My big question for you is how do we ensure that we can avoid these science fiction like scenarios where biological robots end up harming humanity?

Do you ever think about that?

[Music] I'm Insoo Hyun a bioethicist and the Director of Life Sciences at the Museum of Science.

Today I talk with Ritu Raman who is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

Today we talk about her work in biological robots and take a deep dive into where this field is heading in the future.

Thank you, Ritu, for joining us.

I'm so excited to have you.

You are in the department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and I think what people think about mechanical engineering they assume you're talking about engineering of things that involve gears and plastic and metal like the robots we saw earlier at the Museum but that's not what you do.

You work with really different kind of materials.

Your engineering is um is of a different nature.

Can you tell me more about that?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think I also started with this very traditional view of what a mechanical engineer does which is you make machines something that does something.

And the materials that I started building with initially were metals and polymers because that's what I saw everything in my built environment was.

Um but obviously most of the materials that we interact with daily outside of the context of things we actually make are all biological.

So not only our own bodies, people interact with, animals, pets, trees, are all biological systems and all of those are made with living cells.

And so, I try to think about living cells themselves as a material that we can manipulate and build with in the same way that we build with other kinds of materials.

So why would you move from like working with plastics, polymers, metals, to living cells?

That sounds so difficult.

Why would you like even bother to move over to that other world?

Yeah, yeah.

It's a great way to think about it in terms of the why has to be motivated by something that makes it so incredible and so interesting that it is worth the difficulty.

And so, one of the things I think the most easy way to visualize it is think about the things that you can do that a, you know, robot or machine you typically interact with can't.

So, we could pick up our phones right now throw it on the ground it's going to be cracked and all right, well, there's a thousand dollars you're not getting back, right?

But you could fall off your chair right now and bruise yourself or maybe even break a bone, but you would be able to recover from that.

And that kind of dynamic ability to adapt to your surroundings not only negative cues like damage but even things like, you know, training for a marathon and being able to be very strong.

All of those things are enabled by the fact that you are made out of materials that are inherently adaptive to their environments.

So that's why you wanna, it's worth it to up that difficulty because then you can get this dynamic response capability.

So perhaps there had come a time where it became possible to switch the types of materials you work with, the types of things you build with, what was that key period and what enabled that crossover to living materials?

One of the things that I think is particularly exciting about the time we're living in is that we're at the start point of convergence between biology getting more sophisticated, so our own understanding of how cells work in their natural environment, how to manipulate them in Petri dishes, keep them alive for a long period of time, keep them happy, and engineering.

So, tools for you know looking at things that are really small.

Assembling things that are really small.

And so, if you have the ability to look at things that are small and move them around and manipulate them and you have the biological understanding of how to keep a cell alive in a Petri dish and not just in a body then you can start putting these two things together.

And that has been, you know, certainly we've been culturing cells in Petri dishes for decades and decades, but we've been able to understand more different types of cells more complicated types of cells and assembling cells into 3D tissue-like structures much more recently.

And so, we're just we just happen to be very lucky that you know this kind of work is happening at the same time that you know we're having the kinds of ideas we're having.

Do you ever get, resistance is too strong of a word, but just people who are a little bit concerned about the direction of your research?

Who say, you know, “Ritu, you need to be really careful.” We don't want to get into, and I kind of brought up the science fiction, right?

But but what are some of the concerns people have raised about your work and and what do you think about those concerns?

I haven't gotten too much concern primarily because I would say most of the time, I try to have longer form conversations with people.

And when I do that, I can have enough time to explain to them why it is interesting to understand how people move.

And particularly motivate applications in medicine alongside applications in robotics.

And that usually I think sets people up to look at it from a positive mindset.

Where I have received more of that negative feedback is more, you know, you publish a paper, somebody writes an article about it, somebody tweets something about the article, and then it's like playing telephone at that point.

All they've written is biological robot, cyborg, scary.

Um, and so there I think, you know, it's particularly meaningful to then walk back towards the motivation of I don't want to make a robot that's not, that's annoying to people or you know makes me feel bad about how I've spent my life.

Nobody wants annoying robots.

I know, I know, and so I explained to them like this is why I made it, and these are some things that were particularly interesting to me and also here's how it could potentially have applications in medicine.

