The Climate Biotech Podcast
Are you fascinated by the power and potential of biotechnology? Do you want to learn about cutting-edge innovations that can address climate change?
The Climate Biotech Podcast explores the most pressing problems at the intersection of climate and biology, and most importantly, how to solve them. Hosted by Dan Goodwin, a neuroscientist turned biotech enthusiast, the podcast features interviews with leading experts diving deep into topics like plant synthetic biology, mitochondrial engineering, gene editing, and more.
This podcast is powered by Homeworld Collective, a non-profit whose mission is to ignite the field of climate biotechnology.
The Climate Biotech Podcast
Democratizing Science with Jas Neal and Elliot Roth
What if you could break free from traditional educational constraints and ignite your passion for science in a community biolab? Join us as Jas Neal and Elliot Roth share their remarkable journeys that challenge the norms of scientific exploration. Jas takes us from her entrepreneurial roots in Florida to her pioneering efforts in biochemistry, while Elliot reveals how community biolabs helped him bypass educational barriers to pursue his love for materials science. Together, they shine a spotlight on these innovative spaces that serve as a bridge between the rigid structures of universities and the dynamic world of startups!
(00:00) Introduction to the Climate Biotech Podcast
(00:20) Meet the Hosts: Dan, Jas, and Elliot
(00:44) The Value of Recording Conversations
(01:41) Introducing Jess Neal and Elliot
(03:21) Jas's Journey into Community Biolabs
(05:28) Elliot's Background and Passion for Biology
(06:46) Challenges and Realizations in Academia
(08:45) The Role of Community Biolabs
(09:15) Learning and Experimentation in Community Labs
(16:36) Elliot's Unique Lab Spaces and Projects
(19:12) Collaborations and Success Stories
(23:39) Criticisms and Limitations of Community Biolabs
(25:36) Challenges in Community Bio Labs
(26:54) Funding and Sustainability Issues
(29:13) The Importance of Play and Experimentation
(32:51) Innovative Funding Models and Projects
(38:24) Future of Community Bio Labs
(46:43) Rapid Fire Questions and Closing Thoughts
Welcome to the Climate Biotech podcast, where we explore the most important problems at the intersection of climate and biology and, most importantly, how we can solve them. I'm Dan Goodwin, a technologist who spent years transitioning from software and neuroscience to a career in climate biotechnology. As your host, I will interview our sector's most creative voices, from scientists and entrepreneurs to policymakers and investors, so it's so great that we're all together To give a little bit of context. The goal with these conversations always is to get me to shut up and to get other people really talking, and today the people talking is going to be Jess and Elliot. So we've done over 40 of these conversations now. We only recently started recording them and we did them off the record because that's where the most interesting conversations come anyway. And then we have this point of actually there's so much value in this. Let's see if we can put out in the world, and so I just want to be rooted in the spirit that we hope this is a dynamic, open share. This is a topic I've really wanted to talk about for a while, so really grateful, and I just couldn't imagine two better people to lead the conversation. So I've known Jas and Elliot for years and I've seen them just be out in the community being really good people. I've seen them try experiments. I've seen those experiments go both well and badly. But to me the most important thing that I always think about Jas and Elliot is how these little moments where I just see them being really supportive to others and I think that's the spirit of the community bio labs. So I'm going to just read a little bit of fixed bio and then I'm going to ask some basic questions.
Dan Goodwin:Jas Neal is an amateur biochemist and ASAP biofellow currently exploring the feasibility of climate-focused community biolabs in East Bay. She also co-leads the Engineered Matter Labs at Genspace, which is a group of independent researchers focused on understanding the biology and morphology of spider silk. Previously she was an entrepreneur and residence at Arcadia Science, evaluating the scientific and marketer potential of various areas of therapeutics. Elliot is the former founder of Spira, a biomanufacturing company that creates carbon negative materials from engineered algae grown by a global network of farms, and head of business development and venture portfolio in agriculture at Deep Science Ventures. I actually have Spira die on my desk while we're talking. He started multiple independent laboratories, including an IndieLab, RVA, biopunk Society and Celsius. He's a Kairos feature founders and Halcyon fellow holds a degree in biomedical engineering. He has started eight companies, four nonprofits, and studied synthetic biology for 12 years and worked for five years as a product consultant, and together we want to talk about the future of biolabs, and so the preface that I'll say here is I think we need things like community biolabs.
Dan Goodwin:That, to me, is a given. We need the third space. That's not universities, it's not startups. You need the place where people can onboard and just start exploring biology. As we were just talking before, we clicked record on this, I think, to treat the topic respectfully, we also have to be critical of where things have gone wrong in the past. So, also optimistic about the future, I think there's no better two persons to talk about their personal experience, and so I'm just going to turn it over to both Jess and Elliot. And so, jess, I'm going to start with you. Who are you? Where did you grow up and did you ever see yourself as a leader of community biolabs?
Jas Neal:I will start with the last question. Definitely not. I think if I had to describe myself, it would be someone who is just like, endlessly curious and willing to learn what's ever needed in order to make those things a reality. And that started, or that ended up, with the first company I founded, tune, and then I just got really interested in trying to make a plastic-free pregnancy test, and so I took a sabbatical from that hardware tech company, started reading about biochemistry and biology, found GenSpace because I needed to actually do some experiments, and then realized, okay, I need to actually step away from my company and spend from 8 am to 8 pm at GenSpace just exploring this idea.
