Nature's Genetic Hardware Store: Lynn Rothschild on Building Space Habitats, Medicines and Materials with Biology
The Long Now Foundation
Lynn Rothschild is an evolutionary biologist, astrobiologist and synthetic biologist at NASA Ames Research Center. In her Long Now talk she argued that the most promising technology for living beyond Earth is life itself, not something out of Silicon Valley. Cells, in her description, are self-replicating, self-repairing micromachines with a 3.8-billion-year track record. Her lab's work draws on what she calls "nature's genetic hardware store": the capabilities organisms have evolved, moved into hardy production organisms and put to work making habitats, filters, wires, medicines and food. She also claimed that the severe constraints of spaceflight push toward what she called "radical sustainability," and that the results could come back to Earth.
From the Oldest Photograph to the End of the Universe
Rothschild opened with a joke about setting the record for the longest "now" in Long Now's history. Her first image was a galaxy that formed about 350 million years after the Big Bang, which she said is about as far back as current photographs reach. She then jumped to an estimate of the end of the universe, a time so remote that "none of us are going to be here." Between those two points she placed Earth, whose large moon helps stabilize its obliquity and climate, and then San Francisco, where the audience was sitting.
From there she moved outward in space instead of time. On Earth, she noted, she could speak to anyone in the room almost instantly, or even hit them with a ball, and online viewers were hearing her with almost no delay. Leaving Earth changes that. The International Space Station adds a small communication delay and a larger delay in moving physical goods. The Moon lengthens both. Mars is another order of problem: roughly six months to get there, about a year and a half waiting for the planets to realign, and roughly six more months to get back. "You can't just get there and say, 'Uh, I forgot my XYZ,'" she said. Communication lags as well, so crews have to become more and more independent.
She made clear that she does not think all science off Earth has to be done by humans. Still, she finds it "incredibly exciting" to watch members of our own species set foot on other worlds.
Human Needs and the Constraints of Space
Humans take their needs with them, and Rothschild went through them: transportation, life support (including the roughly 21% oxygen atmosphere we take for granted), food, medicine, waste recycling, clothing, habitats that protect against weather and solar radiation, power, heat, light and communication. None of these comes free off-planet.
The biggest constraint she described is "up mass" and "up volume." Launching against Earth's gravity well takes a great deal of rocket fuel, so every kilogram you avoid launching frees up capability for other things. Nobody wants a laundry bag occupying the spacecraft. Supplies also have to be storable, reliable and flexible, and power cannot be assumed. On Earth, she observed, people argue over what kind of power feeds the grid. Off Earth there is no grid.
This led to a framing she said she has been pushing more and more: space is the ultimate circular economy. On Earth we count tons of garbage or tons of recycled metal and paper. Off-planet, she said, you have to track where every water molecule and every carbon atom goes, because all of them become precious.
Selling a Technology in a Black Box
To introduce her main idea, Rothschild described a technology hidden in a black box and pitched it to the audience. It is programmable, which a phone also is. It is modular, which is expected. It is also self-replicating: you don't put your phone down at night and wake up to find two or four phones. And it repairs itself, something she noted no phone yet does. It doesn't run on petrochemicals, which aren't available off-planet. It senses its environment well and can extract minerals precisely.
The technology is life. She called it a micromachine that does carbon chemistry and nanotechnology and makes things, with a history far longer than Silicon Valley's. At about 3.8 billion years, she said, that's "a pretty good run for a technology."
Materials: Cellulose, Evolution, and the Rubber Tree Anecdote
Her first category of application was materials. She pointed to the wool and leather she was wearing and to a slide of a Scottish sheep as reminders of how much we already rely on biologically made materials. The most widely used natural biomaterial today, she said, is cellulose: in wood and paper, and making up about 90% of cotton. She described it as very ancient, possibly invented by cyanobacteria as long as 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. It is essentially a polymer of beta-glucose, which can be turned into cellophane, rayon, starch and other products once broken down.
She gave an example of evolution used as an engineering tool. Industrial cellulose breakdown would ideally happen at low pH and high temperature. Instead of designing an enzyme from scratch for those conditions, some researchers resurrected enzymes that should have existed in ancient organisms, from a time when Earth is thought to have been much warmer. They used evolutionary history as a way to get a working technology.
Cellulose is only one of many biomaterials. She listed alginate from seaweed (used in ice cream), collagen, starch, wool and silk. Not every biomaterial is soft and organic: diatoms and some sponges deposit silica, so in effect life makes glass. Organisms also produce various fuels.
The catch is that none of the original producers can come along. A Japanese colleague once proposed silkworms as a way to keep astronauts busy on the trip to Mars, but in practice there will be no sheep, no trees and certainly no rubber trees. She told the story of an early visit to NASA headquarters, when she was first trying to sell the program. An engineer beside her asked whether, since she thought life was so great, she could engineer life to make rubber. Her answer: "You do know that rubber literally grows on trees, right?" That, she said, was the end of the conversation.
Rearranging Nature's Parts: Bacillus and Hierarchical Structure
Her proposed answer is to take nature's genetic hardware store and move it into a different "production vessel." She showed a micrograph of Bacillus, a bacterium that readily forms spores, which she compared to a resting, seed-like form. Bacillus spores, she said, have been shown to survive even while orbiting Earth for nearly six years. So one option is to engineer Bacillus, or a yeast, or a multicellular fungus, to make silk, wool or rubber, rather than keeping sheep or silkworms.
She argued this also removes limits on form factor. Rubber no longer has to come from a tree or silk from a silkworm. If engineered microbes make all these components, they can be rearranged and printed into new structures. She compared this to bones and feathers, whose properties come from hierarchical structure built up from the atomic level, not from being "a bag of chemicals." With engineered production organisms, she said, you could print materials "that life has never evolved and possibly never could."