Um, and I feel like those have been constructive conversations, but it always requires time, a shared vocabulary, and I think, the ability to put aside your ego and just have a real conversation with another human being.

Is there anything in your field that you're concerned about that might happen?

Any hesitation?

I think, I do have some concerns um, broadly about I would say, you know, what we're doing is we're often synthesizing multiple different fields, right?

So, some, yes it's biology, it's engineering.

But even within biology we sometimes use genetic engineering tools for example to make cells that are a little bit tweaked.

So maybe instead of just responding to an electrical stimulus they can also respond to a light stimulus.

That's a cool thing to do for a robot.

But, you know, we've also seen examples in genetic engineering for example where somebody is modifying an embryo and potentially doing something that might affect somebody for their whole life, and can you really get consent from that person that you're um whose life you're impacting.

So, it's the thing I'm concerned about is that we are at the intersection of so many fields.

It feels very difficult to be at a, at the state of the art in everything and feel that you're not on several runaway carts at the same time.

[Music] So we're here at Harvard Square and I don't know if you've ever been here before, but this is a really cool comic bookstore called the Million Year Picnic.

I thought we'd just pop in and see what we have there yeah check out the comics.

Are you a comic book fan?

A huge comic book fan.

Was there ever an idea that you saw in the comics that you thought would be really cool to actually build in the lab?

Yeah, absolutely I think um, one thing that's come up for me a lot in the lab is thinking about the Flash.

You know, so his superpowers that he can run really quickly, and I work with muscle, of course, and so the question becomes, you know, how is he able to turn his muscle on and off that fast?

Because that's not something, obviously, that we're able to do.

And so, I get really caught up on that question a lot and I think like how could I try to make something like that in the lab?

You know, it might be interesting so that's definitely a comic book sparked idea that I'm working on.

You know, I have a good friend who got inspired to become a bioengineer because he saw Empire Strikes Back and that last scene when Luke has that robotic hand when he was a little kid, he thought "that was so cool.

I wonder if I can make something like that."

And that's how he got into bioengineering.

So, you mentioned that biologically based machines could give you some advantage over non-biological based machines.

But there's got to be downsides right like like you don't have to feed need an iPhone like nutrients, but you would have to right some of these other things you're talking about?

Yeah, um, except you do have to feed an iPhone nutrients because you got to charge it every day.

So, everything certainly everything has an energy cost.

Um one way of thinking about it actually, and I just discussed it in a mechanical engineering class earlier today, is I asked people to name different kinds of actuators, so something that converts some form of energy into a mechanical force, and thinking about you know what are things that we see.

And they said, “Oh well there's, you know these shape memory alloys.

So, you heat it up and it changes shape.” And they talked about pneumatic actuators.

So, things that look like balloons and they inflate and deflate, and I was like “yeah, you're right.” You know the actuator looks like it's this big but for example for things that inflate and deflate what you don't see off camera typically is that there's a giant tank of compressed gas that's being pumped in, pumped out.

And so, the energy source is always quite big and large and, in our bodies, if you actually think about the fact that the main energy source we're using for example for muscle, which is the actuator we use, is sugar.

And sugar is actually an incredibly dense energy source and if you compare the amount of force an actuator is able to generate per, not only the size of the actuator but also the energy source, muscle is very, very efficient and that's just one example of a tissue.

So, what are some of the things you work on?

What are the creations you make in your lab?

In my lab, we're particularly focused on how living creatures navigate their world, navigate really unpredictable environments.

And so, the tissue system that we work on is the motor control system.

So not only you know moving and walking around, which certainly takes muscles, but also how do you plan that motion?

How do you recruit certain muscles?

And how do you coordinate some sort of interesting activity.

So, it could be walking, it could be dancing, it could be gripping something.

So, we think about all of the cell types that are involved in coordinating and executing motion and we try to replicate that in our lab.

How big are the things you make?

Right now?

Most of the things we make are in the millimeter to centimeter scale.

So you can certainly see them with your eyes but, you know, to see any great detail, you'd probably need to look in a microscope and that's actually by design because turns out, and this is a different thing for different tissues, but it turns out for muscle if you look at something that's at the millimeter to centimeter scale, you have enough of the tissue that you can recapture a lot of the behaviors that you might see in a much larger muscle like in my own leg.

