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
Synthetic Biology Acceleration with Pam Silver
Professor Pam Silver from Harvard Medical School joins us as a founding figure and legend in synthetic biology whose scientific path led from pioneering work on nuclear localization to co-developing the revolutionary "bionic leaf"—a system that combines artificial catalysts with bacteria to convert sunlight and CO2 into fuels and compounds at efficiencies far exceeding natural photosynthesis.
Silver's perspective on synthetic biology's evolution from theoretical explorations to real-world applications is illuminating. "The only way we're going to solve the problems of the world with food and impending climate change is through engineering biology," she asserts. "Nature has solved many problems already, and the more we learn how nature solves them, we can implement that."
She doesn't shy away from controversial topics, proudly declaring herself "a full-on GMO believer" while acknowledging the ethical complexities of engineered deployments. Her approach exemplifies the powerful interface between human engineering and biological processes that characterizes her climate solutions work.
For aspiring biotechnologists, Silver offers wisdom distilled from decades at the forefront: "Be bold, take risks, but remain humble and respect nature." This balance of audacity and reverence captures her approach to reimagining biology as an engineering medium—one that might hold solutions to our most pressing planetary challenges.
Whether you're a scientist, entrepreneur, or simply curious about how biology might shape our climate future, this episode offers insights from someone who has helped define synthetic biology from its earliest days.
Be it for better or worse and I'm going to be extreme here the only way we're going to solve the problems of the world with food and impending, dare I say, climate change is through engineering biology. That's what nature has given us. Nature has solved many problems already, and the more we learn how nature solves them, we can implement that.
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. We are thrilled to welcome Professor Pam Silver for a discussion about climate biotech and sustainability. Pam Silver is a big name in synthetic biology and you probably know her from co-founding iGEM, creating companies like Kula, bio 64X, bio Circe. You might also know that Patrick Boyle, one of the co-founders of Ginkgo, was a PhD student in her lab. She's really been everywhere. Today, she sits on the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, so she's respected not only for her research breakthroughs, but also for her mentorship and community leadership, and there's a personal element for this, too.
Speaker 2:I first met Pam in 2021, in the early days of what would become Homeworld Collective, and I was at an agricultural event, and Pam got up on stage and presented ideas that were much more revolutionary, much more difference of kind than other people were talking about. She was talking about let's do full genetic reengineering to accomplish this goal and this goal, and to me, that DNA, so to speak, was really baked into what ultimately became Homeworld Collective. So I'm really grateful for Pam. I hope you enjoy this. What you will hear in this is we're focusing more on the beginning part of Pam's career, as a lot of the later part of her work today is quite easy to find. So I hope you have fun.
Speaker 1:I grew up in California. I grew up in Silicon Valley 1.0. And my hometown was the town of Atherton. To be clear, before it was the richest town in the country. My house I grew up in has not yet been torn down.
Speaker 2:Amazing I actually lived in a large group house in Atherton.
Speaker 1:I didn't know, there were group houses in Atherton and that people lived in them.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, this is about eight people living in this house.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was a very special time, oh yeah, this is about eight people living in this house. Yeah, it was a very special time. The Atherton I grew up in. You had to have minimum of an acre of property and virtually the house couldn't be seen from the road. And then for every horse, you had to have an extra acre.
Speaker 2:Wow. Ok. So in that era of you growing up in Atherton with an acreage per horse ratio, did you always know that one day you'd be seen as one of the founding figures of synthetic biology?
Speaker 1:Heck. No, first of all, synthetic biology didn't even exist. Second, the idea of me being a leader of anything was the farthest thing from my mind. Let's do a little framing here. It was the 60s, there was no careerism and it was the farthest thing from my mind what I might do with my life. We were just messing around man when we weren't being troublemakers. That said, I think that the idea of me being the leader of anything wasn't in the cards.
Speaker 2:One of my favorite cliches or I think it's positive stereotype is I think a lot of the people that do change the world the most were real troublemakers as a kid. So I wonder for you so you were a troublemaker. I can totally imagine that running around the 60s, when did bio start becoming a thing for you?
