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
Transforming Minerals with Biology: Rare Earth Extraction and Carbon Storage with Buz Barstow and Esteban Gazel
Mining has essentially been the same for 5,000 years, just now with bigger shovels. Imagine if we could drastically increase mining efficiency and output for both the environment and national security. That's exactly what Dr. Esteban Gazel, a Costa Rican-born geochemist, and Dr. Buz Barstow, a physicist-turned-synthetic biologist, are working on at Cornell University.
When these brilliant minds connected over rare earth elements and carbon storage, they realized that existing microorganisms could be engineered and optimized to transform how we extract critical minerals from the earth. Their groundbreaking research has already improved the microbe Gluconobacter's ability to extract rare earth elements by an astounding 1,200% compared to its natural capabilities. This biological approach operates at room temperature with minimal environmental impact, potentially transforming mining from a destructive industry into a sustainable process.
The stakes couldn't be higher. Each wind turbine requires five tons of copper and one ton of rare earth elements, materials that currently demand processing hundreds or thousands of tons of rock through energy-intensive methods. As we transition to clean energy, these demands will only increase, creating an urgent need for sustainable extraction approaches.
Their Microbe Mineral Atlas project aims to catalog how microorganisms interact with minerals, identifying biological systems that can dissolve rocks, generate acids, create chelators, and precipitate specific elements. Beyond metal extraction, they're exploring how microbes might accelerate natural carbon sequestration processes in minerals like olivine.
What makes their work so powerful is their complementary expertise – Gozel's deep knowledge of mineral thermodynamics paired with Barstow's synthetic biology innovations. Their vision goes beyond incremental improvements; they're reimagining mining entirely with processes that can efficiently extract multiple elements simultaneously, utilize low-grade deposits, and operate with minimal environmental impact.
Join us for this fascinating conversation about how the tiniest organisms on Earth might help solve some of our biggest resource challenges. Subscribe to the Climate Biotech Podcast to explore more groundbreaking solutions at the intersection of climate and biology.
Let's try to increase the efficiency of traditional mining, because we have been mining the same way for 5,000 years. The only difference is that shovels are bigger, factories are bigger, but you know the principles of mining aren't the same that we have been doing since civilizations started.
Speaker 2: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. Today, we're joined by Dr Esteban Gozel and Dr Buzz Barstow. Esteban is the Charles N Mellows Professor of Engineering at Cornell. He's a Costa Rican-born geochemist whose curiosity about his backyard grew into a career that now spans the deepest reaches of the Earth's mantle and the far-reaching effects of volcanic ash on climate and life, all the way down to the composition of exoplanets. From trekking through jungle lava flows to studying submarine basalts in Bermuda, esteban is good at turning field adventures into insights. Recently, he's been pairing up with synthetic biologists to dream up cleaner ways to mine the critical elements of our clean energy future.
Speaker 2:Dr Buzz Barstow is an associate professor of biological and environmental engineering, also at Cornell and also in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He is a physicist turned synthetic biologist who decided that if lasers and quantum dots were fun, engineering microbes to solve climate problems could be even better. Buzz leads the Barstow Lab at Cornell, where he and his students build genetic toolkits that let bacteria pull rare earth metals out of rocks, absorb electricity to make new fuels and even speed up the natural rock reactions that capture carbon dioxide. Talking with Buzz always reminds me that physicists were the early pioneers of molecular biology, for a reason. So, esteban and Buzz, we're so excited to have this conversation. And well, let's just start with Esteban. Esteban, who are you? Where did you grow?
Speaker 1:up. Well, as you mentioned in that enthusiastic introduction, I was born in Costa Rica. I spent the first 22 years of my life there and then I moved to the US for a PhD and one thing took me to the other and I have a pretty interesting career in the air sciences. Since I was a kid, I was really into geology. It was almost, I think, in part the fact that I grew up surrounded by volcanoes and experiencing earthquakes, but in part it's genetics, I think too. Sometimes there are these passions that are very difficult to explain and seeing the world from the perspective of what rock tells you, because for most people, a rock is this inert mass of chunk of something that you see when you're driving your car. To me, rocks. Even when I was a little kid, it was all these minerals that were the rocks. As I grew older and I learned more, I learned that basically, each rock is a page on the history of Earth and the history of the solar system.
Speaker 2:Cool and growing up. Did you grow up in San Jose, Did you it?
Speaker 1:was close to San Jose, but I had the opportunity to go all over the country and the coolest thing was getting a degree in geology. I think that's probably. If you ask me, like, if you can go back in time, what would you do? I will go back, get back to school and go and get another degree in geology, because I was able to. It was amazing and I'm going to tell you like, this is not how I started, because, even though I always loved geology, it wasn't easy for my family my immediate family, not my extended family, my for my family my immediate family, not my extended family, my immediate family to really appreciate what can you do with a geology degree. So the first year I went to law school but I secretly was taking all the science courses. I was taking all these law courses, but really taking calculus and chemistry and physics, because I knew that I was going to move into science.
Speaker 2:That's an amazing backstory. I hope we come back to this. And so when you were a little kid growing up in Costa Rica, did you always know you'd become this volcano explorer and biotechnologist minor?
Speaker 1:No, I think I thought I was going to have a career in some kind of science, even though I started doing research really early, since I'm 15. Thought I was going to have a career in some kind of science, even though I started doing research really early, since I'm 15. I was doing research on natural radioactive isotopes in volcanoes and other things when I was 15. So science was always something that was there. Now, this connection between synthetic biology or finding more efficient ways to extract critical elements, this is something that I never envisioned it was going to happen. It happened because Buzz and I destiny put us together and we started working on this collaboration.
Speaker 2:Very cool, All right. Well, let's turn over to Buzz. Buzz, who are you? Where did you grow up?