Jas Neal:So community labs actually came about because I had an idea that I wanted to test and I was fortunate enough to be living in Brooklyn where there was a community lab available so I could test that idea. And then I just fell in love with biochemistry and the teacher of biology and kind of just told myself that this is where I wanted to go. So I would say I'm a generalist, definitely not a specialist, just interested in making space accessible so that way people can experiment in whatever capacity that they would like to. I came from a business family, so I always knew that entrepreneurship was going to be in my future, but in what capacity, I don't know exactly. But definitely did not foresee myself going into biology or even STEM. I liked science in high school, but I didn't like academia, so I was like it's not for me.
Dan Goodwin:I like watching other people do science.
Jas Neal:I like inventing science, like once you guys do the science and I will come in and make a business or a company out of it. But I don't necessarily see myself doing the science. I was like the story that I told myself. But I grew up in Daytona Beach, florida. We moved a lot throughout Florida. Fun fact, I'm a twin, so I've never experienced life without my other half I like to call her. She's a doctor and OB-GYN, so we talk about problems in women's health like every single day. So yeah, I grew up in Daytona Beach and I kind of just explored all throughout Florida while we were growing up.
Dan Goodwin:Amazing. And Elliot, who are you? Where did you grow up and did you ever see yourself being an advocate for community bio labs?
Elliot Roth:Yeah, I grew up right outside Washington DC and went to school in a school where there were like 100 different countries represented and 40 different languages spoken, and it was mostly these refugee families that actually came to DC as a landing point and like fleeing hardship all across the world. And so from a very young age, I had this understanding that the world is not always a fair place and that I was afforded ability and privilege to the point where, if I'm not doing something with it, I have a moral imperative to do something in some capacity. And so that was always this North Star pointing me in a particular direction. And I became really obsessed with biology when, in high school, when I found out about Roger Cien's Nobel Prize for GFP and this was like 2007, 2008. Prize for GFP and this was like 2007, 2008. And I became obsessed with the idea of making things glow, because I thought that it was just this magical ability of biology to have these like glowing fluorescent proteins, and I was desperately trying to do anything to make that happen.
Elliot Roth:I faked press credentials to sneak into a University of Maryland bioengineering conference. I faked press credentials to sneak into a University of Maryland bioengineering conference. I ended up trying to join the Virginia United iGEM team, which they rejected me on insurance issues because I was so young, and then eventually wound up joining a systems biology lab when I went to undergrad and I went to a state school because it was what my parents could afford and I realized that academia is a hierarchy and it's a system of oppression and it's something where everybody signs up for it and no one likes it. And I was talking to the professor and he said that he I asked him when was the last time that he had actually done an experiment? And it had been years and he was just busy writing grants. And then the graduate student advisor who was in charge of me kept on making me do dishes and took my experiment ideas as his own and I said, all right, enough with this, I am going to see what other options there are out there.
Elliot Roth:And at the time I think this was like 2012 or so Gen Space was getting going.
Elliot Roth:I ended up going to the Flatbush Avenue location and meeting Ellen Jorgensen and just seeing the chaos and wonder of the laboratory space. At the time, I think the initial concepts behind Opentrons were getting fleshed out by Will at the time, right. And then I popped on by BioCurious and I was just like really interested in what was happening in this like burgeoning DIY bio and later community biology movement. So I decided to get together with a couple of friends and we took a friend's garage space and we started a lab and collected a lot of dumpster diving equipment and whatnot. And I was just so jazzed to be able to finally get my hands on experimentation which I've been questing for a long time and I think then enabling other people to be involved and have that idea of play in biology in particular, this idea of DNA literacy and being able to understand the world around you, is just so powerful and I became so enamored with that. We started hosting events and getting people involved in all kinds of ways.
Dan Goodwin:Amazing and that's actually something that Jas said before we clicked record is this really powerful phrase of I don't think I would have done bio if there wasn't a community bio lab space. There's so much power to that and I'm trying to understand this is that you were a person with a business background. You were motivated by the Jas was motivated by the question of how to do plastic-free pregnancy tests, and then you just went around the corner to Jen's face saying I'm someone who is smart but knows nothing about biology. Can you give me a pipette?
Jas Neal:Yeah, essentially that. I think it's like first read this book the Molecular Biology of the Cell and I didn't realize how big it was when they referred it to me and I was like, okay, this is a textbook. So I got to read for like at least a few hours every morning before I do my experiments, to just get a foundational understanding of what biology is. I then ended up taking organic chemistry and general chemistry classes at a local college as well, just to also have a really strong chemistry background, which was like very obvious with what I was trying to do. It was like, essentially, making that plastic pre-pregnancy test was just like a chemistry problem. And yeah, they pretty much guided me with everything that I needed to know. And there was a lot of people with experience, necessarily, or the experience that I needed to help answer the questions that I have.
Jas Neal:So that was another thing. It wasn't just the physical location that I had access to, but I had access to people who could help guide me in the way that like a postdoc or a PI could. So it was also the community and that environment, not necessarily just like the physical lab space, that was able to nurture the idea. And then, as I experimented more, it became obvious this was a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be, but more difficult than I thought it was going to be. But then I was just like I'm obsessed with experimenting and this negative one to zero phase of like, how do you take an idea and figure out what needs to be tested in order for this to be true, figure out whether or not that is true and then determine whether or not it could scale?