Speaker 1:I think, first of all, growing up at that time in the Bay Area it was still the natural beauty was just overwhelming and kids played outside. I have to confess, my parents had a swimming pool, but we all we also had this massive lawns and could go to the beach and it the natural beauty. I had my tree that I lived in, that I loved, and my imaginary friend. It was a very dysfunctional childhood. Needless to say, both my parents were psychotherapists, but they write whole books about people like me. But no, I think realist. The natural beauty and the opportunity, because of good weather and the setting, to spend so much time outdoors just, I think, nurtures a natural fascination in the natural world. I was big on butterflies and insect collecting and one of my earliest memories is making mud pies with one of my father's colleagues who they had co-invented group therapy, and so there we were, the kids playing with mud pies. It was a wacky neighborhood.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess, given the 60s, that was more the era.
Speaker 1:The natural beauty, but also just science in general. At that time it was the birth of Silicon Valley 1.0. And the level of engineering and science there was amazing. My parents were doctors but many of the parents were mathematicians working at SRI. Or my best friend's father ran founded one of the biggest companies. One of my other friend's father, I'm convinced, worked for the CIA. The level of science and engineering in that world was unbelievable.
Speaker 2:And this was the space race era.
Speaker 1:Too right, and we had a not to say, oh, my school was great, but my school was great, my elementary school, good old Enson School, which I guess people now really crave to get into the Menlo Park school system. Who knew Princeton University had created a science course for 12-year-olds or something, and they came and remodeled our classroom into this kind of interactive space and then they had very focused. We all did little group experiments around physics and things that had to do with the space program or landing people on the moon. That was the climate there was just amazing.
Speaker 1:And then I, for some reason which I don't anymore as a kid I had some degree of math skill. There's a funny story about how girls weren't considered then to be good at math and there was a PhD student at Stanford that decided to research me because I was good at math. And there was a PhD student at Stanford that decided to research me because I was good at math. I'm not good at math anymore, but yeah, for some reason I became fascinated with math. I won the IBM math contest when I was 13. And the prize was a slide rule. Now most people don't even know what a slide rule is.
Speaker 1:So there that's an app on an iPhone, right? Do they have it on?
Speaker 2:So I'm trying to draw a line now, because you end up as a PhD student working in biology.
Speaker 1:First of all, it was a bit of a windy path. I actually spent a few years working as a chemist because I majored in. Actually, I started as a math major, Then I moved to physics, but physics at that time was either chaos theory or high energy physics, and no way was I going to be a theoretician. I really liked doing experiments. The problem was my best friend was doing an experiment at Slack and the pen broke and you could wait a year for your experiment and then this is back before digital right and the pen broke. So that wasn't for me. So then I transitioned to biochemistry and actually then worked in industry for a little bit as a chemist and then ended up in graduate school.
Speaker 1:What I worked on was what people would now consider synthetic cells, but I was doing it 40 years ago. My projects were to package DNA replication, coupled protein translation systems into vesicles to study how proteins move across membranes. That was my PhD project. I'm excited because now there's this whole effort around synthetic cells and I can actually inform on that and relate to it. I'm not going to go back and work on that again. But it also says to me how things go. Technologies advance, but they go full circle also, which is really interesting. Then to the nuclear localization. Yeah, so at that time in the dark ages of cell biology. So this was at a time when molecular biology was really starting to take off and the idea of combining molecular biology with fundamental questions in cell biology was really the future at that time. What about the nucleus? It's at the center of the cell, and so I started my postdoc with the question of how do proteins move in and out of the cell?
Speaker 2:Wow, I have to say a very dumb thing, which is I never considered cell biology to be distinct from molecular biology.
Speaker 1:See, that's why, because you are so young and it was really revolutionary. I think that says something like in the future, is AI going to? Are we just going to think of protein design as AI?
Speaker 2:What computer science has done so is we've built a stack right, and so you get abstractions on top of abstractions, and since in the computer science we built it ourselves, we can trust that you can trace it all the way down to the individual gates and it's going to work. But in biology it's interesting because we don't know what's at the bottom right. We're just building abstraction layers somewhere in the middle and it becomes soup. And in the era that I started taking biology classes in 2005, 2008, they're just the same thing. If you're talking about the cell, you're talking about proteins, and if you're talking about proteins, you're talking about kinetics and all that. I never would have considered there was an era, but it makes total sense that they would be considered different. And so there's also this humility I have to have, which is I can't even imagine what bioexperiments looked like before you had sequences.