Speaker 3:Well, first of all, thank you for inviting us on. So who am I? Sounds like a really deep question. I'll start with where I grew up. I was born in Manchester, England, and I grew up all over the north of England. I always say Manchester is my hometown. Who am I? I guess I'm a sort of biological engineer, physicist, general purpose scientist.
Speaker 2:And now did you always know you'd be a physicist whose research would end up having titles like Knockout Sudoku?
Speaker 3:No, not at all, absolutely not. Like, actually, I'm actually terrible at naming things. For one thing, it's actually all the titles we have that are cool I've stolen from people. I actually think the Micro Min we have that are cool I've stolen from people. I actually think the microbe mineral atlas was paul's idea, was paul reginardo's idea, or maybe it was your idea, in fact, and knockout sudoku was a name that was. It was coined. The sudoku part was coined by a guy called yuneeb erlik, who I think now is a professor at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and then the knockout bit was coined by Michael Boehm, who is an associate professor at Harvard Med School. Now, I had nothing to do with those names, I just kept my ears open, basically, and sort of adopted and sort of shamelessly stole them.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Now I was pumping up the role of physicists in biology, but your arc into biology is really unique and powerful, and it'd be I think it'd be very interesting to people to know what your scientific arc was.
Speaker 3:As a kid I would probably count myself in some way Asperger's or something and like a little bit, and so mathematical sciences are sort of mathematically encodable sciences, like physics, or just come very naturally to me, and I remember the British educational system sort of funnels you from a very early age into a speciality. And I think when I was 14, I think was 14, I think I was given this career test and you answered a bunch of questions and I went in. I don't remember why, but I remember thinking I really want to be a physicist and so I answered the questions in a way that would, I thought, result in the answer of physicist, which it did. I actually disliked biology intensely at school I hope none of my teachers are listening and it's not because I disliked the teachers. I actually really loved the teachers. I think it was because it didn't feel very interesting. It felt like it was cutting up eyeballs and frogs and I didn't really like any of that and I think I would actually really enjoy it now, but I didn't at the time. But I do remember reading a lot of science fiction and I read. The one that really comes to mind is Arthur C Clarke's 2010, where they go to meet the monolith in orbit of Jupiter and they find it can self-replicate. And there's this whole digression on von Neumann machines and how they're like phages. This is really cool. Or I'm a huge fan of the TV show Babylon 5, and it's obviously not the world's best acted TV show but profound in terms of the ideas it explores and like one of the key plot points is like ultra advanced biotechnology. I thought that's cool If you go to school and you're like, oh, this is like sheep's eyeball, where's the spaceship in that?
Speaker 3:And I went to university, did physics, my undergrad advisor. I think your career is always shaped by the mentors and my, I think, my physics high school teacher, physics tutors. I just loved them, like my mentor, especially for my master's degree. It was almost like a second father to me, like in some ways I felt like someone destined for a career in optics and the like and I wound up doing I'd gotten to grad school in the States and I had to figure out a way to pay to get there. So I took a job with my undergraduate tutor's startup company which was building he was a particle physicist but he was building a next generation sequencer, so they used very high signal to noise, or how should I put it? Very high sensitivity detectors that could pick out very low signal to noise ratio signals to build the next generation sequencer. I thought this is cool, this is the sort of biology I want to do and I never really looked back from that problem from that moment and I also I think I felt from a very early age that sort of.
Speaker 3:My mom was a civil servant for the british civil service and the fundamental knowledge part of it never really interested. So knowledge for knowledge sake and like at some level I really appreciate that. But like on a practical, like day-to-day get me out of bed after it doesn't do anything for me at all. Right, it just is no interest for me whatsoever. And so I always felt like this has got to be in the service of like a you know some problem for society and sort of medicine seems like the obvious outlet for the problem. But again, I remember at the time feeling that it was, and still to this day in some ways it's somewhat ill-directed health interventions of the 20th, the 19th and the 20th century. They produce enormous extension, like increase in life expectancy by decades and all the money that we've spent on the war on cancer starting in the 1970s hasn't really produced a similar sort of effect on life expectancy.
Speaker 3:And I'm like I'm not sure this really interests me and also I would. I would count myself as somewhat contrarian, like I think. If you get to the root of who I am, I think it's sort of somebody who just does what they want to do, and I thought I don't really want to do what other people are doing. And then katrina happened. Oh, that's the problem. And I remember I was walking home and I in some ways this must be a false memory somehow, because it was 2005 and yet I remember listening to the radio or like a podcast, and I can't imagine how I was listening to a podcast in 2005 about what happened in superdome in new orleans. I thought, god, if you read sci-fi about climate change, it's all about the breakdown of civilization. I was like like it had seemed up until that point a very distant, like it existed, but it was centuries, decades, centuries in the future. I thought, wow, this is not. This is right now. This is the thing, this is the problem.
Speaker 2:And I never looked back from that moment, really like I, I never really thought about that's the problem I want to solve so I love that you got nerd sniped into biology and route to doing a PhD in physics by working on a sequencer machine. That's a really good origin story. So I want to shift now into thinking about what brings you guys together and thinking about the really awesome work you do. So I want to shift now into thinking about what brings you guys together and thinking about the really awesome work you do. And I want to just underscore Esteban's point on geology being overlooked. I think I kind of go back and study some more. We totally feel this at Homeworld and in general. Geology, I think, is one of those areas where it's really due for a huge upswing. And I just like to throw my editorial like Buzz's point's point on not finding biology interesting as an undergrad is very similar, I think, to geology's problem.
