BioTech Futures Part 2

Data & Society

Christina Agapakis, the creative director of Ginkgo Bioworks and one of the world’s first biodesigners, discusses biotechnology and feminism.

In the early 2000s, a group of scientists from outside mainstream biology proposed that they would make living things behave like computers. They would treat DNA like command code; they would make cells behave with Boolean logic; and ultimately they would make life programmable. They called their field synthetic biology. Since its inception, synthetic biology has influenced the practice biological research, current understanding of biological systems, and the biotech economy— by 2019 the global synthetic biology market is projected to be worth $13.4 billion.

ABOUT THE SERIES

The Biotech Futures Talk + Lab Series explores the implications of and ways in which biology is becoming a data science. Each talk is paired with a 3-4 hour lab workshop at Genspace for Data & Society and Genspace community members to demonstrate how these themes become realized in the lab.

Christina Agapakis is creative director of Ginkgo Bioworks, a biological design company growing cultured products for partners across many industries. Her work brings together biologists, engineers, designers, artists, and social scientists to explore the future of biotechnology. During her PhD at Harvard, she worked on producing hydrogen fuel in bacteria and making photosynthetic animals. She has taught designers at the Art Center College of Design and biomolecular engineers at UCLA, and she once made cheese using bacteria from the human body.

Chapters

1. Why do cockroaches fart methane? New technologies and social complexity. (00:00:00)

2. A tale of two papers. Regenesis--a provocation. Searching for an “adventurous human female.” (00:05:08)

3. Conversations around synthetic biology concern the future. What might a feminist synthetic biology look like? How might we create new kinds of relationships that allow us to study biology in its complexity? (00:15:45)

4. Why design? Process, aesthetics, & humility in synthetic biology. (00:20:04)