Dan Goodwin:I love that Actually, just to reiterate, because what you're describing to me sounds like the ideal, where you go in there and they say, yeah, we can give you a pipette, but you need to read this book. From my experience being trained in biologies you need that person a little bit more mature than you to say this is dumb, this is never going to work. I highly recommend Devin Stork's essay on when to quit. By the way, I think it's one of the best articulations of that.
Jas Neal:But then it led you to taking classes at a community college in chemistry. Yeah, I think it just became like very clear that the self-directed path is difficult because you're learning what you need to know as you need to know it, but then you realize that there's something else I need to know to understand that thing I need to know. Versus if I just took a class where they say let's start with this foundational thing, build on it, add that, build on it, add that, build on it, add that. Then things clicked a lot faster for me.
Jas Neal:But also because I was exposed to the problem that I was trying to tackle, then chemistry made so much more sense Because I had seen, like, what an alcohol group is. Okay, I know what these things are. But then when you learn about the intricacies of chemistry, then it just made it stick, so much more so than I think it would if I was just learning it just to learn it. So I like classes and I just felt like I could probably get the information I needed a little bit faster in that type of format than like this continuous process of like, all right, now, which book should I read in order to understand that thing? And it just felt like foundational knowledge as well, which I wasn't going to get around if I actively wanted to experiment on my own.
Elliot Roth:I love that. I think people in community biolabs are community organizers and activists. First because you see challenges and problems wrong in the world and then you want to get together with other people who see similar type things and share information together, and I fundamentally believe that nothing really happens unless somebody else does something. So you can try independently to make something happen, but unless you get other people involved it's never going to get anywhere, and so that was part of the point of creating community in places where there wasn't really communities of practice, and so part of the reason to start these spaces.
Dan Goodwin:Yeah, and I'd love to kind of hear your perspective too. Elliot, do you have an equivalent story to Jas's experience? I think she was walking in with no bio background. I think you walked into community spaces with some bio background. Were you the one giving the textbooks to other people, or what has been your strategy with helping people learn?
Elliot Roth:Yeah, I had constantly been seeking out mentors or information and then constantly been getting pushback or saying I needed to clear some sort of hurdle or some sort of credential or some sort of stepping stone to get at the information. Like I had to be a part of a program or I had to be in a laboratory or I had to be doing something. At a certain point. I got so frustrated with having to check a box in somebody else's mind that I was chatting with a. Having to check a box in somebody else's mind that I was chatting with a friend who has a PhD in analytical chemistry and he had this workshop space behind his house and so we just decided to put together a laboratory in that space. I was seeing all this information online with, like there's this DIY bio Google group that's still active and people would message like, oh, I'm running this protocol, can somebody help me with this? And just being the dichotomy of looking at a university system where it feels very closed door and you have to break through these barriers constantly, versus something incredibly open where I could access virtually all of this scientific knowledge at my fingertips is just phenomenal. And so I started really diving into that. I started reading as much as possible and then I needed, like, the social pressure of learning and so having other people around me, having the other people who were like, oh yeah, we're doing this thing on Friday, right, and I'm like, oh yeah, we're definitely doing this thing on Friday, so being able to gather people together, host events and whatnot.
Elliot Roth:I think that, sharing in the joy of discovery, I got really obsessed with the concepts and ideas behind materials as well, because materials were the main things I was working on in my degree in biomedical engineering and I was really stymied by the accessibility of biological materials.
Elliot Roth:Meaning I started doing all these weird things, like I was getting really into keratin as a material and collecting fingernails and hair and I was like melting them down using perm kits and trying to reconstitute them and it was stinky and so stuff like that. Or I got really into mushroom materials there was, I flipped over my bike handlebars and broke my front two teeth and that showed me that trees interface with the city and the built environment in a really negative way, because they're breaking the sidewalks, they're like causing all sorts of different hazards, and so how do you incorporate biology with the world, with the way humans are, instead of having them at contrast and having them constantly fighting each other, what are the different ways that we can interface biology with the built environment? And so that's how I got into a lot of this. Experimentation is looking at biomaterials and playing with biomaterials, because it was a little bit more accessible than working with DNA, and then the next subsequent step was starting to work with DNA and starting to program these materials from the foundation.
Dan Goodwin:So I love that and I want to get towards the larger criticisms and the importance of working with community biolabs. But I think this is also a great platform for you guys just to tell a few little punchlines or specifics from your own journeys pregnancy test. I think there's a really beautiful story there. Elliot, I'm going to put you on the spot first. I know you've done some very weird things, setting up very weird lab spaces. Can you take just a minute or two and just tell people some of the specific projects you've worked on, some of the lab spaces you've set up? If I remember right, you overhauled a place that didn't have a roof.
Jas Neal:So I think yeah just tell everyone about some of the weird places.
Elliot Roth:you've done biology and specifically what you know what you were doing with bullet holes in the wall and more spiders than I could count, and an attic of a mansion in Georgetown, a shipping container laboratory that we were trying to put in a warehouse, that the roof was falling apart and so there were things like collapsing on us as we were doing work in that shipping container lab. We were really trying to make that lab actually an open access community lab. Just by the very nature of the environment, you want to adapt whatever you're doing to your local environment or your local community, and LA is a very decentralized place, which is why the genesis of a shipping container lab or something you can drop it off in different locations around LA. I think part of the motivation for all of this is that I think having a studio or a realm where you could play I think is really key, because this idea of play in the sciences isn't emphasized, isn't really supported in a variety of ways, and without the ability or enabling people to play, you really aren't able to have people discover things. And so some of the things we were doing in the local community when I was in Richmond we were teaching inner city kids all sorts of different science things. We did DIY fireworks and I had everything from a seven-year-old to an 87-year-old working on trying to make sparklers for themselves. We made infrared goggles.