Speaker 2:And we had this great conversation on the podcast with Ben Scott, one of the Homeworld grantees, where he has this great point of we were talking about how biology is taught, like geography used to be right, this country's next to this country and just memorize that and that's you can't build stuff on that. And then Ben's point was great. He's like yeah, well, we even worse than that, we don't even have. It's like teaching geography about history, and I really love that formulation of that's why biology used to be, I think, poorly taught, and now, because of the work you guys are doing, engineering, seeing biology more as engineerable, I think, is the big thing that's leading more people into working in bio.
Speaker 2:I think geology is set up for the same kind of thing. It's a thesis that we have and I'd love to explore this together. Is that beginning to see geology as an engineerable medium? There's principles behind geology and we're probing that in this conversation through how biology interacts with geology, and so I would love to toss it out there. Maybe, Esteban, you can answer. This is just would love to hear the story about how you guys started working together and kind of what your primary collaboration point is right now.
Speaker 1:I wonder if I can make a comment about geology first, though, please, and I think it has to do with geology being a little bit misunderstood. It's not well understood what geology really means, and it mostly has to do with the fact that geology, for the most part, is an applied science, like in a department like mine. If you talk to my colleagues, they're all doing fundamental science. It's either use-inspired fundamental science or discovery fundamental science. But the majority of geologists are applied scientists. They're there working on a mine or getting energy resources from the earth, or working in the environmental industry being sure that there is no pollutants going into water. Unlike most sciences where you know, most of the members of that group stay generally in some kind of fundamental area. Geologists are in this interface between engineering and science and very applied science, so we don't really know what they do, even though they are fundamental for every process we have. This is how we get energy, this is how we get resources, this is how we guarantee that the water we drink is up to the standards that the EPA provides, because there's all these earth scientists working there being sure that the day-to-day operates. But that goes into how I connected with Boss. I was invited to an Atkinson Center thematic launch on carbon storage and part of my research has to do.
Speaker 1:I have been working with this mineral my whole life, called olivine. It's an iron magnesium silicate. It's one of the first minerals that crystallize when the solar system is cooling down. It's also a mineral that is incredibly unhappy in the surface of a planet like ours. It's a high pressure mineral so thermodynamically in the surface of the planet it's unstable, it's unhappy. So it starts degrading and in that degrade process by interaction with water. The process is called serpentinization, because the rock actually looks like a serpent, like a snake, and actually the last time I had a walk with Paul I pointed to some serpentinized periodites in that part of San Francisco. So around the Bay Area there are many places you can find them. And then this process naturally sequestered carbon, because you start with an iron magnesium silicate plus water, plus co2. To make a complicated process simple, you end with a mineral mineral called magnesite. That is a magnesium carbonate that permanently sequesters carbon. But it's a very slow process. It's a process that it will take the earth in the order of tens of thousands of years to sequester all the carbon we have put in the atmosphere. And these are tens of thousands of years we don't have the atmosphere, and these are tens of thousands of years we don't have Because of my work with this mineral and the alteration of this mineral.
Speaker 1:I was invited to this launch and just by chance, the person next to me was Boss. So I went and I gave my five minutes lightning talk. Boss gave his five minutes lightning talk. He sat down next to me and I immediately look at Boss and I say hey, something, that process that I just mentioned, that very likely nobody understood what I said. I have a very deep suspicion that life has an effect on the acceleration of this process Because if you look at what is, the rates that have been determined in the lab are too slow compared to what I'm seeing in the field. So the only way to accelerate our reaction is by catalysis or by somebody else being involved and by somebody else's life. There are microbes that likely are using the energy of this process for them to metabolize or byproducts of this process, for example hydrogen or whatever, or the iron oxidation. They're using the energy for iron oxidation. So I told Buzz I think there is some potential here and that's how everything started iron oxidation.
Speaker 2:So I told Buzz I think there is some potential here, and that's how everything started Amazing. And so I think there's going to be probably two processes we're going to be talking about today. There's going to be carbon capture, and then there's also going to be rare earths. And so, buzz, maybe I'll toss it over to you what you guys are working on today. Are you doing both? Are you focusing on one? Tell me, yeah, I'm really curious to hear the kind of the synthetic biologist lens on this meeting story.
Speaker 3:It happens exactly as Esteban remembers it, the thing about the carbon sequestration, the accelerated weathering that we're working on today it sort of went in one ear and out the other for me and I was very fixated at the time on rare earth and I think I said back to Esteban what about rare earths? There was a body of work, a very small body of work at the time, on microbes that could extract rare earth elements from rock and I think that the reason why Esteban said on microbes that could extract rare earth elements from rock and I think that the reason what Esteban said sort of went through one ear and out the other was not that it was boring or stupid, it was because it was almost too big to handle, like it was too amazing of a phenomenon to really wrap your head around. And I think that something that I critique other people for not getting it, it happened to me. I just I didn't get it in that instant but, much to esteban's credit, I said something back that was slightly in retrospect, slightly nonsensical, like a little bit off the point. Let's do rare earths instead. And he went with it. Right, which is great, and if you look back at sort of interdisciplinary collaboration in any field, right, like I think, if you know your point about like how physicists were the molecular biology revolution, I think physicists involved let's say schrodinger probably said a lot of stupid stuff when he was getting started and people were smart enough to put up with him. And I'm sure I say like a lot of like. I'm even to this day right. I actually went to this meeting yesterday with with a colleague who is in microbiology, for building over from me and my one of my postdocs was talking to him about the horizontal gene transfer mechanism and it all went completely over my head. And same here, right with the accelerated weathering, estabon was good enough to just say, ok, let's go with it. And so the rare earths were like a really great place to start because they have rare in the name and all this stuff I've said, like about let's make microbes, that, let's sequester co2.