Growing Habitats from Fungal Mycelium
Her most detailed example was habitats. By her own calculation, the Apollo 11 lunar module had about the volume of a single cell in Alcatraz's C-block if the cell were only five feet high, and she said nobody can be expected to work well for long in quarters that cramped. The conventional approach brings the habitat along, and she cited current plans for a 29,000-kilogram habitat for a Mars mission. That implies multiple launches just to put a house in place.
Other proposals use local materials: turning lunar or Martian regolith into a kind of concrete, building ice houses, or living in caves or lava tubes, which she said would still need some protective structure inside. She acknowledged problems with each option.
Her lab's alternative is fungi. The target is not the mushroom, the fruiting body, but the mycelium: the network of hair-like filaments (hyphae) that grows underground and also makes up the mushroom itself. Just as hyphae grow through soil, they will grow to fill a mold ("a mold filling a mold, if you know what I mean"). The fungi don't care what shape the mold is. The first object her lab grew was a drone made of fungal mycelium, and the lab has also made a chair and habitat forms.
She played a concept video made by Chris, the project's main architect. A folded inflatable, like a balloon, carries dried fungi and dried feedstock. It unfolds, and a rover adds locally sourced water. Rothschild noted that the Moon and Mars do have water, just not in liquid form. In what she called "my dreams," algae inside the structure then photosynthesize, converting water to oxygen and making their own food from available CO₂. Once they have filled small bioreactors, the fungi move in, solidify the structure and help provide radiation protection. She asked the audience to imagine a whole city of them.
She described several ways to process the material: growing mycelium around sand with nutrients, or around wood chips, and baking it hard. Chris later used the technology to build a house in Namibia and filmed a comparison in which a man tries to break a concrete brick and then a brick made from the lab's mycelium. Her summary was "it gets better." If you would trust concrete, she asked, why not mycelium bricks?
Mycelium Filters for Metal Extraction
Life, she continued, is also good at extraction, particularly of metals, which space exploration needs in quantity: lithium for batteries, carbon for composites, silicon for glass, gold for telescope mirrors and foils. She said that about half or more of the enzymes in the human body use a metal as a cofactor. When people ask which metals, she tells them to read the back of a vitamin bottle, which lists elements like selenium and cobalt. Other organisms use much of the rest of the periodic table, and with bioinformatics, she said, small proteins can reach much of what remains.
Her lab designed a filter, again grown from fungal mycelium, using proteins that bind the fungus at one end and a specific metal at the other. The result is a filter that can be grown and tuned to a chosen metal. She found it appealing that such a filter could, in principle, be composted at the end of its life. Later in the talk she tied this work to closing Earth's "tech" cycle, which she described as mostly one-way: extract, make, use, dispose, pollute. Metal recycling of this kind, she hoped, could help turn that into a cycle.
DNA as a Building Material: Silver Wires
Rothschild then asked the audience to think of DNA not as genetic code but as a physical material. It is very thin, can be made very long, and is cheap when made biologically. This work has been led mainly by Simon Vecchioni, who has been associated with her lab since 2013.
In normal DNA, adenine pairs with thymine and guanine with cytosine. At a cytosine–cytosine mismatch the bases can't bind to each other, but the team found that silver atoms can sit inside the mismatch. Since silver conducts, and DNA is long, thin and cheap, the question was whether DNA could be made into a wire, which she said the team has done over the years. According to her, NMR showed three silver atoms intercalated in the mismatch, and a thymine–thymine mismatch can take up mercury. Simon and a student from NYU are now building three-dimensional structures in addition to long thin ones. The current goal is to have organisms produce these structures biologically instead of relying on a DNA synthesizer, taking advantage of what she called life's "incredible precision" as nanotechnology.
Breaking the Physical Link: Sending DNA as Information
She raised a point she said might seem trivial but considers important. Everyone alive is physically connected to the origin of life through an unbroken chain lasting some 3.8 or 4 billion years. Today, her lab members design DNA sequences on a computer and press send, and Rothschild enters a credit card number. A company in Hayward, or wherever they are ordering from that week, turns the digital information into physical DNA and ships it back, and the lab puts it into organisms.
That breaks the physical link. It doesn't seem impressive when the synthesizer is across the room, but once the link is broken, she argued, it doesn't matter whether the synthesizer is across the room or on the Moon, Mars or Enceladus. Biology can "jump" without every piece of biological material being physically sent.
Chemistry, Bioelectricity and the Astropharmacy
Many chemicals in a chemistry catalog, she said, were originally made by organisms; aspirin came from willow trees. So rather than making chemicals on Earth and launching them, she asked, why not put the chemical factories off-planet? She also noted that all animals convert chemical energy to electrical energy, not just electric eels. Our nervous systems depend on it. She did not claim it would be an efficient power source off-planet, but thought it could be useful when small amounts of energy are needed.
Medicine received more attention. Astronauts are currently screened to be very healthy before launch, but people do get sick, and more so on longer missions. There is an astronaut medication list, but nobody knows in advance what a given crew will need. They might need nothing, or all need the same drug. Many medications expire, and she said current plans for the Artemis lunar missions don't include refrigeration, which rules out drugs that need cold storage.
Her group's response is an "astropharmacy": bacteria, working with Bacillus and some E. coli, programmed to produce medications. If the organisms can be programmed and stored in a stable form such as spores, astronauts can make drugs on demand without knowing in advance what they'll need. She said the team is developing the system and believes it can be shrunk to a small box. She held up an example and said that was what she showed Congress the previous April. She noted the obvious uses on Earth: drug development, disaster relief and personalized medicine.