Elliot Roth:It was like this interesting intersection of science from like a practical, pragmatic sense and physics-based chemistry, biology, everything combined in the laboratory and so some of these community projects. I really love the artists that get involved because they're the most curious and they ask some of the best questions, and so I taught a class at Gen Space on how to grow, extract and dye using algae. During the pandemic I've taught classes on how to biohack perfume and how do you actually engineer living probiotic perfumes with a bunch of artists at the Institute for Ardent Olfaction. These are exploratory topics where, once you give people the tools, it's amazing what they run with and what they come up with. I think one of the artists I introduced to perfumery started trying to make bacteria that made like Cool Ranch Doritos scent or something Just like very, very strange interesting projects, and you never know where they really end up.
Dan Goodwin:I'm pretty sure there's nothing biological in Doritos and Jess. I'd love to hear just some of the specific stories that you know, projects that you've worked on in community biolabs.
Jas Neal:Yeah.
Jas Neal:So after pursuing the plastic pre-pregnancy test and realizing that probably wasn't going to come to fruition although I still have my ear to the ground in case I find out something that could turn that around I ended up leading a lab or a team at GenSpace that was focusing on the morphology and biochemistry of spider silk, and I originally started being a co-lead as a way to just learn more and help with organizations, but the more that I was learning about spider silk, I stepped into more of like the scientific, like direction role, which was actually very interesting.
Jas Neal:And then we reached out to Cheryl Hayashi, her lab at AMNH. They've been studying for silk for since the nineties and fortunately one of her grad students and one of her postdocs were able to help us and work very closely with our work, so that was really helpful to see what we were able to do in tandem with what they had available at their lab as well. That team is still up and running. They just recently got a grant that will let them, I think, operate for another few years, so that's awesome.
Dan Goodwin:You're saying that a traditional academic lab supported and collaborated with some weirdos in a community lab space.
Jas Neal:Yeah.
Jas Neal:So I just reached out to Cheryl Hayashi and I said hey, we're studying the biochemistry of spider silk. You are pretty much like the mother of spider silk. You know so much you were the ones that were able. She was the one that figured it out which amino acid sequences were associated with different properties. So spider silk is very repetitive and so there's four different types of repeats within spider silk and each of them she found that they were actually associated with certain mechanical properties when they show up in a certain pattern, which was really awesome.
Jas Neal:And she just happened to have a lab that was in new york. So I just emailed her and said this is what we're up to, this is the experiment that we have planned. And she said you know, I don't have the bandwidth to help you, obviously personally, but people in my lab do. So she had introduced us to folks in her lab and we actually did fieldwork with one of her grad students to catch spiders, which was awesome in New Jersey. So, yeah, I just reached out, which was also in New Jersey.
Jas Neal:So, yeah, I just reached out, and I think I reached out under the assumption that I wanted it to be very clear that we did the research. First we knew exactly what we were trying to do. We had done phylogenetic studies, so we knew which spider we wanted to work with. We had done a lot of work where it wasn't like oh we're interested in spiders, can you teach us something that if we just did a Google search we would find the answer to? I wanted to be very clear that we had done a lot of upfront work, and so I think she acknowledged or respected that and then was able to help us because the questions that we had, there was just no way we would have access to those answers or we would just get faster answers from going to people who had done it for a long time.
Dan Goodwin:Got it Okay, I love this, and so we.
Elliot Roth:oh sorry, Elliot, did you have something to say? Oh, I was just going to say that it's astounding the kind of organizations that come out of community labs. You know one of the key elements there's a community bio conference called the Bio Summit. That happens pretty much every year at MIT, and David Kong leads that initiative to gather people together there to share stories, and some of the difficulty is just tracking information from all of these different labs and the kind of impact that they make. So not only the educational aspect in introducing people to synthetic biology, biotechnology and the tools of the trade right, but in addition there's this oversized economic impact from a bunch of different companies or concepts or intellectual property that comes out of being able to play at the edge of possibility and frontiers. And so you have groups like Opentrons or Mammoth Bio came out of BioCurious and these kind of very sizable companies now initially started in a corner of a cheap, affordable laboratory space that they could get access to because no one really asked questions about you know what's your PhD in?
Dan Goodwin:Yeah, okay, so I love this, and it's one of those things where, the way we talk about it so far, it sounds to me like obvious that there should be more community bio spaces. Right, if there's community places to go lift weights, there should be a place to a community place to go lift up a pipette and, you know, go play with some DNA. I think a lot of the major cities probably have at least one community bio labs. I think gen space gets credit for being the first that I know of, and please correct me if I'm wrong. To me it seems like the growth right now is at a sort of plateau while we're figuring stuff out. Again, please correct me if I'm wrong. And I think it's worth just trying to be critical with what some of the shortcomings have been so far.
Dan Goodwin:And I'll start with the provocation. I'll leave it up to either Elliot or Jas to respond, but when I interact with people in community biolabs, what I immediately like is the ambition. Right, I see people who come in with a mission first and I think there's a lot of very good criticisms of academia that sometimes the ambition gets beaten out of you. What I've noticed from someone who's post PhD level is, I find a lack of rigor pretty quickly, and people's ideas like they can tell you what their first experiment is, they can't really tell you what their second experiment is, and then it peters out, and so to me, that's one of the main criticisms that I feel is that it selects for ambition, which is great. It doesn't yet have a good method of rigor, and so it seems like that's going to create a lot of churn. But I'm not the expert here, so I don't know if Elliot or Jess, one of you guys, wants to jump in and unpack some of the criticisms or some of the limitations right now.
