes physics and chemistry and, and now computer science.

But it's where the fields have emerged and are now becoming something new.

Is this a field where somebody gets training in this, or does it have to be, you know, it's like an amalgam of people from different backgrounds.

It's really it's a it's a collaborative game, you know, art, where you really I see the way you really do breakthrough work is you bring together, you know, experts in different areas who are all excited about the same challenge or problem.

And they it's so difficult they can't solve it on their own.

But if you bring the right complement collaborators in areas, they don't have expertise, but they know they need to work in then amazing things happen.

And so it is transdisciplinary, meaning you have to have many disciplines, but it's collaborative and it really is sort of team science.

Yeah.

Now, you've been involved in this concept for a long time, right?

Way back in the seventies, back when you were in college.

Well, in college, I guess I got into the world of transdisciplinary serendipitously.

In fact, a lot of the major steps in my life are serendipitous.

But I, I got into yeah, I went to public high school.

I got into Yale winning the math awards.

I got turned off to math in classes that it was so sophisticated that didn't seem like fun.

I always had an interest in nature and I always had an interest in how things work.

I was always mechanically minded, but I also had, for whatever reason, natural interest in art without ever doing much art.

And so I was taking a class in what was called basically molecular biophysics, which is like how molecules work.

And this is in the mid seventies.

And what I was learning is that it's the it's the three dimensional form of the molecule, three dimensional design of the molecule.

It's the idea of the lock and key with an enzyme and such that the DNA helix, it's actually the shape of the helix that allows it to separate come together and in defined ways.

And I saw kids walking around campus who are taking an art class with sculptures that look just like DNA, viral capsids viral structures.

And then I asked, what course did you build that in?

And they said, it's called three dimensional design.

And so, like I, I fought to get in this course.

And in that course I was introduced serendipitously.

The teacher asked us to build structures made of sticks and strings with the strings.

Basically, he told us in a class, it was one of the most creative, actually stimulating classrooms I've ever had.

He said.

You have sticks that are about foot long, you have strings are little places to tie them at the ends.

He said, I want you to build three dimensional structures that hold themselves up in 3D, but the sticks can't touch.

And he left the room and we all looked at each other and I think one of the students must have been an art student who had seen sculptures by an artist named Kenneth Snelson or Buckminster Fuller's sculptures, but they're called ten segregate and they basically, by having the strings in the right way, the strings pull the sticks up against gravity and stabilize.

It turns out it's the way our bodies are built.

Like if you go to an anatomy lab ever, you will see a skeleton.

And the reason it looks like us is they wire it together and hang it from a stick.

But in reality, we're 206 bones that are stiff, that are pulled up against the force of gravity by a continuous series of muscles, tendons, ligaments and fascia.

And it's the the tone and your muscle tone or tension that makes us, you know, stiff or flexible or standing or lying down and that is called an engineering, a pre stress isometric tension.

That is a fundamental principle of these tensegrity structures.

But what was life changing for me was that the professor built these out of elastic strings and sticks and it was round and as you talked you would flatten it against the the desktop and it flattened and he let it go and it bounced up in the air round.

And by chance I had just learned how to culture cells in a in a cancer research lab as an undergrad and I saw cells when you put them on a dish flatten and when you clip their anchors they round up and I had heard 1975, they just said that all sorts of what's called a cytoskeleton and a little molecular skeleton at the nanoscale.

So I assume this is the way cells are built.

And then I went back to my lab, cancer lab, and we had a drug that changed the shape of the cell.

And I said, or the tensegrity changed.

And the postdoc looked at me, and said what did you say?

And I describe, you know, art class, Buckminster Fuller, sculptor.

He said, never say that again.

And so I went back to the library and that was sort of the beginning of the rest of my life in science, which is I went to the art library, the biology, the physics library, chemistry lab, and I saw a theme about this is the way nature built.

So when you went out to do your PhD, you did that on tensegrity, that must have just really captivated you to actually, I did my Ph.D.

on cancer and what makes a normal tissue become cancerous, but the more I read about it and you have to realize 100 years ago everything was described in terms of mechanics and then when molecular when chemistry and genetics came in, it was the baby was thrown out with the bathwater.

I actually saw that mechanics could be involved structure, three dimensional organization.