Water, Food and "Hell Cells"
Humans are roughly 60% water, and the good news, she said, is that the Moon and Mars have water as vapor or ice. The bad news is that none of it is currently drinkable. Lunar water contains contaminants such as mercury, and Martian water has problems including perchlorates, which are highly toxic. A few bacteria can break perchlorate down into oxygen and chlorine, but they only do it when kept away from oxygen, they aren't very good at it, and they aren't hardy. Her approach again is to take that capability from the hardware store and put it in a tougher organism.
On food, she pointed out that besides water, organisms are essentially all we eat, so it would be "ridiculous" not to use them. She described a vision of eating a steak on Mars, not from a cow but from engineered cells producing fat and muscle, either printed or grown on a scaffold that cells populate. Sometimes an algal product might be enough. Cultures in Ireland and Japan routinely eat seaweed, as sushi eaters do.
Sometimes, though, a food organism might need to grow faster or tolerate higher or lower temperatures, higher pH or drying out. Nature has adapted to all of these. She showed Octopus Spring in Yellowstone, where organisms live at the boiling point of water, and mentioned others in Yellowstone living at about pH 2 or lower, roughly stomach acid. Moving such traits into production organisms is what her students have long called the "hell cell," and she said there is no better name for them.
Life 2.0
She then offered what she called "wild ideas." Instead of squishy lipid membranes, perhaps a production system based on biology but more resistant to radiation, with "a titanium shell" or "stainless steel chloroplast." This means starting over with "life 2.0," which she said many people are working on.
She described two approaches. The first she called a "Frankencell" approach: taking modern cellular components and trying to reassemble them into something living. She admitted this sounds almost like cheating, then added that nobody can put cells in a blender and reassemble them, because something is still not understood. The second approach, taken by origin-of-life researchers, starts from the one known case of life arising from non-life on Earth and tries to work out how that happened. She said she has colleagues "very, very close" on at least the first approach, and predicted that a paper will eventually announce that someone created life, followed by an uproar over whether it counts.
Laundry: Two Metric Tons of the Problem
What she called a "prosaic" gap was also her pandemic project. A young UK colleague, Kyle Grant, who founded a company called Oxwash and had spent time at Kennedy Space Center, got excited when she suggested applying his technologies to space. Searching how astronauts wash their clothes, she found that they don't: a washing machine is too heavy to bring.
With labs shut down, she kept searching and learned, for example, that a pair of men's medium cotton boxers weighs about 90 grams, while women's underwear and bras come to about 70–80. She asked astronaut colleagues how often they change clothes on the ISS ("not probably as often as you do, I hope"). Assuming six astronauts and a round trip of about two and a half years to Mars, she calculated around two metric tons of laundry. "I'm a biologist and I could build a washing machine for under two metric tons," she said.
Working with Grant, the team designed a very small washing machine that uses acoustics and other technologies to clean individual items, which they believe could take as little as 18 seconds. She pictured an Earth version at the end of a hotel hallway, since, she joked, she gives hotel laundry about a 50% chance of coming back. Astronauts have volunteered for the project and are "frantic" for it, and she said it has finally gotten NASA's interest.
The biological part is twofold. Washing reduces the bioload and keeps crews healthy. And enzymes that have evolved, or can be engineered, to digest food stains, blood, fats or DNA let clothes get clean at lower temperatures, which saves power, and power, mass and volume are the constant constraints.
Getting It into Space: Eu:CROPIS and Starlab
Anticipating the objection that none of this will happen, Rothschild described flight work. Her first space mission was a secondary payload on a German satellite, Eu:CROPIS, whose main experiment tried to grow miniature tomatoes on recycled urine. She said it may have worked, but communication was lost and nobody knows. What interested her team was that the satellite spun at different rates, simulating microgravity, one-sixth Earth gravity (the Moon) and one-third (Mars). Their payload, called PowerCell, tested basic synthetic biology technologies under those conditions. Without showing data, she reported that it worked. Some processes will be unaffected by gravity, and for others gravity will have to be accounted for.
Her current focus is Starlab, a commercially operated space station that received NASA seed money. Unlike the ISS, she said, it is being built as complete units to be launched, with a series of Starlabs planned eventually. Ohio State University is the main academic partner, and through it her team has gained a foothold for its fungal mycelium work. Showing an artist's rendering of a metal-heavy interior (complete with a table, which she found odd in microgravity), she said the team believes mycelium could make the station more biophilic, reduce flammability and dampen noise and vibration.
Hilton Hotels is handling the living quarters. Before a meeting with a Hilton vice president, she photographed a Hilton room and asked what in it could ultimately have been made by fungi. Her answer: "darn near everything." That slide was the vice president's favorite, she said, and she is now in contact with the hotel side, which already has a vegan room and is interested in a mycelium room. Interiors could be grown, or at least given a veneer, so crews aren't looking at stainless steel all day. Chris has also designed sleeping pods. Instead of being strapped to a wall, astronauts would lie in black pods, pigmented to help with radiation protection, that close over them to give the feel of a bed in microgravity.
Replaying the Tape: Synthetic Biology and the Question "Are We Alone?"
Synthetic biology, she argued, also opens scientific questions. After basic concerns like dinner and reproduction, she considers "are we alone?" one of humanity's oldest questions. But we don't even know the full range of what happened on Earth, because we have only one narrative of life. She cited Darwin's comparison of the record to a book with 90% of its chapters removed, then 90% of the remaining paragraphs, sentences, words and letters. Her own analogy: applying for a literature professorship and, when asked how many books you've read, proudly answering "one." Evolutionary biologists, she said, are in exactly that position.
Engineering life allows "what if" questions. What if different enzymes, different nucleotides, or right-handed amino acids instead of left-handed ones had been used? Synthetic biology can speed up evolution, or even go back to an earlier point and rerun it to see whether the same outcome recurs. As an astrobiologist she said nothing would excite her more than finding a second origin of life. In her youth, astronomers knew of one solar system. Since missions like Kepler, they know of thousands. Biology still has one example. She would be happy with "an N of two," and even replaying the tape would help.