Speaker 3:I think people sort of just it was too big of a problem to wrap their head around. Like in some ways, I think cancer research receives so much attention because it's sort of like a small world problem in the way that like this is not to diminish cancer, right, I don't, but it's to say it's a problem, say, in computation, they're very small worlds. You can circumscribe them completely and solve them completely In some ways. Cancer, it can be tackled in a petri dish. And climate change, it can only be solved at the global scale.
Speaker 3:And but for some reason, rare earth elements best piece of scientific marketing ever, because they're not even that rare. People are like rare, I like that. And we were also lucky as well that we were in exactly the right time and place because the the first trump administration really wanted rare earths like much to his credit. Right, he got the geopolitical significance of them and so I remember I'd written like a hundred applications and I got one interview which was at cornell, and when I showed up to the interview, the department chair, I was doing the talk and it was all about like electricity, eating microbes and he and then I get out the bit about rare earths and he's like okay rare earths.
Speaker 3:I want to hear more about that.
Speaker 3:And it's a very useful sort of intellectual entry point for people, I think. And so we wound up. I think rare earths were a great starting point because we understood we vaguely understood the biology. It was something we could take, this sort of world changing problem, and we could put it in a petri dish a little bit, and that was a great place to start. And then, and so we over the next several years, we understood how a micro called gluconobacter extracts rare earths from rock and also how selective biosorption works as well.
Speaker 3:There are two processes you need to crack for rare earths. One is getting them out of a rock. Rare earths are. They're sort of. They're called rare, I think, because they are. They're rare compared to the rock forming elements like iron, but they are nowhere near as rare as something like, say, iridium or platinum, and I think they're sort of about in between on a log scale in terms of abundance. But they're very dilute in rock. You almost never find concentrated deposits of them, and so you have to dissolve a huge amount of rock to get a small amount of rare earth. Once you've done that, you have to separate them, and you can chemically separate just about all the lanthanides, but separating individual lanthanides is in is probably one of the hardest problems in chemistry, but biology again gives you an existence proof for doing this. There are lanthanide chelators, and then there's also sort of selective lanthanide biosorption as well, and we chose to go down the route of lanthanide biosorption as our approach to separating them on an individual level.
Speaker 3:Then we we were very lucky we got this award from RPE to sort of turbocharge this, and then we had this engineering program that went through about 2023. And we were pretty successful in that. I think we improved the ability of gluconobacter to extract rare earth elements from monazite, which is a mineral that's found in the Chinese deposits, I think, of rare earth Esteban can correct me if I'm wrong Also in coal fly ash, and we improved its ability by about 1,200%. We also improved the selectivity for adjacent heavy rare earths by about 15%, which doesn't sound by much, but that led us leapfrog conventional solvent extraction technologies as well. Two of my students started a company called Regen to commercialize this, and then we did not really want to compete with them, because if you think about a sort of a perennial problem with academia, right is that it doesn't do a very good job of creating opportunity, especially the career end of it right. Unfortunately, we're stuck in a state of very limited to maybe even diminishing opportunity, just because of the demographics of the country. So it's a little bit zero sum, but companies allow you to create endless opportunity.
Speaker 3:And I said I wasn't interested in fundamental problem. I am actually I will come back to this later, especially in terms of our book recommendations. I am actually very interested in fundamental problems if they connect to a problem. And so we said if it ain't a fundamental problem, we're not really that interested in it. We're not interested in competing with region. And so the next thing was we came back to this problem of the penny had finally dropped about the accelerated weathering actually, and the reason it dropped is one of my master's students had the idea independently and I went to Esteban and I was so excited to tell him about this idea and I think he said oh, I told you about that three years ago or something. I'm going to leave this to Esteban now and he can tell you all about the accelerated weathering.
Speaker 2:Cool. I just want to riff on one little thing, which is that Paul Reginado actually has this wonderful quote, which is that when we worked in neuroscience on our PhDs, we worked on things that are too small to see, but when we work on climate, we work on things that are too big to see. We work on things that are too big to see, and I think what we're talking about here is Buzz's phrase of building a small world to assess. I think that's really interesting, and that, to me, is the big crux of getting biologists engaged with geological problems, because a lot of it is just too big or also too vague for people to start engaging with, and Buzz started breaking this down. But I think it's really worth just understanding that when you make a drug, it goes directly into a person. You just need to manufacture the drug, but when you work in geology, you need to grind the rock, access the rock, separate the metals, and so I really appreciated Buzz for laying out the two main problems of kind of access the rock and then separate the rare earths, and so I think we can go both sides of this.
Speaker 2:I didn't want to interrupt too much of the pass off to Esteban, but I did want to really underscore that. This challenge of working on things that are too big to see, I think is one of the major challenges of getting biologists engaged with this, because it just becomes too vague after a while, and so we'd love to hear, esteban, whatever you're most interested in. I'm happy to hear more about carbon capture or also on rare earths, especially since I think you were very precise to describe geology as applied science. Helping biologists begin to work in the applied science of working with rocks is just generally interesting to the audience, but totally happy to hear you riff, however you want here.
Speaker 1:Well, I think the two projects have the same connection and the connection is this won't ever happen if we have a person like Buzz, with expertise on synthetic biology and systems biology, and someone like me that understand minerals, that understand rocks, but also has the lab to make the measurements. Because one part is understanding, for example, the thermodynamic principles behind how a mineral form and what elements are going to go into that mineral, Because not all minerals will hold all elements. This is controlled by the rules of physics, like as any process that is out there, and is controlled by very specific P-T conditions that will define what is the state of order that will form and what are the minerals that are going to form. And, based on those minerals that form, then specific elements are going to go into. For example, Buzz mentioned monazite. Monazite is a very common, what we call an accessory mineral. It's not abundant, but when it happens it will basically sequester all the rare earth, because not all the minerals in the system will have the structure to be able to hold the rare earth element there and also we'll get some thorium there, so it brings a problem. We need to separate the thorium because thorium is very toxic and we don't want to deal with that.