And then I realized that tensegrity could explain my ideas and I started to build models, and that's how tensegrity was part of my thesis.

That's absolutely true.

But that wasn't what my thesis was on and actually the idea that mechanics is important for cancer formation or why normal tissues break down and become cancer is now a very hot area in science took 35 years, but it's now well accepted.

You know, there's almost like a playfulness to what you're describing of taking an idea from art, kind of combining it with something you're learning in a cell biology class.

That playfulness, I think it to me speaks very well to kind of this idea of biologically inspired engineering where you where you're taking ideas and in a playful way, it's almost like a postmodern kind of approach to science, you know?

I mean, when I created the Wyss Institute, we've created a kindergarten for some of the world's most creative, brilliant people, and we give creative freedom to all these young people to explore.

And I was very lucky as a child to take get into a special program that was called the Elementary Acceleration Program, where we we did three years of work in two, but we actually had special art teachers, special music teachers and we would, you know, read, you know, Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island.

We would see five different movie versions of it.

We would make puppets, we would put on a play.

So you saw all these different perspective.

Everything was just different perspectives on the same thing.

I think that's affected me from a very young time to like not see boundaries between disciplines.

And so I think, you know, going back to bioinspiration, if you look at how nature does things, it does them, you know, incredibly efficiently at no cost.

It's their self-healing.

They don't use harsh things to manufacture.

And so, I mean, I think early on I realized that we could learn an incredible amount about nature.

And I tried to read up as much as I can and look for principles more than parts where in science when I was training and now too, it's so reductionist, it's so focused on like what's is made of, like, what's the gene, what's that?

It's what's the that's not the way biology works.

It works as collectives.

And I think those those are like fundamental principles, networks, collective interactions, hierarchical things, small parts put together, new functions emerge, multiple parts come together, new functions emerge.

Think of ourselves are made of molecules or tissues made of cells or organs are made of tissues.

Each one has different functionality.

Those are principles that do come in to what the field of biologically designed engineering now does.

I know that the Wyss Institute has a very strong social mission, and I want to get into that in a moment.

But I wanted to start things off now with the big question.

And my big question for you is can biologically inspired engineering help us face some of our world's toughest challenges, not just in human health and disease, but also for the environment and for sustainability?

Yeah, I mean, so the Wyss Institute has two major target areas health care and sustainability.

And I and I think we've been primarily doing health care, but we've also done sustainability so far.

But I think the future is one where that's where more and more emphasis will be.

Because I think it's that's where biologically inspired engineering can have the greatest impact.

You think about.

I was listening on the radio here and we're talking about carbon sequestration and the huge challenges and the underestimation of how much we need to do to have an impact on climate change.

Well, you know, people think about simplistic things like putting carbon under the earth or, you know, producing less carbon.

But, you know, nature is the biggest user of carbon.

And then the output or manufacturing of things we want, you know, whether it's, you know, sugars or polymers or, you know, materials.

And that's a great example where synthetic biology, where you actually people are now engineering whole complex networks in the genome circuitry to take a carbon dioxide, which is now produced, let's say by a manufacturer.

And this is like a company that just spun out of the Wyss called Circe where let's take a beer manufacturer, major output is carbon dioxide, which is killing the environment.

This by engineering microbes that you can culture in vats.

They can take that CO2 and they could make products, they could make fats for foods which are like, you know, natural.

You know, there's no animal had to be extracted for it or killed or have cows add gas, methane gas, the environment.

You could use it to manufacture jet fuels.

You can so you can think of it's not taken into the calculations of climate change, have technologies that use.

Imagine if this spread out for all kinds of manufacturing.

That could be a huge way to reduce carbon dioxide in the environment.

There are technologies out of the Wyss that you would never expect to be sustainability or energy.

For example, one of those, Joanna Aizenberg, one of our faculty, developed the technology that she want to develop a way to prevent ice from sticking to airplane wings.

And she was looking for nonstick surfaces.

And here she was inspired by a particular it's almost a little bit biomimicry.

It's called the pitcher plant in Africa.

It's really it's sort of like a Venus flytrap.

When its dry insects can crawl all over it.

When it gets wet, they slip in and it eats them.

Okay.