But it's also small enough that we can, in a not cost prohibitive manner, make a bunch of them, and test out a bunch of hypotheses on what works or what doesn't work.

So engineering is a discipline that tries to solve problems.

So, what kind of problems could this kind of engineering do, resolve?

I think, I tend to split the problems that we think about into both short-term and longer term.

So, the longer term problem that we are focused on is robotics.

We think about well there's a lot of different robots, like the ones we've seen out here in the museum, that can navigate cool environments and, and in ways that are similar or at least recapitulate things that humans or other animals can do.

But again, all of these things because they're made out of metal or plastics cannot really dynamically respond to their surroundings.

So, our thought is could we make robots that are like that but because they are part biological be able to do things like exercise and get stronger or heal from damage.

That's a very long-term goal that we're working towards but as we're doing it what we're doing is we're creating these tiny model systems of muscle and nerves and other things that control movement in our bodies.

And so when we're studying things like how does this tiny little tissue recover from damage?

We're actually learning how might I recover from damage or how could I accelerate my recovery from damage?

And so our shorter term applications, and shorter term still means you know multiple years or decades, um are looking at things like how can I learn from these systems how we recover from muscle injury or nerve injury and then turn that into a therapy that might be able to restore mobility to people who have lost it either through, you know, disease or through physical trauma.

It sounds like the kind of things you're building have the capacity, the potential, maybe really far down the road, of having some certain amount of autonomy, right?

How much sort of like self-regulation, self-control agency even would you want in something like that?

Do you always want to have like, like remote control over it or do you want it to kind of be able to do things on its own so to speak?

That's a great question and I think it's something that could be very dependent on the application, right.

So there might be certain things for example like a tele-surgical device where you just don't want to fly out a surgeon, you don't have the capability to fly out a surgeon to a specific area, but we know that there are kind of robots that might be able to do things like suturing and they can control it there you might want to have a lot of um the controls still primarily be from a human source.

But there are certain parts of that that you could think well, you know surgeon's thinking about a lot of things.

Is there something that you know that we could automate like suturing, for example, it's not a very particularly high-risk test so the surgeon can focus on you know thinking about how different blood vessels or nerves connect together.

So, there could be some parts of it that are remote controlled and some parts that are autonomous.

Similarly you could think about, you know, a bomb disposal robot or other things where you're always thinking what is the minimum level of complexity that I can endow to this the that it adds value and reduces danger for a human being but you don't necessarily need it to be as smart as a human being unless you anticipate that you won't be able to communicate with it in real time.

So, these kinds of far off into the future robots you're talking about, these biological robots, if there's any kind of quote unquote and I'm using quotes decision making involved they would have to have some kind of like neural network.

It would have, it can't just be like a lump of muscle, right?

Yeah.

So how would you actually do that?

Would you have to, would you have to have like multiple parts, multiple biological parts put together some of it kind of neural in nature?

Yeah, the thing that makes our bodies particularly interesting right is that they're made out of multiple types of cells.

And the reason is that each cell type has its own specific thing that it's good at and then it can talk to other types of cells that are good at their thing.

So, when we're thinking about decision making, we generally say all right that's kind of the purview of different types of neurons that are interacting with each other.

And so, if we want to not even you know thinking about something as complex as cognition but even have things like yes, no responses or deciding to go in this direction versus that direction.

We think about not only having muscle but also integrating motor neurons that are controlling muscle, as well as potentially sensory neurons that can, you know, detect the rate and degree of muscle stretch, other types of nerves into those system.

And so, what we would need then is to have good understanding of each of those cell types and how to grow them and keep them happy but also how to put them together and get them to talk to each other in a way that is productive and leads to a desirable outcome.

Ritu, so if you had a superpower what would it be?

It's a hard question.

I think I would be like, something like Ant-Man.

Like able to get really small because often I'm in lab and I'm like why isn't this tissue working on.

Why isn't it twitching or behaving the way I want?

I was like if I could just get really small and get in there you could just see like how are the cells talking to each other you know?

Oh man.

Yeah.