Speaker 1:But elements behave similarly depending on properties of how they will form, at the beginning of the solar system or in the big band, or by cosmic radiation. But it is later, during the crystallization process, that they will selectively feed into different spaces. It's like you have certain spaces you can fit depending on your size and electronegativity. So we also need to make measurements. We need to when we do experiments. We need mass spectrometry, we need a scan in electron microscopes, we need a spectroscopy.
Speaker 1:So we have all these techniques in my lab to be able to quantify how much of these elements are being extracted, how much of these elements were original in the mineral, and then do a mass balance and then have a very good idea of different mutants or strains of a specific bacteria is successful or not, either in the dissolution or separation. So we really need that connection. So I think the common denominator here in these two projects is to be able to cross the boundaries between traditional science and I think that's where the discovery really is in the 21st century. It's a. It's a the phase transition between two fields where I think we're going to really do where the discovery is going to be this century.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have these dreams where we just totally refactor science, that physics blurs into chemistry, blurs into biology. Maybe that's the name of the first few classes you take, but really there's just a more fluid way of thinking about these things. I want to lay a quick little groundwork, like a direction of where we want to go with our last few minutes before we go into rapid fire, which is one I would love to make sure that we learn about the microbes and minerals atlas, and I think we've been touching on that but would love to have you guys tell the world what you're doing and how you're approaching it with these kind of multidisciplinary approaches and how that might create can be learning from gold standard, other parts in biotech of creating public data sets or creating high throughput sampling. The other side of it that I'd really love to make sure we talk about and, esteban, I'm going to toss this to you is I'm going to put you on the spot for something that I've been noodling on really hard, and whenever we talk about metals or mining and that's having a vision that we're going towards and let me briefly unpack this when people start working on carbon capture, everyone will say what's the vision? Oh, we're going to get to the gigaton. We all need to work back from getting a billion tons of carbon captured a year. Everyone's agreeing that's great. When we sequence the genome, we know how many base pairs are there. We just need to measure them all. Right Off we go.
Speaker 2:But when I look at mining it's like the rare earths limitations. There's the vague ones, which is that we need more right, we need to do it domestically and we need to do it in a decentralized way. But I'm personally really kind of lost on. Like a good framework or what is that kind of for lack of a better phrase the moonshot, or like the big vision that we're trying to work backwards from, or maybe there isn't one. One other example is that Department of Energy said the earth shot for hydrogen is $1 per kilogram, and then everyone, like the whole field producing hydrogen, steers towards that.
Speaker 2:But I wanted to set this as like both moving forwards, which I think is what the Microbes Minerals Atlas is doing, but then also trying to get the field to think about these milestones in the future. These like techs I use the phrase like techno maximalist futures that we're trying to work backwards from and, frankly, I've got vague visions of how we need more rare earths, we need more carbon capture. But when I talk about rare earths I don't really have a battle flag on the specific thing, and so I would love to just maybe you know, so we can go both micro mineral that was end kind of mining but is there a battle flag in your mind that people can rally around for sustainable metals extraction or better mining? More precise, what do you think?
Speaker 1:This is, of course, a very complex question because this is not just related with the deposits or the processes, but it's also geopolitical. Unlike oil that is currently controlled by a handful of countries. When we start looking about rare earth or any critical element, deposits are distributed around the planet based on the tectonic evolution of those places, and getting to the details is a little bit extra complicated. But it's not that we have rocks with every metal everywhere. Okay, this is. There are processes that will produce an anomaly, a volcano, for example. Volcanoes are great to concentrate metals. Volcanic activity will bring metals to the surface of the planet. So you understand volcanoes. You understand how these elements are distributed.
Speaker 1:So there is the geopolitical part that is complicated, and mining is not going to go away, as, for as long as we have a huge demand on anything, it doesn't matter how much we recycle, it doesn't matter how much we work on circular economy. There is also going to be a significant amount of material. We need to get above. Let's say we're incredibly efficient with recycling. We still need to get more and we live in that world. That's the world we live. We live in a world that, even if we recycle 100%, the demand is sometimes or there's a magnitude more than what we can recycle. So mining is not going to go away, but maybe what I think we need to envision is a system that is more efficient.
Speaker 1:There are mines that only mine a single element. What if we look at other elements? And there are cases that they're mining copper but they trash the gold. I'm not kidding. There are cases that are. So let's try to increase the efficiency of traditional mining, because we have been mining the same way for 5,000 years. The only difference is that shovels are bigger, factories are bigger, but you know the principles of mining are the same that we have been doing since civilizations started.
Speaker 1:So let's try to do an assessment of what the deposit has in terms of what else we can get from this rock that we're going to crush. That can help us be more efficient, and even if we don't need to get it today, let's put it somewhere in a way that we can get it in the future. The second one is changing the processes to be more environmentally friendly. My vision is that one day, if my collaboration with BOSS becomes successful in a scale of process or whatever efforts other scientists are doing, is that we're going to replace the traditional thermochemical processes with processes that are more friendly to the environment. That it will also allow us to get elements from low-grade materials.
Speaker 1:That's a solution for national security too, because, as I told you, if you want, let's say cobalt, now there are a couple of countries that are the main producers of cobalt. We have cobalt in the US. It's just, with the exception of a couple of places, it's going to be a very low concentration. So maybe from a perspective of efficiency today it's easier to get it from some other places, but in the long run it's being able to tackle lower concentrations, lower grain materials with processes that are friendly to the environment that probably are going to take us to the next level.
Speaker 2:That's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and one more thing Think about alternative solutions. For example, brines have all sorts of elements. Let's try to get elements from brines directly, instead of taking a rock and dissolving the rock brine is already a dissolved rock into some percentage of that brine. There are elements already there that we can get, and we're doing that with lithium, but I think we can explore it with other elements too.