So she tried to figure out, like, why is it so slippery?

It turned out to be a nanostructured surface that held a liquid.

She makes artificial materials.

There's a company now that sells those to prevent barnacles from sticking to ships, which you think, that's nice.

But the amount of energy saved by having decreased resistance of having a smooth ship is huge for the environment.

She showed that you can coat refrigeration coils on a refrigerator and not have ice sticking.

Well, if anybody has a refrigerator freezer and they have to clear the ice off, you know, every year, that decreases energy efficiency.

Things like this actually are part of sustainability.

But the other thing about the Wyss that's amazing is that because we do both health care and sustainability without bounds, my group took that technology and leveraged it to coat medical devices so you don't get blood clots forming because it's so slippery.

It's like slipping on liquid.

It's like ice skater.

When you add ice, it melts and you're on water and that's now in commercialized with a different company.

And you know, an example is there are kids who have shunts in their brain who have swollen the sinuses of their brain swell.

It's called hydrocephalus.

They have a shunt put in to relieve the fluid and now they clog and the average 1 to 2 years, they have to do major surgery to take it out.

There's great evidence with this preclinical that if you coated with this, you have long term survival.

So this came out of, you know, a bioinspired idea to solve a problem that was pretty targeted not obviously sustainability yet that's what we do.

It's like you're saying you kind of fold in like you're cooking creatively.

Okay, we have this.

What could we use it for?

We could use it for that.

What you know, how does how can we adapt it for something else?

And so we develop what we tend to think of as platform technologies, something that you develop but then can be used for many different things.

And so that's, I think, a signature of the Wyss.

Yeah.

What are some examples from health care?

You know, health care, there are many, you know, technology out of my group that has gotten a lot of attention called human organs on chips.

And here's you know this is true bioinspired.

It's also what some people call biohybrid because it has manmade and non manmade things in it.

But the challenge was what's the one of the biggest problems that we could see in in medicine today is that most drugs fail when they get to the clinic.

This is a major cause of the health care crisis in terms of costs.

People aren't getting great drugs.

And then there are ethical issues because of animal testing.

And and it's and actually up until a month ago, it was absolutely required by the FDA to do animal tests before you go to humans.

And I just a quick aside, partly because of this technology, the Congress passed a change in the law that now you could use pre-clinical tests with human cells, including organ chips, as a replacement.

But so the idea was, you know, well, could we mimic organ level responses in with cultured cells?

And the challenge was like, what are the design principles that make an organ an organ?

And they actually you can distill it down to some simple ones, which is you have to have two or more tissues come together, usually like a blood vessel type of tissue.

And let's say the lining of your lung.

And then also you have to have blood supply flow.

And then I was interested always in mechanical forces and have shown for years that mechanical forces can be as important as chemicals and genes.

And so we wanted to have the mechanical microbe And so we started a breakthrough was a lung on a chip.

That's that's the design principle.

But why not take the best of engineering and apply it?

And so we took computer microchip manufacturing approaches, which you can make many things at large scale, low cost, and you have control over the features at the same size scale that cells and tissues live.

And we made these little hollow channels inside a device that's the size of a of a computer memory stick.

And we made it out of up to clean, clear material that's sort of rubbery.

And you could think of it like a tunnel, but you drive through.

So we make the we split the tunnel into top and bottom, and we have a porous membrane.

We put in the lung, we'll put lung lining cells on top, we'll put lung blood vessel, capillary blood vessel cells underneath.

We just recreated what's called the alveolar capillary interface.

That is where we have gas exchange, drug delivery, you know, metastases, pneumonia, COVID.

And then because it's all flexible, we add side chambers and we apply cyclic suction and it stretches these cells and relaxes and at the same rate and degree.

And when we breathe doing that, we can recreate lung functions at a level never seen before.

And we've now done this with 15 different organs.

We just showed a liver chip that is 7 to 8 times better than animal models at predicting liver toxicities in drugs with drugs where we knew that the animal said it was safe and it wasn't in humans.

And that in part is what's led to a change with the Congress passing what's called the FDA Modernization Act.

So, you know, that's an example of bioinspired at a level that you don't it's not biomimicry.

It's really being inspired by it.

But then think what are the tools you could bring together from engineering, biology, medicine to accomplish a goal?