Always for work reason.

Well, I guess if I had to have a superpower, I'm a terrible singer, so I always dream of like singing really well so like maybe my superpower could be like I'm such a good singer.

I unite opposing forces.

Like I bring people together.

Well, I thought it would be like breaking glass, you know, like an opera singer.

I went violent but you went good.

You could do that with it with a singing voice, but I want I want to bring harmony.

Maybe I like watch too much Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure growing up.

But uh but yeah.

That's a great goal.

So, I've seen some pictures of the things some of the things you created.

One was very memorable.

It looked like a little sushi piece.

So, it's like a strip of muscle, you know, it's on top of like a plastic strip and you hit it with some light and it contracts, and it moves.

Now, I remember you saying when you presented this work that um the more, they move the stronger they got, something kind of like exercised and got larger, and then you can cut them, and they would heal.

Were either of those things planned or just did a surprise you that it could do that?

Yeah, um, I think, they were things that I wanted to believe were possible because that was like the whole motivating point of wanting to do it, right?

It's like you can always make a robot that walks but at the end of the day, um as exciting as that video was for me, I think if somebody had asked me to directly pit my tiny robot that's crawling across a petri dish, compared to you know one of the big legged robots that we're used to seeing, I feel like yeah it's slower.

You know, so what I wanted to show is that but it's it's cool because I can do things that that robot can't do.

Um and so you know I think first started with exercise because that's kind of when we think about muscle that's the way we we talk about it and think about it and have a very learned experience with it, right?

We all know the experience of getting weaker or stronger based on our diet and our activity levels.

So, I just wanted to try that out on them.

So just getting them to contract every day, walk every day, see how that impacted not only how much force they were producing but also how mature the muscle was and what proteins were in that muscle that we made.

And then once we did that, we figured wow that's what happens when you know you have a gain of function or good cue for in your environment but what happens when bad things happen like a damage or disease?

And so, then the obvious next step was to go in and kind of use a scissor make a little cut in the muscle and then look at how it responded.

And we did end up seeing that they could recover from that loss, and it was a very, very exciting finding.

That must have been very exciting.

So, my big question for you is how do we ensure that we can avoid these science fiction-like scenarios where biological robots end up harming humanity?

Do you ever think about that?

Oh, I do.

I think it's really important to think about.

I mean part of it I think about it because I watch a lot of science fiction and superhero content.

Um so and I think one of the great things about that medium is it allows us to explore these kinds of questions.

And I think it's true for any branch of science or engineering or innovation.

Anytime you make something new sure you're probably starting off thinking well I'm studying this because I'm interested in disease.

I'm studying this because I want to make a cooler robot.

But it is possible for somebody to use it for something that you didn't intend.

So, I think it's always a useful thing to think about.

One of the ways I would say, you know when I think about mitigating that possibility in my own research is always matching the complexity of the system we're making to the needs of the application.

How complicated, how strong, how smart does something need to be in order to be minimally functional in some environment and not necessarily, you know, give it abilities that yes, human beings and other living creatures have, like reproduction for example, that might not really have any value in a robotics context.

Yeah, what I really find very fascinating very exciting about engineering today is that there's a possibility of creating all kinds of different designs that can do really new things exciting things.

But whenever you design something, you kind of have to make some trade-off decisions because they're always going to be constraints, right?

Cost constraints or some constraints but even the technology itself or time there's some limitation happening.

So, you have to make some adjustments along the way of of what you're planning to do um and there are some examples.

For example, if you're trying to build getting back to more like traditional mechanical engineering, if you're trying to build like a really efficient city car it has to be very safe but also super-efficient.

After a while, those goals start to fight against each other because the more safety equipment you add to it, the less efficient it gets, the lighter it gets, the less safe it gets.

So, you have to constantly decide well what is that trade-off point.

What are the values that we're using to to make a decision that's going one way or another.

You know there's a saying in cycling, I'm a cyclist.

You know, strong, cheap, and light.

Pick two.

Because you can't have all three, right?

So, when you're making a, you know, a new, thinking of a new project, thinking of a new thing to create, what are some of the trade-off decisions that are kind of in your mind?

You know, like what are some of the tough choices you have to make and what are some of the constraints you face?