Speaker 2:That's a fantastic. We could spend three hours just unpacking that. Thank you, esteban and Buzz would love to actually hear what the Minerals and Microbes Atlas is doing towards these visions that Esteban was describing.
Speaker 3:So the Microbe Mineral Atlas is probably the most fundamental thing that I have done in years in my career. So again, we want to build the sort of Star Trek future in my career. So again, we want to build the sort of Star Trek future, right? So what we mean by that is an energy infrastructure that's got, is able to channel something like an order of magnitude more power than our current energy infrastructure, so something around, let's say, 100 terawatts. It gives a standard of living to the average person on earth equal to the standard of living of every american alive today. So instead of 300 million people enjoying, or 330 million people enjoying that, somewhere between 10 11 billion people, maybe more, get to enjoy that standard of living, not to say that it will be average. I think Americans will still consume far more power than anybody else, but our standard of living will be dramatically enhanced over what it is today.
Speaker 3:If you look through history, energy consumption is always correlated with quality of life, then we don't want to do this by despoiling the earth, right? So at the same time, this energy infrastructure is carbon negative, so it sucks over the course of at least a few decades, maybe a century. It sucks about one and a half to two trillion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequesters it permanently, just puts it away, and it doesn't generate any additional CO2 as well. So this thing, this infrastructure, is full of electric vehicles, full of electric planes, full of planes that use carbon neutral jet fuel, superconductors everywhere, high strength magnets, and this is going to take hundreds of millions of tons of metals to make this a reality. And we want to get those metals out of rock without metals to make this a reality, and we want to get those metals out of rock without leaving the planet full of holes. So we want to mine every element, every atom out of every chunk of rock that we take out of the ground. We don't want to just take the cream and then throw away the rest. We also want to get away completely from.
Speaker 3:So what this demands is is, if we're going to have a biological solution to this are better ways to dissolve rock, and we're looking for that. Gluconobacter has some of this. It specializes in acids. But if you can think about a mineral in terms of what's called the Porbe diagram, so it tells you about the state of the mineral in terms of redox, pH, and then you could potentially add a third axis of chemical potential, and you can normally move around that with hard acids and electrodes, but in the future we'll move around that with microbes, and to do that we'll have to have microbes that can generate acids very efficiently, that can maybe make chelators very efficiently and can precipitate very efficiently as well, and we sort of have an inkling about genes that control all of these things.
Speaker 3:But the micro mineral atlas is designed to find a much bigger panel, a much bigger menu of them, and then figure out how we can deploy them. So we're going into this in a much more impartial way than we did in the past. We did rare earths. We knew the bug that we were working with and we knew exactly. We said, well, we're going to improve this factor and we're going to improve that factor, whereas with the micro mineral atlas what we do is much more open.
Speaker 3:This is both an opportunity it's an amazing opportunity, right, like to do lots of stuff but it's a danger as well, because I think, left to its own devices, basic science, but worst case, it can just produce a lot of papers that don't do anybody any good. It does great for our cvs, but that's about it, whereas we want technologies and so we have to be laser focused on saying this has got to go into a technology, and that again that sort of requires Esteban and I to maybe go back to the think about how was it that we were able to work together so successfully and then figure out how to scale that up to more people, like how do you motivate them, how do you focus their interest, their intensity? I think those are the central challenges of the Microminerals Atlas. I hope that answers some of the questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think. So. I have a thousand questions I actually want to follow up on, but luckily it's online and you can go to Cornell's website and you can learn more about it. I would love to move us into the rapid fire questions, because there's going to be four questions and there's two of you, so it's going to be eight back and forth, so we're going to move this pretty quickly through. But I really love doing this because it focuses on there's a lot of emphasis on kind of personal development and kind of like philosophies of doing science and anyway. So, without any further ado, esteban, I'm going to put you on the hot seat first and we'll just do the same question to both of you, switching who goes first. Esteban, what is a single book, paper, art piece or idea that blew your mind and shaped your development as a scientist?
Speaker 1:This is like when people ask me what is your favorite wine. It's a very difficult question to answer. If I can choose one book that I can tell everyone to read, Meditations from Marcus Aurelius, because a lot of the issues we deal with day to day. Humanity has been facing these issues. It's just so clear. And I'm not especially from the stoic perspective because I'm probably the least stoic person you can imagine. I'm always showing my cards, but it's just to give you this idea of how the challenges we have today. They have always been there. Just the scale is what it changed.
Speaker 1:I love art too, and it's very difficult to tell you what really defines my life in terms of art, but I think one piece of art that really makes it something to talk about is the dome of I think it's Brunelleschi in Florence. For hundreds of years, humanity forgot how to build a dome. The Romans know how to do it, the Greeks know how to do it. All the people knew how to do it. Then we went into the Dark Ages and we got rid of science, we got rid of enlightenment. Suddenly, facts were no longer important, so people forgot how to build one. So he needed to start from zero and he hadn't really faced a lot of challenges. Up to the point he was, they kicked him out from the academy because they thought that he was crazy, but then he eventually succeeded. So it tells you to the idea that it's great to listen to feedback, but if you want to change the world you need to be stubborn.
Speaker 2:I love that. I will just say plus one to Marcus Aurelius's meditations. He has a passage there where he talks about being unapologetic, and that really set me free, just like. It's a very beautiful phrase to be unapologetic, and that goes well with the dome story, which I'm very moved by. That Buzz and rapid fire questions. What is a single book, paper, art piece or idea that blew your mind and developed you as a scientist?