Yeah.

Now I could see in the health care arena this type of work could have a huge impact and already seems to be doing so with FDA in sustainability and for environment.

It seems like you have different players, like you don't have like a patient advocacy group, you don't have, you know, like investigators at hospitals.

They're kind of driving and pushing for like demanding for that technology.

Is it a challenge to kind of get uptake in some of the.

It's a really interesting question.

And when we started, we were doing work on building materials of, you know, energy.

And they were the real challenge wasn't interest groups, it was investors.

And the medical world has venture capitalists who put a huge amount of money to do startups that, you know, big companies won't take risks.

And that's really what's transformed the whole, whole health care system.

There didn't exist in building materials in environmental multiples.

Now that has changed in the last five years, and that's just because the environmental crisis is so huge.

And I think people see the opportunities there.

You know, you could see with the Tesla and the electric car ten, 15 years ago, but we thought it was going to be impossible.

And then it just shifted overnight.

So I was just at a meeting in the National Academies on biohybrid materials, bioinspired materials and there's just numerous companies investing in the space.

So you are beginning to see companies that are making, you know, you know, artificial leathers out of mushroom.

You know, the whole alternative food industry, which Wyss is beginning to get into, leveraging what we developed for medical materials like for instead of making an artificial liver, you can make an artificial muscle tissue.

So tell me a little bit about how ideas come to fruition at the Wyss?

I mean, it must be a little combination of there's a problem that needs to be solved and then people get behind it and maybe another process of just like imaginative play and discovery and then you find, this thing that we were developing could have a certain application.

Is there a kind of sort of both?

So the first thing I would say is that what makes the Wyss unique probably to many other places, is that we're more problem focused.

So it's like if a group comes to us, whether it's a funding agency, a company, you know, a donor who has a, you know, a child with a problem, we will bring the most unusual group of people and, you know, things that have never been applied in this area before and combination of know how.

And it's really based on whether the young people in in the labs and the faculty members get excited about the challenge.

And as a result, innovation begins to happen.

We have created a unique structure we call our translation funnel, where we and we're part of Harvard, but we're also consortium with an MIT, B.U., all the Harvard hospitals.

So we kind of leverage the whole Boston Cambridge ecosystem.

But we have hired into the Wyss people with ten, 20, 30 years in product development from every type of company you can imagine sustainability, computers, you know, sound software, pharma, biotech, aerospace.

And they're they're part of our teams who help translate technologies.

We have our own strategic intellectual property attorneys, we have our own business development people.

So we actually very early on teach people about, you know, putting in what we call report of inventions, which which gets feedback from a lawyer who's who's not writing a patent But he's saying this isn't patentable because it's not novel.

Or are you saying it's not patentable but if you did this, this and this, this could be amazing.

That actually then effects a grad student, a postdoc to change their experimental design to be on the shortest distance path to impact.

And so that immediately gets things going.

And then we've created structures to provide funding and support where we will bring our business development people and we'll bring our people with product development, with a young group of people who are passionate about like they want to change the world by solving this problem.

And we ask them to like identify early on an application that they think would be a high value impact.

It may not be the final one, but all of a sudden the focus like you are almost starting a company, but just thinking about solving a problem, bringing your business development people to find out like, is this really the important problem?

Is there a market?

Are there investors start talking to investors.

And so this is where we cross between academia and the industrial world that we are de-risking with de-risking technically or de-risk commercially.

We work on cost of manufacturing, we work on we've done clinical trial.

And so we're getting things much more matured because a big problem in any technology getting out of academic labs has been the valley of death, which is it's too early, or your post-doc leaves and gets a job and nobody will ever pick it up again or the patents are submitted but not followed up.

We really bring it along so that it can be a hand off, meaning often our people go out and start startup or we license it, but you know, we're responsible for almost 25% of all of Harvard's intellectual property and startups every year.

And as we only have 11 core faculty and, you know, 15 associate, all of whom have labs in other departments.

So it's been quite an amazing experience.

Well, so sounds like this approach to engineering has the potential to really, as we said earlier, address some big problems and some of these problems people are coming to you with or you're identifying.

I started by noting that the biological inspiration of this approach engineering might make engineering very accessible and exciting to people who otherwise wouldn't really care too much about engineering.