Speaker 1:There are many still lurking around here that really were at the true, what I call true cell biology. And then our interlopers came and started cloning things and making fusion proteins and violating all the fundamentals.
Speaker 2:And that was what you did. Right, you were using GFP in some of the first experiments.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we my first experiment as a postdoc, and I was inspired by the work of, for example, john Beckwith, who had also pioneered the idea of using fusion proteins to study and isolate mutants of bacteria. That affected how proteins are secreted from the cells, and that's how we were able to define the secretory machinery, and I was really inspired by that, and so I wanted to take a similar approach. I was in the Potashny lab. Has anyone ever heard of Mark Potashny?
Speaker 2:I normally try to say speak to us like we're smart, but I think it is worth giving a little bit of context there.
Speaker 1:So Mark was really at the forefront of molecular biology and understanding the basics of transcription. He was studying the very simple bacteriophage Lambda and the principles that he worked out are still true for even more complex systems. And anyway, he was also at the forefront of the recombinant DNA revolution. An amazing person. Many people said, oh, you don't want to work with him, and it was the best. One lesson I learned is, when people say don't work with someone, you should really go the other way. Maybe not always, but in that case, and some of my best scientific friends for life I made there. But I came with my own idea and that was to define, by using molecular genetics, how proteins get into the nucleus and also to identify, using genetics, the cellular machinery.
Speaker 1:So that was my first half of my scientific career, essentially.
Speaker 2:And what did I get wrong, though? Because this was discovering some of the early nuclear localization sequences that we still use today.
Speaker 1:Right, Yep, yep. People still use the one I discovered.
Speaker 2:And so, to try to speedrun where you got to today, you finished your postdoc and then did you go straight to becoming a professor.
Speaker 1:Yes, and again, my lack of careerism. I was, I had no plan, and what amazes me is I look at young people today and there's so much angst about when. I feel so sorry for them because I was like I don't have a plan, except that maybe I need to make money.
Speaker 2:But in 2004,. You become the founding faculty at the systems biology right.
Speaker 1:So there was a big distance between being at princeton and that's where I continued the nuclear globalization work and then I moved back to harvard and that's where I was actually at dana farber cancer institute and at the medical school for my first. I guess I'd be the middle part of my career and that's where I did the GF. Some of the first GF you were.
Speaker 2:I'd love to now look in the more recent part of your career, but I'd love to explore it from an interesting angle, which is that, for the people who have listened to this, there's a common rant I go on which is that I was a bio student for a semester as an undergrad.
Speaker 1:What? Were you an undergrad? Where were you an undergrad? I undergrad and I hated it. Where were you an undergrad? I was at Harvey Mudd College.
Speaker 2:I went to UC Santa Cruz, but I think Harvey Mudd was my third choice it's so good For me, like the big thing I took away there is it almost broke me right. I was like really close to dropping out but I stuck it out and I think a big part of the toughness I've had was this yeah, if I can do mud, I can do anything, and I think that's what they really instilled for a while. Our bio program was not that strong at the time and I took a class and I had to count crabs on the beach and I was like this is dumb. There's no way that I'm gaining any sort of skills in the real world From the outside.
Speaker 2:In bio always looked like a descriptive science, like a geography. Just memorize what goes next to what. And the mitochondria does this. But now, and for people who do research biology, is this really cool engineering medium. Right when I think about synthetic biology. For me that means viewing biology from an engineer's point of view, a technologist's point of view, jumping in, and that builds off the work that you've done your whole career. I'm curious, at what point did your First of all? I'm curious how that resonates with you and you've seen the arc. At what point do you think biology started becoming more of an engineering mindset field and kind of where was that in your career?
Speaker 1:Let me go back to the counting crabs on the beach for a moment. And because I lived in Santa Cruz and my best friend was a marine biologist and so we used to go out at the crack of dawn and count sea lions and things like that. So all that information, by the way, is really important. And they were going to build a nuclear reactor and so they wanted to know what impact it was going to have. And now, with AI, all that stuff is really good. So let's not discount the descriptive angle.
Speaker 2:My personal opinion, excuse me.