Speaker 3:I love this. If I was to recommend it would be David McKay's book Sustainability Without the Hot Air, which is a Another physicist, another physicist, mathematician and the kernel of it was a report that he wrote to the British government and he lays out the sustainability challenge in mathematics and the scale of it, and that was something I read fairly early on when I was very worried about climate change. And again it says it's really big but at least it puts a bound on it for you and I loved that. After I read that it was no longer a nebulous problem, it was just a big problem. But there's a number there so I could deal with it. The second thing I would recommend and I'm going to try and work in the other books in response to your other questions is a report written by michael brenner called engineering, and we wrote it with several of the luminaries in jason, like freeman dyson called engineering microorganisms for Energy, and that report I remember when I was early on in grad school I read Schrodinger's book what Is Life, where he basically lays out the challenges of the molecular biology revolution, and I read it.
Speaker 3:I thought it was boring, actually, like Watson and Crick had read it and they loved it, right. And I thought this is really boring. And it's only boring because he's effectively posed all the questions and then other people went and solved them, right. That's the only reason it's boring. And I sort of forced myself to read it because this is generally accepted as an amazing book, right? And I wanted to read it so that if something like it were to crop up in my lifetime, I would know what to look for.
Speaker 3:And then I read Engineering Microorganisms for Energy Production. I was like that's it, because Brenner lays out. He doesn't again like Schrodinger, right, he doesn't get everything, every framing right in what is life, but he gets the essence of it right. And Brenner gets the essence of what are the challenges, what's the big scale, right? He puts numbers on how much gasoline do you have to make every year? How much power do you have to capture every year? What does this mean for microbial metabolism? What does this mean for photosynthesis? And I thought every time I read it I get something new out of that. Even today it's almost 20 years old. It's an incredible document.
Speaker 2:Wow, I didn't know this existed and that's. I'm going to pull it right up. Afterwards We'll put these in the show notes and people can find the books. I am going to toss it actually to you back. I'll ask you, buzz, the next question, which is what is the best advice line that a mentor gave you?
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, I thought about this deeply, okay, and then this is going to let me work in my third book recommendation. So my PhD advisor, saul Gruner, said to me one day I think he must have been a fan of Feynman and he liked to puncture people who are too smart and he said there are some problems that are thought to be impossible in theory but in practice they're really quite soluble. And he was talking about x-ray crystallography, where you take a diffraction image, you've got all these spots on it and you turn it into an atomic structure of a protein and if you think about it in theory, by taking the photograph you've lost all the phase information from the Bragg diffraction. How do you turn that back into an atomic structure, especially one with thousands of atoms in it? And in fact it's actually totally soluble because additional information like bond lengths and angles and you can include that in your solution. So Max Perutz talks about this in his sort of memoir. I Wish I'd Made you Angry Earlier and I just thought that was a wonderful piece of advice, like I really thought that was like a great I think.
Speaker 3:Later on, when I invented Sudoku, I was sort of at the lowest point in my career and there was a paper on DNA Sudoku and it had in it the scheme that we later used for cataloging knockout collections. And the author says this is impossible. The way it's very simple and cheap way and I thought maybe it is, but maybe it's. In theory it's not soluble, but in practice maybe it is. So I tried it and it was. You just had to use probabilistic thinking to do it. And that brings me to my fourth book recommendation, which is Andrew Hodge's biography of Turing the Enigma, where he talks about probabilistic methods for cracking encrypted messages. So nothing is too hard. Basically that's the message of that book.
Speaker 2:That's a beautiful, a beautiful. I'm going to force myself not to riff on that, but thank you for that mentor line. And, Esteban, what is the best advice line that a mentor gave you?
Speaker 1:I will give the credit to my car and my PhD advisor. One of my PhD advisors. He used to give like a list of rules of how to be successful, and Mike is a person with a very good sense of humor but very dry, and he used to say work well with others or not, and I think that really matters. We can try to work with others, we can try to develop collaborations, we can try to really anything, but unless there is this chemistry that works and also complementary skills, it's not going to work out. Like you need to put away your ego if you want science to be successful.
Speaker 1:It's it's all about the data, it's all about the process. It's all about the collaboration. It's all about speaking different languages, like whenever we have a meeting every two weeks. Both and I like our groups that is a big group of people we speak in different languages and for the most part, we learn how to communicate each other, but every so often is someone from my group or vice versa. It says, well, what was that? And I think that really matters. Again, if you're going to be at this interface of putting two fields together, you need to learn to work well with others or not. Maybe that person is not a good match. Instead of getting into the high-end statistics and probabilistic developments that Buzz mentioned, I guess this advice is more about how to work with people too.
Speaker 2:I love it. It really resonates with a lot of things I've learned in life too. So, esteban, if you had a magic wand to get more attention or resources into one part of biology or geology, what would it be?
Speaker 1:I don't want to be here when the next super eruption happens. And it's not because of the damage that is going to be happening close to the volcano, it's the climate effect that is going to. Last years, the last time an eruption like this happened, we were not able to produce food in the northern hemisphere. If this happened again, it will destroy civilization, and we don't have the mechanisms, we don't have the monitoring, we don't have global networks. We have a series of disparate networks to study volcanoes, some more instrumented than others.
Speaker 1:It's not a lot of money. It's going to be a fraction of what James Webb cost or a plans of what we're going to do if that happen and, in part, having enough food or having reserves. That's one, and the other one is if we can really put some effort on moving into alternative routes to get critical elements and people understanding the importance of this. Every time I talk with somebody, I tell them that in every wind turbine there are fine tons of copper and one ton of rare earth, and these are fine tons of copper and one ton of rare earth that we don't have, that we need to get from somewhere. So every time you see a wind turbine, you're seeing a significant amount of material that is being extracted from somewhere, because it takes at least 400 to 4,000 tons of material to be ground and dissolved to turn it into one ton of copper.