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question and actually I remember reading I think the car example in a paper you wrote, and I use it all the time.

Whenever people ask me this question because I'm like “yeah people are making these decisions about every piece of technology.” So I think it's very compelling.

I mean, I think, cost is always up there as a, as a reason so you know especially when you're working with living cells maintenance is a huge.

Essentially, you're buying the cells, you're buying all the food to give them, which is, can be some very expensive, proteins and growth factors and hormones.

You have to keep them warm all the time.

You have to keep them hydrated in perfect environment that kind of mimics the inside of your body.

So, all of that adds up.

But in addition to that cost constraint, the additional constraints that I mentioned like it has to be a body temperature.

It has to be in a humid environment.

All of those needs need to be met as well in order for the system to function.

So, I would say those are kind of most of the parameters we optimize around.

Like how do we keep the cells most happy and then how do we use this cell type that has the most amount of complexity for what we want to do but is not so unreasonably expensive that we can't make you know 10 robots and try different things?

You know, comics are such a striking visual medium.

I wonder if um engineers can sort of benefit from that kind of striking art that comics brings to the public.

You know, sometimes it's hard to get people's understanding of what it is that you do by even like PowerPoint slides or showing videos but if you can maybe convey these areas that you work in through imagery like this instead of scaring people it might actually inspire them.

Like I think art can be really useful for for the kind of work that you do.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's really beautiful.

Often, you know, I think scientists we're always trying to communicate our ideas through writing and images and figures but usually to other scientists to present our work.

I think using it as a form of science communication could really, really help us kind of think about how we would explain really complex phenomena that might be hard to visualize just based on words through mediums like this.

Are the things that you create in the lab sort of, do they look the way they do because it's all functionality or do you ever kind of think a little bit about um, lack of a better term, like marketability?

Like kind of acceptance.

Like you know how it might look might lead to people's better acceptance of what it is that you do.

That's a great point actually.

I'm not sure that I've ever thought about the aesthetic appeal or impact of the work but I think um it could be particularly useful when thinking about you know you can make any of a wide variety of robots but there might be something that's a little bit more appealing or interesting or capturing the imagination so maybe I'll have to give that some thought.

What I find interesting and very very promising about this direction of engineering is there could be a very intentional approach to this right.

So, so instead of just having the people that traditionally are there at the lab meeting brainstorming and and thinking about you know going this way rather than that way.

Could other people who normally are not part of the lab but kind of you know represent a little bit more societal attitudes and concerns should they be involved in some of that discussion early on as your kind of planning you know a design of something?

Because of course you're always building something that you think is going to be useful for society but shouldn't some people from society have some some say in that process a creative process.

Yeah, yeah.

I think the place that I found it most effective to do something have those kinds of conversations and actually I did it just before walking over here I was at the BioMaker Space at MIT and what this is is like it's a maker space so people can learn how to build different things, but it's focused on building with biology.

And we host these workshops there that are for broader community members.

Not just, you know, could be somebody from the business school or somebody in administrative staff who can come in learn how to work with cells.

They try to make our muscle tissues which gives them a lot of the basic vocabulary of the kinds of things we work with.

And then I usually go and visit that class and when I have conversations of like this is what we're working on et cetera et cetera they can often ask some of the most interesting questions of the next things that we could pursue because they don't necessarily have a bunch of preconceived notions or inhibitions about what is or isn't possible.

So, I found those kinds of discussions very, very valuable I think I tend to think of the BioMaker space as kind of an extension of my lab so I would still consider it in that group meeting context.

My students help run that workshop, I think when people are really worried about science fiction scenarios, dystopian scenarios of these kinds of technologies and where they may be heading.

Perhaps they feel that way because they feel really disconnected from the creative process and and uh and they feel like they have no control over what the future might pretend.

So, it might be even just good science and good at public relations just to involve people and include their voice in that earlier process.

So, there might be kind of even like a self-interested reason to to bring in that that kind of dialogue.

You've been doing lots of really interesting work also in the space of getting people excited about STEM especially uh girls.

And can you tell me a little bit more about that that work in that arena?