I think nature has that kind of like drawing in power of curiosity.

But I wonder the I mean, there are some people who have a like almost like a like a sacred view of nature.

And I could imagine there could be some people who are a little bit concerned about this direction of engineering, that it might be kind of commodifying a little bit too much of what they think is kind of the sacred natural world.

I'm wondering if you've ever faced any kind of concern or criticism that like like, you know, what you're doing is you're taking these beautiful, you know, natural processes and you're sort of finding a way to commercialize it and to kind of, you know.

Well, you know, I don't think we are.

First of all, you know, man has commercialized natural processes since the beginning of time.

But that's we're actually not we're being inspired by it and we're creating something new or else it wouldn't be patentable.

You know, we can't buy things that exist.

So what we're trying to do is save our world.

I mean, if we keep doing what we're doing, we're not going to be here very long and, you know, nondegradable I'm sorry, you know, plastics that are just accumulating in the environment.

You know, we worked on biodegradable plastics.

We're working on right now, bacteria and enzymes that we can degrade a mixture of plastics that you could maybe put in a complex, you know, compost pile as opposed to people working on like one plastic at a time, because that's not the reality of the challenge.

The challenge is much more you know, we're basically trying to use nature to to to help the survival of nature of which we're part of it.

But the environment is what we're trying to save.

So I have never had that.

I mean, I've had with organs on chips, people worried that, you know, you might, you know, might create chips that start thinking.

But that's not really what is what is possible with these sorts of chips.

So, no, I haven't.

Well, here's another way to put the point.

The approach that you're taking, I think has a really nice connection to sustainability because after all, nature is kind of self-sustaining.

And the criticism that people have had maybe of of too much technology is that it's gotten this to the point where we're out of balance with nature.

You know, how can engineering get us out of a problem that maybe in the past it was part of the cause for the problem?

I think the response would be if we take inspiration from nature and if we have a different approach, we actually can leverage kind of a holistic, naturalistic view of human activity.

And I think we want to be more at one with our world, right?

I mean, in engineering there's a term called compliance mismatch.

When you have a, you know, a material like a rigid material that's implanted in the body, but our body is soft and compliant and that creates real problems.

And what what biologically inspired engineering does is to allow you to think about designing systems that are seamlessly integrating with us that could be inside your body, that could be in your environment, in your home.

And I think that's the advantage of that.

I do think it attracts people from many different areas and attracts artists.

That's been a big movement in art, you know, is bioinspired design and then there's conversations because we're so open at the Wyss.

Institute that we have artists that have come to us that we then collaborated with on exhibitions that then led to technologies, which is kind of an amazing thing.

So I think this idea, you know, I mentioned 1070 where Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome and a big sort of philosopher of the sixties, was really came up with the tensegrity concept.

And but he had the saying that I often present, which is that he said “nature has no separate departments of, you know, biology, chemistry, physics or art,” which is true.

But we are taught that way.

We have from the time you're in kindergarten to, you know, to schools and graduate schools, they're all siloed.

But that's not the way it really works in the world.

I think biologically inspired engineering is de facto trying to break those boundaries for, you know, for the betterment of man.

And only our measures of success are having technologies that become products not just a paper, but a product that actually people use and that really makes things improves the world.

You know, we're only 14 years in, so it's just beginning to, you know, have products that are out there.

But, you know, it's really happening.

And the other thing is we're training people, not didactic.

And of course, it's not how you learn how to be.

It's by apprenticing, which is how you learn really, medicine as well.

I mean, it's by doing.

And so you don't tell people to do interdisciplinary work.

You put them in an environment where they all of a sudden have a challenge and they realize the guy down the hall knows the answer, and then they start talking and then they both get excited and then a self-assemble team, which is biologically inspired too.

And that's how the place works.

Yeah.

Is there a room, as it was for different cultural perspectives to come in and kind of have an impact on some of the work you guys do?

Well, you know, it's interesting because I always say it's like Starship Enterprise.

I mean, we have every country in the world probably represented.

And I would say, you know, America is probably a minority of the people there.

It's that science today.

And so you do get cultural sometimes it's a challenge because you have different, you know, mores, styles, proximity to people.