Constraints as a Source of Creativity
To close, she returned to the black box, which she called the "once and future technology." It enabled the past and will enable the future, working with a precision "humans simply cannot match." To skeptics of biological technologies she said, "come back to me when you have a 3.8-billion-year track record."
She contrasted Earth's biological cycle, in which plants turn sunlight, water and CO₂ into organic matter, animals eat it, and bacteria and fungi recycle everything, with the largely one-way tech path. In space, she said, water recycling is already very good ("yesterday's coffee is tomorrow's coffee"), but technology recycling is not. The Moon has no biological cycle. Mars probably doesn't now, with little if any liquid water, though it may have had one in the past. Many of the raw materials there resemble Earth's, so she asked why life shouldn't use them off-planet as it does here.
Upmass, volume, cost, storage and reliability are constraints she says others may not face, since they have power and room and worry about "their investors in the next quarter." She said this doesn't depress her. Constraints force creativity, and creativity produces game-changing solutions. Because there is no alternative off-planet, it "has got to work long term," and that, she said, amounts to radical sustainability that she believes will change life both on Earth and beyond it. She ended with "ad astra" and thanked her current lab members, many collaborators, and the Stanford–Brown iGEM teams her lab sponsored for years, which she said pioneered many of these projects.
Q&A: How Ideas Come, and Scientist Versus Engineer
The host's first question was about inspiration and support. Rothschild first credited her postdocs, graduate students, undergraduates and colleagues, calling herself "the ringleader" and not the person who produces the data. She joked that they probably keep her out of the lab so she won't ruin experiments.
She described two sources of ideas. On the technology side, someone brings a problem and she asks how biology could solve it. Over roughly 20 years she has come to see a philosophical difference between scientists, who look at the world and say "isn't this amazing," and engineers, who say "that's all very nice, but let me make something new today." She has come to enjoy the second mode. Engineering ideas come from concrete needs, such as the two tons of laundry or undrinkable water, and from NASA's technology taxonomies, where she reads a numbered need and thinks "we can do that." On the science side, she credits broad training as an evolutionary biologist and worries that fewer biology graduates today grasp the diversity of life. She corrected herself partway: "hardware store" sounds engineering-minded and "maybe slightly exploitive," and what really drives her is seeing how nature solved a problem and needing to understand how it works.
Asked what young people should learn offline, she said to get a strong grounding in science, not only for facts but to learn how professionals think: how a geologist, a paleontologist or a chemist approaches the world. She stressed broad training. Biology, chemistry and physics are "human constructs," not "god-given disciplines." Planetary science became a discipline only 30 or 40 years ago, bioengineering is recent, and astrobiology spans fields. She treats disciplinary boundaries as "working taxonomic units" and says she crosses them almost every day.
Q&A: Where Evolution Could Have Forked
Asked which evolutionary moments she would replay, she compared it to time-travel stories: rewind to lunch and the day might go a million ways, but the further back you go, the greater the chance of an entirely different trajectory. She would want to go back to just before the origin of life, or earlier to see whether the inputs could differ, and to the period just after it. She said she doesn't believe life arose only once. She thinks there were many attempts, some slightly and some radically different, and one won out, not necessarily the best. She used the joke about escaping a bear by outrunning your friend.
She said her "heart goes out to the dinosaurs," who "did everything right" but couldn't do much about the asteroid. Thirty years in astrobiology and at NASA, she said, taught her to look beyond interactions among organisms to the physical environment, the atmosphere, and "the really bad hair day when an asteroid hits you," all of which shaped life's trajectory.
Q&A: Off-World Biomes and Bagging the Moon
When asked what off-world biomes might become possible, she reframed the question: they will be possible, and the real issue is where societies choose to spend resources. The ISS is already a kind of off-planet biome with considerable resupply, and she doesn't expect lunar settlements to be cut off for a thousand years. Her work aims to reduce resupply and use local resources. Lava tube habitats would lose sunlight, so photosynthesis would need artificial light. She mentioned a recent glass-house proposal and ice houses, and predicted that habitats will be a mix of materials, the way a house combines stone, concrete and glass. Her goal is to add biological materials to that palette.
She also mentioned proposals to "bag" the entire Moon or Mars, enclosing it to create a pressurized system, and ideas like warming Mars by releasing CO₂ from its polar cap. She called these "somewhat more technologically challenging" and said she doesn't think such interventions should be done at this point, scientifically, because there could be life on Mars.
Q&A: Curiosity, and Kids in Nairobi
On what culture is needed for discovery, she said curiosity is innate, since virtually every child is born curious, and that she thinks the education system "beats a lot of that out." She told of visiting a school in a Nairobi slum during fieldwork in Kenya, after a war, when many children were orphans and some were bringing along orphaned siblings. The school wasn't even in session that day, yet the classrooms were packed with children aged roughly 6 to 15 who knew the planets, not for grades or because a teacher required it. Humans, she said, "are not just well-fed cows." Curiosity is part of being human, and she believes people will pursue these goals for that reason.
Q&A: What Stops Life in Space, and What Returns to Earth
Audience member Joseph Kurrin asked whether anything fundamental prevents life from growing in space. Rothschild said it depends where. Gravity ranges from near zero to "bone crunching" and affects growth. Unshielded radiation is essentially a "game stopper," especially for multicellular organisms. Not all the Bacillus subtilis spores survived six years in space, though some did. Humans need oxygen, carbon and water. Assuming the question was about humans, she said the main obstacles for Mars are adequate radiation protection and adequate gravity. Returning astronauts suffer bone and muscle loss, countermeasures are difficult, and unpredictable solar particle events add radiation risk. "It really is not easy."