Jas Neal:Yeah, from my experience there definitely is a lot of concern and I would agree in the assessment that there's a lot of interesting ideas. I feel fortunate to have been in spaces with folks who were, you know, predominantly had academic backgrounds and folks who didn't, and the most interesting ideas came from the folks who didn't. So there are a lot of interesting novel ideas but the difficulty is actually executing them. And if you're doing a PhD, you're held accountable, like how Elliot had mentioned, there was a social accountability. You have that built in with a PhD. When you're self-directed, and especially if you have a full-time job and you're doing things on the evenings and weekends, you're trying to get up to speed as fast as someone who's doing it full-time job and you're doing things on the evenings and weekends, you're trying to get up to speed as fast as someone who's doing it full-time with a PhD, with accountability, but you don't have the same accountability or time. So it is a lot more difficult and you do actively have to reach out to the people who might be supportive for you. I can't just go to my PI and ask them a question. I actively have to reach out and find those people and cultivate that community if it's not already there. So we do see a lot of churn. I'm sure, like Jeremy, who's also a lab lead at GenSpace, can speak to this with OpenPlant, like how many members you guys have seen over the years.
Jas Neal:But I know for EML, like our team now is, I think there might be two people who are currently on our team who was on the team two years ago.
Jas Neal:The team's entirely different and so it also makes it difficult to like bring everyone up to speed.
Jas Neal:So we have to do basics of the biochemistry of spider silk every now and then, just to make sure people understand where we are, I think, revisit some experiments as well.
Jas Neal:And then that's also difficult for the people who have been on the team for two years and they're like they know they could pretty much do a lot of experiments on their own and they're the ones teaching other folks, but they want to get to an even more advanced level. So it's like how do you balance different levels of education within like the same community projects and I would say community projects which are, for those who don't know, most labs have a community project, where it's a group of people that come together trying to tackle an idea or a problem. It's the best way we have right now to get people from the initial. This is how you use a pipette to this is how you learn how to do experimental design, how to structure an actual project, and then eventually people can figure out how to tackle their own projects once they learned through others and through that initial projects. But that transition period is still pretty difficult, I would say right now.
Elliot Roth:I think Jeremy said it really well in the chat Having just consistent funding is a bit of a problem, because if you don't have a longer timeline, there's no way to plan ahead, and so many of these laboratory spaces are day by day, week by week, month by month, not year by year at all, and especially when you're looking at longer timelines for experiments, of course you're not going to think about your third experiment if you're worried about funding for your first. Yeah, that's a, without a doubt, a valid criticism of some of the longer term thinking and the experimental planning. I think that one of the key challenges are the funding strategies for these labs. Many of them get started and are sustained on the basis of. Genspace got started because a landlord gave them a lot of freebies and they set up in a corner of a very weird space on Flatbush and then they sustained on the basis of grants. And now it's a question of like how do you support a member base or how do you grow a member base right? Biocurious did a somewhat similar type thing. They had a sweetheart deal in a space and you see these kind of waves and troughs right.
Elliot Roth:The first wave was what Ethan Perlstein called the post-ocalypse in 2008.
Elliot Roth:It was post-recession where there weren't laboratory research positions available, there weren't professorships available.
Elliot Roth:You had all these postdocs who had a lot of time, had some flexibility and money and were looking for something to do with it, and so I think we're about to hit another wave of that, too, in a kind of like economic slump of some sort, where the biotech industry as a whole has had lots of layoffs. There's a lot of people who are on sabbatical right now, who are really interested in play and really interested in testing out some of the ideas, and have seen a lot of hype and over-promise and under-deliver, and so they have experience, and then they're looking to these lower cost spaces to actually get started, as opposed to renting out space in an incubator, where it's going to be, at least in the Bay Area, it's two grand or more, and so I think that the kind of balancing act of that, though, is, if you have a lower cost space, you need to find some sort of thread, the needle for longer term strategy and financial viability. Otherwise it won't stick around, and otherwise people can't really rely on it.
Dan Goodwin:What you're saying makes total sense to me, and I can't help but just briefly deconvolve bio from community bio labs, because bio is hard From someone. My own transition was a career in software and then I started retraining in bio at age 30. I was amazed how slow everything is and how hard everything is and how creating a taste of rigor is really hard and makes everything frustrating. You do an experiment and then a senior person, even a year older than you, will say did you do this positive control? And then when you say no, your whole experiment is now worthless and you have to do it again. And so I can't help but wonder if just part of this churn is that if you do a PhD program you're locked in, you can't just like go in now, whereas if you're a community biolab person you can just, you know, start going to the gym or something. It's interesting. I was like what I kind of want to push out is maybe there's a fluidity of the space that actually is telling us something about biology.
Elliot Roth:Yeah, what's interesting about that and Devin left a comment in the chat that I think is really interesting where it's all around the equipment and all around this idea of needing stuff that works really well and consistently. And I think the key elements that we practice in academia or in industry are this intense scientific rigor. So it is repeatability, whereas I really want to emphasize play. A lot of these people are approaching biology for the first time and I don't particularly care if they have a positive control for their experiments, so long as they learn something and then maybe next time they'll do a positive control. I do think that there is merit to thinking garbage in, garbage out. Where you start off with garbage equipment, you start off with a garbage plan of some sort. You're going to get garbage out.