Speaker 1:Your question was when was the turning point of engineering? And I think I spoke to that already where I'm because I came into biology at the beginning of molecular biology that really opened the door to biology as an engineering discipline, the first example being the production of recombinant human insulin by the group at Stanford and UCSF, which really was just or Amgen, it was just really revolutionary. And so I grew up in that scientific world and if I look back and some of my colleagues are much more purists and say you need to solve biological, fundamental biological problems, and I was always torn because I also wanted to build things that would in part solve problems or allow you to interrogate systems, but more and more towards building more complicated systems that have real world applications.
Speaker 2:And since this is the Climate Biotech Podcast, it's a really good point to bring up COOLA, or what we now know as COOLA, but 10 years ago we knew it as the bionic leaf research coming out of the Nocera and Silver Labs. I would love to just explore this a little bit because I think this is a great example of a combination of fundamental biology questions mixed with an engineering mindset, and I'd love if we could just kind of explore that story, how that came about. To me that feels pretty emblematic of the work that your group does, but I'd love to hear from the person herself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, please tell us about the biome. Yeah, it's a really nice story and I think it's also emblematic of how collaborations can go well and how we need more of them. So let me set the stage. I had left Dana Farber, I developed a cancer drug. I had a company. I said that's it. I can't do better. These people are going to cure cancer, not me.
Speaker 1:And I had the luxury of having met the synthetic biology working group, which was centered at MIT, and I was the token biologist in that group, where they asked how can we engineer biology in a more predictable way, much like, you would say, design an electronic system? That was really one of the underpinnings and fast forward a few years. And I remember they had written what are we going to do with synthetic biology? And it was solve all the world's problems in plus or minus five years or something. But to be clear, that is why I moved into synthetic biology, because I really wanted to do things, not that cancer was big, but I wanted to do things with biology that might have some real world impact. That was always my motivation. It was not to push the limits of what we could design, it was really towards having some kind of actual impact, which, again, may have been a little overly ambitious.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, going along and we're working on things like photosynthetic bacteria and getting them to make stuff. We got them to make sugar. We tried to make photosynthetic clothes with naryoxamine. This is typical Silver Lab stuff. Then we said what you really want is these bacteria to make hydrogen, because hydrogen is a clean burning fuel, right? And so imagine you had a bacteria. That this story is going to the bionic leaf, by the way.
Speaker 1:You had a bacteria that, in response to light, would make hydrogen Meanwhile Dan O'Sara an amazing chemist, if not the most amazing chemist I know.
Speaker 2:And quite a personality.
Speaker 1:Yes and lovely had moved from MIT to Harvard although he says I'm off, but I believe we met at the Harvard University Center for the Environment Christmas Party at Dan Schrag's house, and Dan came up to me and said oh, I really want to talk to you because we have this mutual interest in hydrogen.
Speaker 1:And he told me about the electric catalysts he built that were capable of doing the water splitting reaction, which is what planets do in response to an electrical input, which can be light, and that it would produce hydrogen. And he called this the artificial leaf, and it had gone on to great success in different areas. He asked me can we interface this somehow with biology? And because we'd been working on this problem from a different angle, we came up with the idea of using his electrocatalyst in combination with bacteria that can use hydrogen to produce, to grow, to produce it, to give them energy to grow, together with fixing CO2. And that's exactly what a plant does, and hence that's what we invented. It was really exciting. I had some amazing students that took the guts to take risks and try something like that, as did Dan, and it was an amazing collaboration, remains a great collaboration to this day, and that is the story. That was how we developed the bionic leaf.
Speaker 2:And what did you use for the chassis? I don't know.
Speaker 1:At the time. It's so embarrassing. I believe at the time we were using C necator, I remember. Now I have this pesky thing in my life where, if you live long enough, they change the names of things you work on, and then it's really confusing. And so it was Ralstonia which was the bacteria, but now they've changed its name to C necator. I think I have that right. And how irritating is that. So the papers, we all talk about Ralstonia, and anyway, that was the bacteria got it.
Speaker 2:I was asking about organisms, because your lab has also found some pretty exotic metabolisms through your work, so I was trying to remember if that was part of the bionic leaf, or so our end of the bionic leaf.
Speaker 1:So Dan invented the upfront part, the catalyst, and which is an amazing piece of work. It's a self-healing catalyst. That alone is absolutely amazing. And then we developed the ability to interface it with these organisms, so they would grow. And not only would they grow, they would make stuff. So you have a complete system where you're going from light to stuff in combination with CO2. So it's the perfect situation, right? You're only limited by what you can have biology make, which I personally think is unlimited.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if I remember right the claim the original publication was saying, going from a 1% efficiency energy efficiency to about a 10% yeah, and I'm hesitant to say I'm not sure.