Juan Leon asked how space breakthroughs could make housing and medicine more affordable on Earth. She said space is a very low-resource environment, and that she has never worked for a company. Her pressure is not shareholders or business milestones but that the solution must work under unusual constraints, even if it takes longer. On Earth, she said, there are already multiple solutions for everything, so a new one has to displace them. On Mars you start from a clean slate. Energy is an example: Earth has petroleum, coal, wind, solar and propane, while on Mars the questions are open, since, for instance, the atmospheric pressure is about one-hundredth of Earth's, which makes wind uncertain. Solutions invented that way may turn out good enough to bring home. Returning to medicine, she noted that a U.S. orphan drug covers 20,000 or fewer Americans, which is still a lot of people. She is designing for one to six people, because if they need a drug, they need it.
Q&A: Failure, Persistence and Deep Time
Taran asked what hadn't worked. Rothschild said she prefers "hasn't worked yet," and mentioned disappointing data she received the previous week from Brookhaven National Laboratory. Her main example was the DNA wire. In 2013 it was the idea of Simon, then a Brown undergraduate, and it failed all summer while other iGEM projects were succeeding, ahead of the competition in Boston that fall. Around the end of July she called Simon and his teammates into her office and offered a choice: keep going for the last month with no guarantee, or quit and join a project that would have something to present. One student said they would do what was best for the team, another that they would follow Simon, and Simon refused to quit. The next week, she said, it started working. She contrasted this with Alina, a current lab member in the audience, who spent about a year struggling with one organism before switching to another, which then worked. Knowing when to push and when to stop is a risk-benefit judgment for the person in charge, she said, and she is "hardly infallible."
Asked how she relates to deep time, she recalled a talk on time and biology she gave about ten years earlier to a horological society. Biology spans every timescale, from processes at extremely short scales (she said femtoseconds) through seconds, hours, days and years. She can picture a century, since her grandmother nearly reached 101, and 250 years since the American Revolution. Thousands to hundreds of thousands of years start to feel "fictional," and millions are routine for geologists but hard for anyone to grasp. She has practiced saying that Venus may have been Earth-like "as recently as" half a billion years ago, and that the universe is about 13.6 billion years old. But she said she goes home thinking that is really a very long time. She believes such spans are beyond human comprehension, and that she, like everyone, understands time at a gut level only from fractions of a second to a few hundred years.
Closing: What Would Accelerate the Work
For the final question, about collaboration, Rothschild pointed to rapid advances in nanotechnology and bioinformatics, noting recent Nobel recognition and AI-assisted design of new proteins and enzymes. She recalled a professor who was the world's expert on sponge phylogeny, with an intimate knowledge of many species that she thinks has largely been lost. Computing now makes it possible to pull together scattered information on those species, though she believes humans are still needed to understand the material, ask interesting questions and sift through it. She listed nanotech, bioinformatics, synthetic biology and engineering as fields she expects to drive major advances over the next 10 to 20 years or sooner. She also said more knowledge of life's diversity is still needed, because evolution "has tried so many things that we still don't know about," which could be useful or simply fascinating. What excites her most, she said, is combining these fields in new ways.
Good evening and welcome. My name is Patrick Dow. I'm board president here at the Long Now Foundation and we have a very exciting program with an incredible speaker for you tonight, Dr. Lynn Rothschild.
Dr. Lynn Rothschild is an evolutionary biologist, astrobiologist, and synthetic biologist based at NASA Ames Research Center and an adjunct professor at Brown University and Stanford University. We're going to be exploring together how is it possible to build things in space with biology and what does the process of discovery and invention entailed in that building teach us about ourselves and what's possible here on Earth. We're very honored to have Lynn with us tonight and excited for this presentation. Please enjoy.
Thank you very much. Since it's the Long Now Foundation, I thought that I would try first of all to go for the record of the longest now talk. If you look in that little square there, that's a photograph. It's about as far back in time as we have a photograph right now. That's a galaxy that was born about 350 million years after the Big Bang. So that's once upon a time.
And now we're going to go to building the future. So we'll start way into the future. This is about 10 to the 56 million years from now. Billion years doesn't matter. None of us are going to be here. This is the end of the universe. So there we are, planet Earth. We've got a very nice moon that helps to stabilize our obliquity, helps stabilize our climate. And of course, here we are in beautiful San Francisco. So let's start now going forth in space from planet Earth instead of time.
And so as we go forth into space, we start to have all sorts of issues that we don't have here on planet Earth. I can talk to anyone in this room probably with a little practice. I could hit anyone in this room with a ball. I know there are people online and you are hearing me virtually instantaneously. But as we go forth from planet Earth, we've got other sorts of communication problems. As we go to the ISS, there's a little bit of a time delay and certainly a delay in how long it takes us to move material goods. As we go to the actual moon, that delay becomes even greater.
I'm not necessarily someone who believes that all science and so on should be conducted by humans off planet, but there is something so incredibly exciting about watching members of our own species set foot on other worlds.
Now, as we go from there, we might think about going to Mars. And so now, instead of talking about a couple of days to get there, you're talking about scenarios where it might take 6 months or so to get there. Then you wait about a year and a half for the planets to realign and about another 6 months to get back. So, you can't just get there and say, "I forgot my XYZ." You have this long time delay. And you also have a time delay in communication. So you're having to become more and more independent.
But as we go forward from planet Earth, we still take our needs with us. And just to remind you, we have needs as humans. We need transportation. All of you got here somehow, whether it was by your feet or by a bicycle or by B or whatever. We need life support. Now, this is something we don't tend to think about on planet Earth because today we have about a 21% oxygenated atmosphere. We have food, of course, that we need. We have medicine. We recycle our waste. We wear clothing. We have all that infrastructure here. But when you go off planet, none of that is a given.