Elliot Roth:But the purpose of these community biospaces I think to emphasize the capitalistic notion that there's supposed to be some sort of outcome to these things is not the point in my mind. The point is really accessibility and understanding and play, and then eventually the rigor is built over time. But the rigor can only be built over time if you allow the mistakes to happen. Academia does not allow the mistakes to happen. They punish the mistakes right. Industry does not allow the mistakes to happen, they punish the mistakes. We have no ability to make mistakes in biology except in these spaces, which to me is mind-blowing right. And so you see this in computer science all the time, and that's part of the reason why the field goes so quickly is because people are able to make mistakes so quickly, and so that's part of my emphasis here, and part of what I would like to convey to this community is we need a space to be able to fuck around and find out.
Dan Goodwin:Jass, did you have anything to add to that?
Jas Neal:No, I think that's perfectly said. I know we chatted a little bit about some of the grant applications that you reviewed felt very different from those that you had seen coming from academic labs, and I think that just goes to the point that Elliot said. Is it a bad thing for that application to not be as traditionally rigorous? If anything, I would say from if it were me, it's a win scenario, because either one I get the grant, which is fucking awesome, or two I don't I get really good feedback. That also allows me to improve the way that I do science. So for someone who doesn't have access to someone like you, I'm winning either way, you know. So I think we just have to reframe what we expect coming out of those places.
Dan Goodwin:Yeah, yeah, and just to riff on that, when we did our garden grants last year, we treated every application the same, so everyone got a rigorous review. Everybody got a full packet of all their feedback, and so I and a couple of the people I talked to from the community labs and it was the first time that ever been absolutely shredded, you know. I think they grew from that. I love that.
Dan Goodwin:I want to use a question from Aaron, who said I'm curious about the funding models for these community bio labs. How do you balance providing classes and resources for free while also being equitable and keeping the lab afloat? I think this is a pretty good future forward question because eventually you need to think about my provocation as you guys think about your answers is, I think, a lot about universities 2.0, and I think universities 2.0 don't aren't universities. I think the whole model is about to be overhauled. So I do think this is a really important question how do you balance providing these resources while also finding some sort of scalable financial path? I'm curious if either of you have a response to that.
Jas Neal:Yeah, I don't think we figured it out yet for most people who have been. Unless someone on this call has figured it out, please speak to me after so I can understand what you've done. But I think most people in community labs know that you're not sustainable from the membership model alone. And even there is a slight issue with the membership model because if it's a hundred or 150 bucks a month, you tend to get more tech people come in, which is fine, but we may not be giving like full access in the way that we want, because it is a bit expensive and that's just to get access to the space. Like we all know, if you want to get a DNA ligate, that's 80 bucks from any of you. Now the costs add as you're trying to do more experiments. So I would say we still have some work to do when it comes to it being fully accessible. No-transcript, they have the time, but if they have a full-time job, they're also teaching people biology in addition to their full-time job. So now you see a lot of burnout and turnover from that too, because we can't pay them.
Jas Neal:I don't think we figured out the funding model. I'm curious to see where can projects be tied to something that could generate revenue. So I've been thinking a lot about plant tissue culture, as I mentioned before, like if you're teaching people how to do plant tissue culture and they end up selling house plants, could that be a way to actually generate some revenue from the project that you're doing that's not reliant on brands or that's not relying on the membership models? I think there could be interesting ways. Or even just like a nonprofit cooperative like what does it mean to actually be an owner of the organization or a member of the organization? So I think there are creative ways to think about funding more broadly, because we can't rely on grants indefinitely and the grants are really hard to get as well. So we have not figured out the funding problem. I'm sure Elliot has things that he wants to add too.
Elliot Roth:Yeah, there's all sorts of fun stories here along the way, because I've tried a bunch of different things to see whether we can make it work. At IndieLab we tried recycling old computer parts because one of the members had a background in chemistry and so we were doing, and we had these chem hoods there and so we were doing computer part digestion and then trying to sell precious metals back. There were a couple of groups that were trying to figure out bioremediation, recycling and whatnot as a community project. Like Jess is saying, each of these community projects is a way of trying to figure out, to bring money in for the community and something where people can apprentice and learn and get access to some of these skill sets. At Biopunk we were trying to set up a mushroom church at one point, which was a wild experience, and then more recently I've recognized that having a balance of community and individual projects is really key and then thinking really long term. So being a part of another space as a means of getting started has been where I've always started. So being a part of a makerspace community, I think the best kind of marketing occurs whenever you're taking two disparate communities and you're trying to combine them, and so we're currently at Celsius a part of a makerspace community which is like the Studio 4555 community all around hardware, which is really interesting to pull those people into biology with the intersection of laboratory automation, and that's been fun to ideate and think about.
Elliot Roth:What are the sort of projects that you can do there? How do you get community members involved and engaged? But in essence there's like these three categories of ways for these labs to make money. One of them is memberships and individual projects, another one is classes and events and then a third one is going to be like grants, mostly driving at community projects. And so of those three, it seems like the pendulum initially started with memberships.