Speaker 1:Maybe has anyone done better than that, I don't know. And 10% efficiency is way above. The best in class is algae, which is so. Plants are terrible. Right, they're down there at one or 2%. Algae is up there, I think, at 8%, and we were already exceeding algae. So it's very exciting times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that project really stuck with me because to me it feels like a big theme of future looking. Biology is the interface between humans make something that plants can't do well, and then biology does things that humans can't do well.
Speaker 1:And the other thing it embraces is something I think is also important is the interface between biology and inert substances, or whatever you could imagine an interface between electronics and biology, not just responding to biology but somehow manipulating those interfaces in productive ways, because there is a lot that chemistry can do at that interface.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it feels like we don't yet have the go-to approach. Yet there's some things that are just down pat Cloning, we know how to do. Sequencing, we know how to do we know how to do protein engineering. Everyone has their common workflows, but deployment to me still feels very specific for every single project, and to me, like at least for certain applications, it's either fermentation and give it to a basf, or it's figured out yourself and then develop it from the ground up, which slows progress down.
Speaker 1:so much is this something you think about the kind of future deployments for synthetic biology Absolutely, and it's one of my mantras is to that synthetic biology it's not having its moment in the sun right now. Let's be honest, no pun intended.
Speaker 1:But, part of that is it's a good thing and a bad thing. So part of that is, you could say, much of the last 20 years was spent building systems and testing the limits of what you could build, generating so-called tools and things like that, and interrogating new organisms. At the same time, you could call those toy systems because they generally could not be scaled an oscillator. That is a very accurate timekeeper and showed that you could count the number of cell divisions as a bacteria went through a mouse gut, so using it as a timer, for example. But in general, deployment at scale is often what you need, or deployment in the wild, or deployment if you're going to use it in medical situations. This is what I call the real world applications, and I think this is where we are in part two of synthetic biology.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'm going to give you the most annoying question, which is the what areas we're going to get to, what areas are you most excited about moving forward? And I'll give you one kind of toss up for you to roast or react to. And then I'm curious if it's more of a general answer, which is that open deployments of synthetic biology to me still seems like one of the most important things we could be working on. But it's such an ethical landmine that only really established labs can shoulder the ethical risk of doing it, and I'm not sure if you think that's something. I'm kind of curious what your reaction is. Do you think open deployment of out of the tank biology deployments is something that is worth working on?
Speaker 1:First of all, I'm going to say that I'm a full on GMO believer.
Speaker 2:Me too.
Speaker 1:My dream is to open in Cambridge the all GMO restaurant, Although it turns out there aren't that many foods that are GMO. It's surprising.
Speaker 2:Well, funny. Can I just react for a quick second, Pam? Because there's the enhanced games, which is the Olympics, which is steroid friendly, and it's getting this huge reaction. People are so excited about the enhanced games and so if I could get enhanced food, I would choose GMO over pesticide to hack any day.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Anyway, I also think that, be it for better or worse and I'm going to be extreme here the only way we're going to solve the problems of the world with food and impending, dare I say, climate change is through engineering biology. That's what nature has given us. Nature has solved many problems already, and the more we learn how nature solves them, we can implement that. So your question was about ethics or safety.
Speaker 2:Oh, the bigger question is what areas are you excited? People are going to listen to this, and they're going to be pushed by Pam Silver in a direction or two. For me, I was thinking that open deployments is one of the areas, but I don't want to bias you. There's something else that you think is more important. We can also just jump there.
Speaker 1:There's important and what I'm excited about. Those are two different things, and I wanted to go back to something you were saying earlier about, or I was saying about, or I was saying about how do we get to real-world deployment faster. And I want to just give a shout out for a project that unfortunately was terminated by our current situation, but together with MITRE, we were trying to build something called the Bionet, which would accelerate from concept all the way, to say, production. So, with the tools we have, both from computation and from what we've done with biology, the time's right to do that. So that was one answer and something I was very excited about. So, as far as deployment goes, I'm a firm believer in it. If we're going to bring solutions to the planet, I'm conscious of the need to not do what plastics did Anyone I don't know Anyone's old enough on this to have seen the Graduate.