We have habitats to protect us from the rain, from the snow, and from solar radiation. This becomes even more important off planet. We need power. We need heat. We need light. We need this radiation protection and communication.
So again, just because we're off planet Earth doesn't mean that we don't have all these needs, but we have different problems to actually satisfy these needs. So for example, one of the biggest issues is up mass and up volume. To get off planet Earth is extremely expensive. It's not something you do lightly. And part of the problem is that we have to launch against Earth's gravity well and that is extremely expensive. It takes a lot of rockets and a lot of rocket fuel. So every time you can reduce the amount of mass that's coming off planet Earth, it gives you much more mission capability to do other things. So that is a big issue driving what we do, is this up mass. And then of course the volume. You don't want to take up the whole volume of the spacecraft with a laundry bag or something. And so, as I say, that's involved in the cost.
And you need to be able to store things. They need to be reliable and they need to be flexible. You need power, and that's certainly not a given. We have a huge infrastructure here. We're quibbling over what type of power goes into the infrastructure, but there is no infrastructure for us off planet.
And so I've been increasingly arguing that in a lot of ways going off planet is the ultimate circular economy, because we're no longer worrying about how many tons of garbage we have or how many tons of metal or paper recycling. We're now having to worry about where every water molecule is going, where every atom of carbon might be going in the cycle, because all these things become extremely precious to us. So again, it becomes incredibly important to look at where that economy of the elements and the molecules is going.
So we ask, is there a technology that can help? And of course your answer is going to be surely there must be something in Silicon Valley that can help us. And that's been the approach that we've used up till now. But as a biologist, I'm going to suggest that maybe there's another technology that could do just as well. Actually maybe it can solve a lot of problems that this other kind of technology can't solve.
And so what I like to do is say, okay, I've got this black box here and I've got the technology in the black box and I'm going to try to sell it to you. So this technology is programmable. And you say, well, so's my cell phone. So's my computer. It's modular. Okay, you sort of expect that, but it's self-replicating. And then you say, "Whoa, when I put my cell phone down at night next to the bed, I don't expect to wake up in the morning and find two cell phones or four or whatever." But this technology does. And it can repair itself. And once again, I remind you that there is yet to be a self-repairing cell phone that I know about. And so these are two big game changers: self-replicating, self-repairing.
And actually there are a whole lot of other things this technology can do. It doesn't run on petrochemicals, which are not available off planet, and they're very good at sensing and all sorts of things, precise mineral extraction. So this is a really, really cool technology that could potentially fill in a lot of the other gaps. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the technology that I have just sold you is life itself.
And it turns out that life, if you think of it as a micro machine that does carbon chemistry and nanotechnology and makes things, is an incredible, incredible technology. And further, it's not just something new. It's got a very, very long distinguished history, much, much longer than Silicon Valley. In fact, it's, oh, say about 3.8 billion years old. That's a pretty good run for a technology, isn't it?
So, the question really is, what's the big idea? I mean, I've told you what the advantages are. What can we do now with this technology? So, let's start with materials. Life makes materials. I'm wearing wool. I have some leather on. These are all products that are made by life. And that's why I particularly like to show this little sheep from Scotland, because we use a lot of materials that sheep make. You can see some wood in the background in a tree.
Which brings us to the most used natural biomaterial on planet Earth today. And that is cellulose. You're all familiar with cellulose from trees, paper. Cotton is about 90% cellulose. And it turns out cellulose is really ancient. It was invented by cyanobacteria possibly as long as, say again, 3.5, 3.8 billion years ago, and it's more or less a polymer of beta glucose. And beta glucose itself, once you break it down, can be used to make, oh, cellophane, rayon, starch, cellulose, all sorts of things.
So wouldn't it be cool to take this cellulose that is so prevalent in nature and be able to break it down and make other things with it? And it turns out that some people have been very interested in that, and what they've done is turn to evolution to the rescue. So instead of trying to make an enzyme that can really break down this cellulose under conditions that you might need in industry, like for example low pH and very high temperature, what these particular researchers did is take organisms that evolved years and years ago, at that time when it should have been much warmer on planet Earth, and resurrected the enzymes that should have been around then to break down cellulose. And so they've taken advantage of evolution as a way to develop a technology to break down cellulose. Very cool.
Cellulose is just one biomaterial. Here's a whole house mostly made of cellulose. But I remind you there are lots of other biomaterials, some of which you may be familiar with, even things like alginate that go in ice cream from seaweed, collagen, starch, wool, silk, and so on. You're familiar with those. But not all biomaterial is sort of squishy organic like that. Life also deposits silica. So you can think of life making glass. Organisms like diatoms and some sponges actually make glass, and they've also been very good at making various fuels. So again, life can be used to make all sorts of material products.
The problem is we're not likely to take silkworms with us. Although I had a Japanese colleague who suggested that is a great way to keep astronauts busy on a trip to Mars. We're not going to take sheep with us. Not going to happen. Cellulose, yeah, we can take organisms that make cellulose. We're not going to be taking trees. We're certainly not going to be taking rubber trees.
And I always like to point out that there was a time I went to NASA headquarters when I was first starting to sell this program, and an engineer next to me finally looked at me. He said, "You think life is so great, could you ever engineer life to make rubber?" And I just looked at him, I said, "You do know that rubber literally grows on trees, right?" And that was sort of the end of that conversation.
So yes, rubber trees, silica, diatoms, sponges, and so on, metals. We'll get into that a little bit later. The problem is how do we take advantage of nature's, what I call, genetic hardware store? Well, we might actually take these. This is a photograph through a microscope of Bacillus. And it's a particular kind of bacterium that's really good at making spores. Do you see those little white dots? Those are spores. Think of it sort of like a seed form. It's a resting form. And Bacillus is really great because its spores have been shown to be stable even orbiting the Earth for nearly six years.