Elliot Roth:But memberships don't pay the bills, particularly because the amount of usage of the square footage is pretty challenging. Especially in a laboratory environment you need a lot of square footage and in the cities it's very expensive. The grant funding that comes from the project seems to be where the emphasis is now. Events and classes are always going to occur but, like Jazz is saying, they tend to burn people out over time. Yeah, again, big question marks here, I think, especially in lowering the barrier and enabling accessibility. We're still hitting the price point for biology, where it's people who have jobs and have the ability to pay right. Unless it's subsidized by state, local community grants or philanthropy, there's no way for people who are in underserved communities to get access to these tools.
Dan Goodwin:Let me push you guys for a second, because there's a very interesting tension here, which is when you do a bottom-up. Every time you hit these bottom-up meaning like a small, organically growing organization you're going to look it's beautiful because it perfectly fits the community it's coming from. There's a lot of arguments for equity and that, and so I love that. On the other hand, the executive in me is frustrated at the idea of learning the same dumb mistakes over and over. So I think there's this tension of wanting to standardize it or make a common ask for community biolabs to be a repeat, repeatable model versus. You know that's intentional to this decentralization component. So I'm curious if there's been any efforts with David Kong and shout out to David Kong because he's been doing this stuff forever too and really respect the work he's done. Is there any kind of progress towards collective ask, repeatable model, or is it still each lab to themselves figuring it out?
Elliot Roth:Yeah, the Syntec Bio network out of Latin America, like these labs occur all over the world really, piece of work that was done out of GenSpace as well as part of iGEM one year, where they ended up coming up with some of these basic principles and basic techniques. Laboratories do independent labs and community labs oftentimes do this ad hoc sharing. The Fab Lab Network was a network where the evolution of the Fab Lab Network out of MIT is what piggybacked the community bio network in the first place. But there have been some of these sort of ad hoc things. And then I really I like talk to a lot of people in DeSci and I'm like, oh you, sweet summer child, because they're just getting started on understanding these coordination problems across multiple groups across the world.
Elliot Roth:And I'm just like, okay, translating computation and networking online to something where you actually have to physically do things is very challenging. And the pieces of curriculum or pieces of information, ip, whatever that's coming out of these spaces, if you're trying to make money on them, first you got to make sure they're happening and they're happening consistently, repeatedly. And iGEM has the reproducibility side of things. Center for Open Science is doing some really interesting work on reproducibility and studies as well. I think ASAP Bio is also doing some interesting work. Jazz can probably comment on that.
Jas Neal:Yeah, I would say Talley Chapel is also trying to lead the biology for everyone effort and pretty much what they're interested in is this concept of libraries. So essentially there's three different iterations of accessible science. A library can start as just a singular place where you have a scientist that you can speak to regularly if you're trying to get a project off of the ground and maybe some basic equipment. So you could do like just general microbiology experiments, and then you might have bigger versions that look more so, like the community labs that currently exist, where the breadth of the experimentation that you're able to do is a lot bigger, and then you might have an even bigger version as well. So they're really interested in playing around with this concept and then pitching out what it could look like to get government funding for it. So there are some other efforts that are trying to make this more of an institutionalized concept as well. There's been three waves. The first wave was the early biohacker movement, that kind of piggybacked off of the 1990s, where everyone was like what if we took the same PC, do-it-yourself garage inspiration and kind of transition that into biology. And then in 2008, 2009, what Elliot was saying when you see, when you got like a bunch of postdocs that weren't working. People then redirected that into making these apartment or home labs, and then you saw, like GenSpace come out in 2009, counterculture labs, et cetera, all the way up until like 2020. And then you saw the community bio summit. That happened in 2017 or started in 2017.
Jas Neal:And I think now we're actively thinking about okay, we've learned a ton of lessons about what works and what doesn't work. How do we broaden access and institutionalize it a bit more? So these things are like also more acceptable and not just sort of these rogue scientists that like they have their little corner over there but just keep them over there in the corner. That's like all that they need. So it's interesting to see that we're in this third wave of there are examples of people who wouldn't be in biology if it weren't for these spaces.
Jas Neal:So we do have examples and, like Elliot said, like Opentron, there are also companies that wouldn't exist if it weren't based off of community labs, although that's not the intention, but we do have examples that they are important. So if we were to expand this and allow people to pursue something that they're curious in because, frankly, we don't have a good way to predict what's successful in science. We like to say that we do, but we don't. We can't expect to know what's going to happen from the future, so we can just have more people experiment with things that they're curious about. Then who knows what the world could look like in the future?
Dan Goodwin:And, as we wrap this up, I want to steer us towards the question of you know what do we need? Moving forward and shout out to Mark Hansen, who I think is another example of the exact phenotype you're talking about, of people who might not have been biology without community biolabs. Bring them in. And he has this great point, which is that he had tried to volunteer in the quote unquote real labs, official labs, with the hope of being able to use the equipment and transaction for his time, and apparently that didn't work out. So I like this idea of people being scrappy, figuring out how to engage and get access to half million dollar equipment, et cetera. So I want to close with one more big question and then we'll do some rapid fire ones at the end which is what do you think community biolabs needs besides just money? And I think we've been touching this, and so maybe there's a summary sentence from both of you. If you could snap your fingers and get blah, what would that be?
Elliot Roth:Yeah, I think Jess and I had a conversation a little bit about this a couple of weeks back and I oftentimes think it's just a sense of marketing and awareness.
Elliot Roth:I end up receiving every single conversation I have about community bio with an external party who doesn't know about community bio ends up approaching it from a stance of fear and saying, oh, you're letting independent people work with DNA.