Speaker 2:Oh, very good, I'm throttling myself. I'm not going to riff Buzz, I'm going to toss it over to you. If you had one magic wand to get more attention and resources into one part of biology what would it be?
Speaker 3:I think it would be. This was the one thing I didn't notice on the list of questions, so I had to think about it when Esteban was talking. I would go with another part of my research program, which is electromicrobial production, and it's also the way the sort of the vehicle that I met Paul Reginardo through. When the penny was dropping about accelerated weathering for CO2 sequestration, I asked myself the question in order to dissolve rocks, gluconobacter has to eat sugar and sugar has to come from photosynthesis. So just how much sugar do you need? And it turns out it's a lot, and I wrote a paper about this. Paul Reginardo discovered a missing decimal point in the paper and he got in touch with me. I thought this is an interesting guy. I've got to talk to this guy, and so every time I've spoken to him ever since, I felt like I have to take it very seriously, because he's thinking on a very he's very deeply interested in the problem.
Speaker 3:What that prediction stated was that we could all these new biotechnologies that are going to power the energy infrastructure of the future that I outlined earlier. They're going to have such a demand for sugar that they might monopolize the world's food supply, so we could solve climate change and we could have every electric car we want, but nobody will have anything to eat. So we need a way to beat photosynthesis and we need a way to turn cells. We talk about microbial cell factories, but if you think about it, the last thing a cell really is a factory, right, because it's not really interested in making one thing a sugar, a jet fuel it wants to make more of itself, and so the true factory-like state is actually very non-natural, right. It's like extremely.
Speaker 3:There's actually no way that evolution would select for that. And if you were to, somehow miraculously, do you completely rethink the incentives of life, is it in fact life, the thing that you're making? Even though it has some biological aspects like room temperature and room pressure, catalysis, room temperature, self-repair, it does have self-assembly, but it doesn't arrive at any of those things through evolution by natural selection. And that brings me on to my maybe fifth book, which is Life as no One Knows it by Sarah Walker, which is a sort of a 21st century version of what is life, and it's a great sort of mathematical theory of what exactly is life and what counts as life and what doesn't of what exactly is life and what counts as life and what doesn't.
Speaker 2:Very interesting, I have not read that. We'll absolutely read that. I am going to toss to the fourth question now, which is and Buzz, this one's to you, which you guys are both professors, you're both taking care of students in their careers, and what is one aspect of personal development that you think scientists need to spend more time on?
Speaker 3:that you think scientists need to spend more time on, I would say being very, very comfortable with failure, knowing that there are sort of milestones, career stages. There is a careerist aspect to it, there is a gold star aspect to it. If you think about this, if you think about it, academia is like the concentrator for the gold star winners the world over. Right, and it's worse. Become a gold star, accruing competition and nothing more than that. You can very much lose sight of the why are you doing this right? Hopefully for the betterment of humanity, and so I would say, learn to remember why, learn to remember why you're doing it right.
Speaker 3:There is every incentive for the careerist stuff to consume all your energy and to allow you to slide off task. You have to be aware of it right. You can't like I always say to especially the undergrads, it's like grades aren't everything, but given the choice, I would have all A's right, like it's not the be all and end all, but it is. You do have to tend to it it can't be everything in your life and also know that the things that are really worth doing are really hard, and so you will likely fail many times, and that's actually acceptable as long as you make, as you eventually succeed, and now it's not again. It's not acceptable to fail all the time and it's not acceptable to fail in the end, but along the way you fail a lot and you have to go from one failure to the next with no loss of enthusiasm or, if you do, get over it pretty quickly I love it very much.
Speaker 2:Agrees with my life experience too, esteban. For the last of the rapid fire questions what is one aspect of personal development that you think scientists need to spend more time on?
Speaker 1:so I I agree with a lot of what boss said, but I think it's fundamentally to keep in mind that, besides trying to decipher the secrets of the universe, science is here fundamentally to serve society. Science and technology, engineering we're here to make our society better and we need to keep that in mind. We need to keep in mind that we are here to train the next generations that are going to be leaders in science, technology, government, industry, but with the goal of tackling those fundamental problems that we that are facing society today. While working on fundamental processes is super interesting, interesting we always need to keep in mind that we're not here just for that. We're here because we need to face the reality of what humanity is dealing with and try to solve those problems.
Speaker 2:So I think we will do a graceful exit on that beautiful note that science is here to serve society. When we talk about working on climate, we're working on bringing a society that can go through 2100, 2200 and beyond. I have to say, buzz and Esteban, I've really enjoyed this conversation. What people who listen to this will not see is that I've been smiling ear to ear this whole conversation. There's many things for me to read and learn from Esteban. For people wanting to look you up after this, what would you point them towards? Your Cornell website or a specific resource?
Speaker 1:You can look at my Cornell website. For the most part I have all the press releases of articles that have been published there. There's a lot of resources also through Cornell that you can see there, besides the collaborations that I'm working with Buzz.
Speaker 2:Cool On your Cornell website is also some great adventures from your field work, which is some photos that were great to see and Buzz. Same thing. How do people who want to learn more about the Barstow Lab find you?
Speaker 3:I would say website barstowbecornelledu, and maybe even followers on Instagram. Actually, I try to post photos these days more often than not, Like I think I find social media lends itself often to negativity, but it's very hard to be negative with photographs.
Speaker 2:Awesome, awesome. Well, esteban and Buzz, thank you guys so much for making time and I hope everyone else who listens to this enjoyed as much as we had talking. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Daniel, it was. It has been awesome and it was great experience and hopefully the next time we can have a conversation in person.
Speaker 2:Love that. 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 to our producer, dave Clark, and operations lead, paul Himmelstein, for making these episodes happen. Catch you on the next one.