So why not take Bacillus, or maybe a fungus, maybe a yeast, maybe a multicellular fungus, and engineer them to make these products? Take nature's genetic hardware store and just put it in a different production vessel. So instead of having sheep making wool or a silkworm making silk, maybe you can have a bacterium making that silk for you, or that wool, or whatever. What a cool, cool idea. And now we're no longer limited by form factor, because you don't have to think of rubber coming from a tree or silk has to come from a silkworm. You're now thinking of, well, maybe all of these are coming from these engineered Bacillus.
And so now we could sort of rearrange them and print them into something that we wanted. So for example, if you look at our bodies, think about something like your bone in your leg, or think about a feather. Now your bones or feathers don't have their properties because they're a bag of chemicals. They have their properties because they have structure starting at this really atomic level that builds up what we call hierarchical structure. And that gives you the property of something like a feather or a bone or whatever. And so now if you've engineered these Bacillus or yeast or something else to make all these cool things, you can now rearrange them and print something that life has never evolved and possibly never could.
So let's give you more of a concrete example. One of the issues that we've turned to is habitats off planet. Now I bring you back to Apollo 11. The lunar module was not very big. I did a calculation once, and if you take the volume of the lunar module, it's about the same as a C-Block cell in Alcatraz if it were only 5 ft high. You can't expect people to spend long periods of time being successful working there in very cramped quarters. We need something much better. So, we've turned our thoughts to habitats.
And the traditional approach is to bring something with you, like the lunar module. There are currently plans for a 29,000 kilogram habitat for a Mars mission. So, you think about that. That's an awful lot of upmass. And so, now you're talking really about multiple missions to get your house in place. So, some people thought maybe there's a better way. Maybe we could use some of the materials that are already there. So, maybe you could take that regolith, the surface material on the moon or Mars, and use that to make some kind of lunar or Martian concrete. So you're taking advantage of a lot of the materials that are there. Or maybe you can make an ice house. Now, there are problems with both of these. I've also heard suggestions of basically living in caves, but you're also going to lava tubes and so on. You'll need some sort of protection even in there.
And so, we've made another suggestion in my lab, and that is turning to something so familiar to all of us, and that is a mushroom. Well, actually, we don't deal with mushrooms, because that's the fruiting body of many types of filamentous fungi, which have this hairlike structure underground. In fact, the body of the mushroom is made of this hairlike structure, these hyphae that come together and make a mycelium.
So, what does a mushroom have to do with a habitat on Mars? Well, it turns out just like these hyphae grow through the soil on the Earth, they're more than happy to grow to fill a mold, a mold filling a mold, if you know what I mean, and build some kind of structure. And they don't care if this structure looks like a drone, which is the first thing we built in my lab, was a drone made out of fungal mycelia, or if it looks like a habitat or a chair, which we've also done in my lab.
And so I'm going to play a short video of the vision that we have of how you could take this kind of biological technology to build yourself a house on Mars. This video was put together by Chris Maurer, who's the main architect on this project. But here you go. We have this folded up inflatable. Think of a balloon. And it's got the dried fungi and some dried material that it can eat in it. It unfolds. And you can see that the rover is giving it some water that's locally sourced. So there is actually some water on the moon and Mars. It's just not liquid.
And so here the structure has been inflated. And in my dreams, we've got algae in there that are now photosynthesizing and converting that water to oxygen and making their own food from the CO2 that's available. And then once they have started to fill these little bioreactors, in come the fungi, and they now solidify the structure and help provide some radiation protection. And here's just sort of a zoom out so you can get a better feel for that.
Now, wouldn't that be cool? Imagine a whole city of those. Now, on Mars, there are all sorts of ways that you can treat these things. You can grow them around sand with some nutrients, for example. You can grow them around wood chips. You can bake them and make them hard. And so, Chris, who took this technology and built a house in Namibia, took these great videos. On the left you can see this gentleman trying to break concrete bricks, and on the right you can see him trying to break one made out of our fungal mycelia. It gets better.
So again, don't think that this is a bad
approach is it? I mean you would trust concrete. Why shouldn't you trust fungal mycelial bricks? And so again, this is our vision of what a habitat on Mars might look like.
But life is also really good for material extraction. It pulls things out. One of the things that it pulls out is metals. And it turns out we need a lot of metals for space exploration. We need lithium for batteries. We need carbon for carbon composites and silicon for glass and gold for mirrors on space telescopes and foils and all sorts of things. And it turns out life is really, really good at extracting metals. In fact, about half or more of the enzymes in your body use metal as a co-actor. And people ask me which metals, and the answer is look at the back of a vitamin bottle, because it will tell you what metals you absolutely need. And that includes things like selenium and cobalt and so on that you may not even think about, but we use them. And a lot of other organisms use much of the rest of the periodic table. Not the entire periodic table, but with bioinformatics, we can even access much of the rest of the periodic table with small proteins.
So we took advantage of this in my lab and we were able to design a filter made again out of the fungal mycelia by taking proteins that bound to the fungi at one end and bound to specific metals at the other. So now you can grow a filter that can be tuned to whatever metal you want. Really cool stuff. I think the idea of being able to grow a filter that at the end of its life in principle could be composted.
I'm sure everyone in this room's heard of DNA before, if not recently, maybe sort of in passing in your biology class. And you think of it as the genetic material. And yes, that's what life uses it for. But it's also a thing. And what if you thought of DNA not as coding material, but as a building material? Think, it's very skinny. It can be made very long. It's very cheap to make if it's made biologically. We're making it all the time. So what about using DNA as a building material?