Yeah, I mean I think for me I think about the reasons that I got into a STEM career and my mom, my dad, my grandfather, were all engineers, mechanical, chemical, civil engineer, and they're kind of people that were very actively building, physically building, tangible things that were solving problems in their communities.

And that was very exciting to me.

I wanted to do something that was meaningful.

I wanted to feel like I had a positive impact.

That was what brought me to STEM, and I think that's why it makes sense to engage with other people to know what are the things that are, what are the things that are bothering them?

And how can I solve those problems, right?

It gives you some meaning.

And kind of tied in with that, is then the question of, we can ask a lot of people what's bothering you.

But then if we have only one kind of person solving those problems, we have a certain set of ideas that we're exploring in a large parameter space that we're ignoring.

I think we just have a ton of unsolved problems.

It seems silly to me that we would exclude half the population if not more from that kind of problem solving.

And so, I think it is self-interested you know for everybody to say how do I get the best, smartest, most interesting, exciting, people um working on the stuff that will make all of our lives more comfortable and fun.

So that's why I'm particularly motivated, not only to share science, but also, I don't think I wouldn't think of it so much as like getting girls interested in science.

I think everybody is interested in science by nature.

We just have to see kids running around a museum, so I know that.

But it's more preserving their confidence that, that is something they can be good at when there's a lot of societal and cultural cues that push against it.

Right.

Did you face any of that when you were growing up?

I, I you said you came from an extremely you know scientific family and full of engineers.

But but did you.

did you feel some of that growing up?

Yeah, I think that I was very privileged in that I had an inside bubble that was very different from the outside bubble, right?

So, from the outside world I like, everybody else was, getting certain cues about girls aren't good at math.

There aren't a lot, they█re just clearly being not that many female scientists as role models to look up to.

We weren't like you know talking about that robot that was made by that girl.

That was never a thing.

Um not on TV, not in real life.

And if I hadn't had the privilege of my family which not only showed me a woman who was an engineer but also men who respected her as an engineer, I don't know that I would have had the confidence and the courage to kind of pursue that path.

So, it certainly I think a particularly lucky accident for me, but I would like to give other people that sort of confidence bubble.

If they can't find it in their family, hopefully they can find it elsewhere.

So, do you think that comic books could be used to teach like young folks, students some important concepts?

I mean you know you can like go anywhere with comics.

You can go on any topic.

You can take it in any direction.

It would seem like you could use something like this to teach younger folks some really cool concepts.

Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely um you know I'm actually the advisor for a comic book series on young girls in science.

Um, so I think it's something that sort of conveys real scientific concepts but is a little bit more engaged in outreach.

And actually, even here I've kind of found a bunch of things that a little more targeted at adults like a medical memoir that walks people through the experience of what it might be like to have breast cancer.

So, it's just a really useful medium to talk about things I think.

Yeah, I mean in my area of bioethics there's so many like science fiction like scenarios that people want to talk about.

And if you can, if you can engage them in a way with a comic, to walk through some of these scenarios and actually teach them along the way, you know, some of the questions that come up and research.

I think that could be really over really cool next step.

Maybe we should start something where like, you know, we actually have academic comics that you can use.

I would be very into that idea.

So, are there disciplines or are there other researchers who you wish you could collaborate more with?

Like types of researchers.

Um you know that really you think would really take the field to the next level.

Are there conversations that should be happening that are not really happening?

Some sets of conversations that I've been particularly enjoying over the past year is that I've I'm learning more about the different branches of biology.

In the past I was mostly thinking about biology as human biology or biology of other mammals for which can be translated to humans because I was mostly interested in medicine and medical applications.

As we think more about this robotics work, I've been having really interesting conversations with biologists who study squirrels and ants and whales and realizing that the way that they create movement is actually different and very exciting and could be leveraged in robotics even if it doesn't have applications in medicine.

And so, getting that kind of flavor and breadth has been very nice especially because, I think you know going back to this ethical perspective, their motivation is a lot of like just natural curiosity about the biological world and not just disease, going to cure it.

And I think it's very exciting to think about that as a motivation as well.

Do you ever think about possible collaborations with artists?

I mean um I I asked that because in my experience in bioethics a lot of time people maybe subconsciously make moral judgments about what they think about something novel based on how it looks.