Those are all things that you have to work through if you want to do collaborative, transdisciplinary sort of stuff.

So it is part of the training in that sense.

You know, in your wildest dreams, if you were to look back in your career and say, this is the impact that we've had with the Wyss and your work, what would you like to see happen?

Like what in your wildest dreams would be the biggest accomplishment?

I would say my whole career, I'm someone who was sort of a maverick in that I saw connections that no one ever saw and I pursued them.

I'm proud of that.

But that, you know, it's so hard to question authority, particularly in the current world.

And questioning authority is like the key to the next wave of enlightenment or advancement.

And so in some ways, I feel that if just the birth of biologically inspired engineering is sort of my is one of the major contributions I did, this idea of everybody is talking about, you know, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary research, biologically inspired.

Now I feel like I was part of that in a big way my whole life since I was 17 years old, you know.

So I think that in a way, you know, I could point out to, you know, drugs that went to clinical trials or devices and clinical trials or organs on chips or this or that, but I think it's more realizing that there is value in looking at things different ways and pursuing a path that that crosses boundaries.

What area what direction most excites you about the future of this work?

I mean, I think there's there's no doubt that artificial intelligence is coming in so rapidly and it's really going to change the way we do everything.

You know, if you just think right now, if you ever have a family member who's been in the hospital and I'd had a, you know, X-ray or a CAT scan or MRI, you know, it's read by radiologists, there's no doubt it's getting humans can't do it as good as these computers.

I mean, it's not all there yet, but it's beginning.

You beginning to see these blips and it's going to happen.

So the question is like, you know, what can what do we do?

You know, what is man do?

And it's really the creative process to do this sort of crossing boundaries that didn't exist before.

I mean, the AI works with sort of what exists, right?

And so I think that's sort of I think that's one area of just on a global scale.

In terms of biologically inspired engineering itself, there's no doubt synthetic biology, which is really only 20 or 25 years old, that maybe 20 to 24 it's about to explode.

And because it's not only engineering, you know, bacteria or yeast, but now it's human cells.

You know, you're seeing car T cells, these engineered immune cells that are used for cancer therapy.

It's those were pretty simple.

It was like, you know, classic one gene engineering.

Now people are engineering whole circuits in human cells.

And now you could have programable living cellular devices, we call them.

So living cells as medical devices, totally seamless, biocompatible, biodegradable, you know, get to places where they want to do things, do it at a self-organization level.

I think that's going to transform medicine.

And then I mentioned examples of engineering manufacturing, biomaterials, production, carbon sequestration.

So in synthetic biology is a big part of what we do at Wyss.

I think that is, you know, genome engineering is a subset of that.

And the other is, you know, biomaterials which crosses over with that because you can make biomaterials that way.

But you know, living materials, multi-functional materials, materials that have all these functionalities rather than you're going to get this put in for the mechanical support, you're going to get this put in for electrical and have one thing that does it just like our body does it.

And then finally, regeneration rather than artificial materials, like I'm talking about medicine.

Now there's Mike Levin does some amazing work at the Wyss.

It's still in lower organs, but it's just amazing in terms of being able to redirect, you know, formation of whole limbs in lower organisms and or, you know, an AI or just whatever you want.

But he uses bioelectricity.

Another idea that is poo pooed for 100 years and now just beginning to be recognized.

And you always have to wonder, like, why was mechanics poo pooed?

Why was bioelectricity?

And I don't know what the answer is.

Some of it is sort of human nature of like we're doing, you know, genomics, genetics, and look how powerful it is.

So, you know, we could explain everything.

What, because we change a gene.

But if you want to understand how the machinery of life works and I mean man, as well as plant, as well as insects, it has to have physics as well as electronic cells as well as chemistry.

And so I think that, you know, the opportunities are taking all these different approaches in the future and melding them into one.

And that's what biologically inspired engineering does.

Well, what I'm hearing from you is sort of a recapitulation of that, that first excitement, that love of of all these areas coming together back when you were a student.

And I think you're living your life, that energy has never seemed to have dissipated.

It's kind of carrying you throughout your there ups and downs.

But thank you.

I hope that's true.

Well, thank you so much for joining us.

My pleasure.

I really enjoyed it.

Thank you.