Speaker 2:I have.
Speaker 1:There's the famous scene where he tells the father, tells Dustin Hoffman, what's the future, and the father says plastics. That just haunts me, although just today I was reading about in the ocean. There's these things. I forget what they're like solid things form, and they've always been doing this. They have a name and now they're starting to incorporate plastic into themselves. And so how cool is that? The ocean is recycling plastic on its own.
Speaker 2:Are these coca lithophores? Is that what they?
Speaker 1:are. I didn't have time to read it, but how cool is that? Maybe that's how nature's to work. There's this whole thing about adaptation right and so important. There's what do I find exciting and there's what's important. Obviously, food is a huge issue and can be dealt with in many ways. I think getting better at predictable engineering of plants is super important and something if I had time and knew anything about plants I'd love to do. Having just returned from diving in Indonesia, though if I had my way, I would work on coral. Coral is just so amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Now engineered coral. How are people going to feel about that? I think it's really it's a cost benefit issue. And also this goes back to my early days slightly before I came to Cambridge, to Harvard, there was a ban on DNA cloning which resulted in hearings by the Cambridge City Council. So this is your public at work. And Mark Potashny, my former advisor, was one of the most vocal people and got into this tiff with the mayor and I think you can dig up the tapes of this. It's really interesting to watch from a public interaction on science. But one of the I remember in a similar question, mark's response was it depends on your definition of risk. This goes to the vaccine issue. It's a cost benefit issue. Can't guarantee that there's no risk.
Speaker 2:I also I find myself making arguments of there's a risk of not doing things as well.
Speaker 1:There's always that yes.
Speaker 2:So I will have to say I'm so sorry, because I really wanted to explore the tardigrade plus plants projects. We're just going to throw that out into the ether as a teaser for people to check out really exciting stuff coming from your work, pam. But because we're getting short on time we have to just jump into the rapid fire questions. So four questions Are you ready? And whatever comes to the top of your head, there's obviously no right or wrong. So the first question is what's a single book, paper, art piece or idea that blew your mind and shaped your development as a scientist?
Speaker 1:I can say the moon landing, that was pretty cool. Scientist, I could say the moon landing, that was pretty cool.
Speaker 2:But before that I think it's sad, but I think I was destined, not destined but I think it was just I was going to be and do something in science. That's great, I would say. You'd be amazed how many people say sci-fi book or a piece of art, moon landing is a great one.
Speaker 1:I'm not going with moon landing though, because I was interested, but you have to remember it was the 60s and I was interested in a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2:All right, so second question what's the best advice line that a mentor gave you?
Speaker 1:Don't follow what mentors tell you.
Speaker 2:But I found that once I started not doing what mentors told me, things got better for me. That's awesome. My NSFW way of saying this is that learning to say strategic uses of F-U has actually served me really well in my career.
Speaker 1:There was one of my mentors. One of my mentors did say one of his taglines was F-M they can't take a joke, perfect.
Speaker 2:So maybe that was the best advice yeah, if you can't laugh with someone, I don't think you can work with someone, okay, great. Third question if you had a magic wand to get more attention or resources into one part of biology, what would it be? The?
Speaker 1:ocean the ocean except more, except more than the land. There are more, or there's more, bacteriophage in the ocean than there are bacteria, I think, the resources in terms of life, in terms of understanding the earth, and it's beautiful.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. And the fourth question what is one aspect of personal development that you think biotechnologists need to spend more time on?
Speaker 1:Be bold take risks, but remain humble and respect nature.
Speaker 2:Perfect, so I hope it's clear that I'm throttling myself from asking a thousand follow-ups there. Pam, I really have to say a huge thank you. You and your work have been a big inspiration to me personally, and so I'm really grateful that you take time to share your story so openly. I really appreciate that you spent so much time on the beginning part of your career, because it's very easy to find stuff on what you've produced in the past 10 years. But it's really important, I think, to be rooted that we all start somewhere right and we go through these different steps in our career and I think we tell stories backwards sometimes. So I love that we told this story forward.
Speaker 2:Pam, thank you so much for all this what you've done for the climate biotech community, for the synthetic biology community and me personally. So thank you very much for your time, Thank you. 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.