If it looks scary, if it looks gross, it's evil.

Yeah.

If it's beautiful and pleasant it█s, it's beautiful.

And when you look at mythologies that's kind of how things play out.

But good characters are beautiful, and the evil ones are gross so it kind of maybe viscerally matters to people how things look and they come to a snap judgment.

There's a possibly real opportunity to sort of be very mindful of what these things look like because that might elicit a response.

I wonder are there opportunities, are there conversations with designers█ kind of more the aesthetic realm that could be kind of an interesting way of getting people together and maybe move the field forward in that in a positive direction.

Just your thoughts on that?

Yeah I think I think that's a really, really interesting point because I had always thought of it as you know in outreach or communication tool of oh well not everybody learns from a podcast not everybody learns from reading some people are more visual and that's great but now that you bring up this other point of visual cues often lead to visceral moral judgments that's very true.

I can think of things where I'm like I like that, I don't like it from from nothing else than just looking at it.

I think that's super, super interesting and would be something that I'd really like to explore further.

Thinking about not only how can it be used to educate and share um but also cultivate feelings of warmth and optimism.

Yeah, I think it could be, and again I'm so excited by the seal because I see some so much interesting potential and one area that might be under-explored but could be fruitful, is this idea of breaking down the barriers or the assumed barriers between art and engineering.

Why do they have to be different silos?

I mean why can't one inspire the other?

Can't they co-conspire or work together to to complement each other?

So, it would be really fascinating to fast forward several years from now to see you know look at the great stuff coming out of Ritu's lab or MIT.

That's not only useful but just beautiful.

Yeah, yeah.

That'll be wonderful.

It would be wonderful, and I think to your point, I don't see science as separate from art.

Because often what we're doing is we're saying there's a thing right I need to get from here to there but that's all.

That's the problem.

But you could build stairs.

You could build a rope.

You could swing from here to there.

There's so many ways and each person would design that solution differently and to me that is art.

So, I don't really see a distinction at least in my head between the fields.

When you look out of the natural world like, what inspires you the most?

Like what in your wildest dreams would you love to somehow leverage, or you know you know utilize or mimic?

Is there anything in particular you feel like wow if I could if I could accomplish something that could do something kind of like that it'd be awesome?

Yeah, I think the thing that kind of excites me the most is the diversity of our natural world, right?

Because yes, of course, we see humans do incredible things.

There's stuff that I can do which is exciting.

There's a stuff that an Olympian can do, much more exciting, one might argue.

Or a TikTok dancer, I guess.

Um but also yesterday for example I met with a student who didn't have a very similar background to me, but they just showed me a video on their phone of a trap jaw ant.

And they can like basically snap the head off of termite so incredibly fast, right?

I visibly gasped, which I have not done in a research meeting in a really long time, and similarly you know you might see hummingbirds or fishes and they're all doing and there's so many kinds of animals.

And every time you see these videos, I think you feel this like childhood level oh my gosh that's so cool.

That you can still capture at any time.

And the nice thing there is the diversity.

There's so many different kinds of animals that can do all of these different things.

And so, I'm very excited I think about not just getting inspiration from humans or dogs or things we see more normally, which are very exciting, but also thinking more broadly about all of the the natural biodiversity.

So, you said that you almost felt like childlike when you saw that video, as a child what, what did you see that made you gasp?

So, one of the other exciting things about my childhood is that I spent one of my my first memories are growing up in Kenya.

And so, I was born in India, I moved to Kenya when I was very young so that's kind of a lot of my early memories are coded there.

And part of my dad's job was we lived in the city during the weekdays but on the weekends, we would travel to rural villages to help put up communication towers.

And when you're in a more rural setting of course there's just more nature right.

That is not a typical childhood by the way.

It's not typical at all, but it's so wonderful because Kenya is naturally a very beautiful place.

Not just you know not even excluding animals like mountains, grass, waterfalls, sunsets, and then going on safari as a child.

The same week that I watched The Lion King, I went on safari.

And let me tell you that's also very atypical.

Very atypical but it is hard to shake that experience and it's hard not to be so excited about the natural world around us.

Well, that excitement still comes through in your work I'm so happy you joined us today, this is such a fun conversation.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

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