Elliot Roth:And I think that comes down to how we storytell and portray scientists in media. Instead of portraying scientists in a really negative sense, where what they're doing is creating a virus that destroys the world, having a really interesting stance of seeing these spaces as creative spaces where they're doing something positive, they're not doing something that is destructive, because inherent in those kinds of questions is this othering and fear oh, I can't do that, or oh, I don't want to do that because it's scary. If the one thing that I would want for these community spaces, or the one motivation I have, is changing the story around people working with DNA and seeing it as a means of, like Mark was saying in the chat, we exist in a time and space where we need to tackle the challenges of climate change, and one of the key tools that is able to do things to that we're not tapping into the full resources of humanity to work on it because of the limitations of accessibility of working with biology.
Jas Neal:Yeah, I definitely think that's beautifully said. I think another thing that would be helpful is if we have to think about the construction of these spaces from scratch. If we know that sustainability is a problem, what does it look like to create a different type of business model with that in mind? So, people who are thinking about alternative forms of funding I think is interesting as well. So I think are thinking about alternative forms of funding, I think is interesting as well. So I think that could be helpful.
Jas Neal:And, yes, changing the narrative I think sometimes you get caught up in community labs or running away from academia, because academia is restrictive with what you're able to do and what you're able to pursue, and that kind of has a little bit more of a negative tone versus it's a place where you can imagine what is possible to build with biology, which, like Elliot said, has a bit more of a positive tone. So, yeah, I would say I personally want to transition from anarchist spaces to just spaces where anyone can experiment with biology, explore anything that you're curious about. But, yes, having other people who are actively thinking about business models, I think is something that would be incredibly helpful right now.
Dan Goodwin:I love it. All right, we're going to do three rapid fire questions and we're going to wrap gracefully. So these are going to be very quick, off the cuff questions and you're going to answer this first one and then Elliot, then we're going to all right. So, jess, what does a paper result or idea in biology that changed how you think about biology?
Jas Neal:Yeah, tyler Burnham from Cultivarium recently released GenomeSpot, which is a set of models that are able to predict the ideal growth conditions of bacteria and archaea, and I think it resonated with me, for one. It just showed the what's possible if a bunch of people were able to collect and format data in a way that could then be trained, that are used for these models. So then, I think that's another case for community labs. We can also be a source of that data distributed data, which is very interesting. And then two, just what is possible if you have things like ML and AI that can work with you, that allows to expedite the process of doing science, which is now more accessible for someone else who's trying to do science, who otherwise wouldn't have access to this expertise. So I loved his paper so much. I organized an event for it with RKDF, where we have a nice little feedback session. So if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. It's really great.
Elliot Roth:Awesome, elliot. I love this one paper. I'll post a link. It's called the Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research. It's probably one of my favorites. I share it with everybody and it's so important to think of people coming to community labs as children and children learning language for the first time and to become DNA literate means you have to babble in order to learn and understand a given language. So without the ability to just babble and say to learn and understand a given language, so without the ability to just babble and say nonsense things, you're never going to actually form sentences.
Dan Goodwin:I love it Okay, Elliot, back to you. What advice line, what's the best advice line that a mentor gave you?
Elliot Roth:So a combination of probably three things. One of them is man's search for meaning. Viktor Frankl, If you have a, why you can bear any. How, I think combined with one of my investors when saying there's two reasons why businesses fail they either run out of money or they give up. So if you keep on going and keep on pursuing and pick a mission in life, you'll never really fail. You'll just learn different ways to not do it.
Dan Goodwin:Jess.
Jas Neal:Yeah, I would say just the constant reminder from mentors that no one knows what they're doing. Everyone's winging it along the way and that's really the only requirement to doing something. Great is just being comfortable with uncomfortable situations and uncertainty. So there isn't anyone like 10 steps ahead of you that knows perhaps a lot more than you do. They're just trying to figure out what the means that they have available to them. So you're just as capable as anyone else. Everyone's winging it as they go.
Dan Goodwin:I love it. All right, Jess, you're going to start us off on the third, the last question. If you had a magic wand to get more attention or resources into one specific problem area in biology, what would that part of biology be?
Jas Neal:It's more of an applied problem, but continuous hormone monitoring. I've been talking about that with my sister for so long, especially for women. Why are we still using the pill even though we know that it has so many awful side effects? It goes into a broader conversation of the struggles that women undergo that are, like constantly ignored. But I think there are so many things within women's health that could be revisited, Like why are we still using the speculum, which is like 100 years old and painful? Everyone hates pap smears. There's just there's so many problems in women's health. I wish we had more funding to tackle.
Elliot Roth:I said the same exact thing. It's like women's health is severely underfunded and underinvestigated and like the more time and attention that we spend on that. There's a woman in our laboratory group who is doing menstrual stem cells right. There's all kinds of like really interesting, unique things, because it's just under explored and underfunded Because we live in a patriarchal, male-dominated society. Everybody should watch Barbie.
Dan Goodwin:On that note, thank you everybody. Let's give a round of applause to Elliot and Jess. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Climate Biotech Podcast. We hope this has been educational, inspirational and fun for you as you navigate your own journey and bring the best of biotech into planetary scale solutions. We'll be back with another one soon and in the meantime, stay in touch with Homeworld Collective on LinkedIn, twitter or Blue Sky. Links are all in the show notes. Huge thanks for our producer, dave Clark, and operations lead, paul Himmelstein, for making these episodes happen. Catch you on the next one.