And this is work again that has been primarily led by Simon Beckone, who's been associated with my lab since 2013. And one of the things that we've discovered with him taking the lead is that DNA, instead of having the normal bases match, you normally think of adenine and thymine binding together and guanine and cytosine, so GC and AT, what if you have a cytosine-cytosine mismatch? Now they can't bind. But it turns out what they can do is now put silver atoms inside that mismatch. And so then we started thinking, silver's conductive. DNA is long and very, very skinny and cheap to make. Could you now make a wire out of DNA? Which is what we've done over the years.
Turns out you can see from that NMR that it's three silver atoms that can be intercalated. Turns out with a thymine-thymine mismatch you can intercalate mercury. There are all sorts of things you can do, and Simon and now another student who has been working with us from NYU are building not just these long skinny structures but now three-dimensional, and on and on and on. Incredibly cool. And what we're trying to do is encourage them and teach them how to do this biologically. Instead of going to a DNA synthesizer, have an organism actually make something like a wire. Again, this is nanotechnology taking advantage of the incredible precision of life.
Now, this may seem kind of trivial to many of you in the room, but we also send digital information to make DNA. Everyone in this room, we are all physically connected to the origin of life. It's an unbroken physical connection. And we've had this connection for 3.8 or four, whatever, billion years. But we are now at the point that we can take DNA sequences, come up with them. People in my lab do this all the time. They push send. I put in a credit card number, and someone in Hayward or wherever we're getting our DNA from that week takes that digital information and makes the physical DNA, sends it to us, and we can put it in organisms. So you have now broken that link.
And it may not be impressive when that DNA synthesizer's across the room. But once you've broken that physical link, it doesn't matter if it's across the room or on the moon or Mars or Enceladus around Saturn or, or, or. So the important thing is you've now broken that physical link. So in a way you can now jump biologically without having to physically send every bit of your biological material.
Life does chemistry on the Earth. If you look at a chemistry catalog, actually a lot of those chemicals were made by organisms. Even aspirin originally came from willow trees. So why shouldn't it do chemistry off planet? Why would you have to have life make these chemicals on the Earth, then load them into a spaceship and send them somewhere else? You might as well have your chemical factories off planet.
Turns out all of us also convert chemical energy into electrical energy, not just the electric eel. The electric eel is very good at doing that and then storing it and then releasing it all at once. But we all do that. Otherwise, we wouldn't be sentient beings. We account for our nervous system on this conversion of chemical to electrical energy. It may not be the most efficient way to get energy off planet, but it may be an interesting additional thing when you need small amounts of energy.
And what about medicine? We mentioned that before. Well, the way we've worked on sending astronauts off planet now is making sure that they're extremely healthy before they go. But things happen. People get sick, and particularly as you have longer and longer duration missions, people will get sick. And it turns out that there is an astronaut med list that they're sent with. The problem is that we don't know what each astronaut's going to need. Maybe they won't need anything. Maybe they'll all need one particular medication. And even worse, many of them will expire. And it turns out the current plans for the Artemis missions to the moon don't even have refrigeration. And think about the number of medications that need refrigeration on top of it.
And so what we've done in our group is to develop an AstroPharm pharmacy where we program bacteria, again we've worked with Bacillus, some with E. coli, and program them to make medications. And so now you don't need to know in advance what you need. If you can take those organisms, program them, and then put them in some kind of stable cell form and send them with the astronauts, the astronauts can make their own drugs. And so this has involved a lot of really wonderful people over the years.
And to give you an idea what we're talking about, we're now at the point that we're developing the system where we believe that we can get it down to a little box like this. At least that's what I showed to Congress last April. So this is really the sort of level. So it's incredibly exciting, and it does get us away from the refrigeration problem, and the making medications on demand. And I need hardly point out that this and many of these other projects would be incredibly useful for planet Earth, whether you're developing drugs or you've got problems with disaster relief or personalized medicine.
I keep talking about water. Turns out we are very watery creatures. We have, what, 60% or so of our body that is water. We need to have water. It is vitally important. Great news is there is some water on the moon and Mars. It's not in liquid form. It's either in gas form or it's solid as ice. The really bad problem is none of it is potable right now. The water on the moon has got things like mercury in it, and the water on Mars has got other sorts of problems in it, including perchlorates.
Now, perchlorates are really toxic. The good news is we don't have a lot of those in our water here. It does occur naturally. There are a couple of bacteria that have figured out how to break perchlorate back down into oxygen and into chlorine. And so that sounds great. The problem is those organisms really don't want to do that unless they're kept out of the oxygen, and they actually are not really all that great at doing it. They're really not that hardy and so on. So once again, our thought is we tap into nature's genetic hardware store, take those capabilities, and put them in an organism that is much more rugged to do the work for us.
What about food? Well, once again, we have a very long history of eating organisms. In fact, that is what we eat besides drinking water. And so it is ridiculous not to take advantage of it. I have a vision someday of being able to eat a steak on Mars. How are we going to have a steak on Mars? Not by having cows there, but maybe by engineering cells to be making the fat and the various muscle cells and so on. And maybe Jess is going to have a printer that makes it. Or maybe we're going to do it on some kind of scaffold that populates itself with the cells so that we have the ability to make a steak without an actual cow there.
But sometimes maybe just going to some kind of algal product might work very nicely. There are cultures like in Ireland and in Japan that do routinely eat seaweed. We do when we eat sushi. There's nothing wrong with it. There are plenty of other algae that really are very nice foodstuff, but there are times that maybe you want something that grows faster, or maybe it can deal with a higher temperature, or maybe a lower temperature, or maybe a higher pH, or maybe it can be dried out.
And it turns out nature's hardware store has been really good at taking advantage of all these different types of environments. So we have organisms, like in that Octopus Spring in Yellowstone National Park that you're seeing, that live at the boiling temperature of water, and others in Yellowstone live down to about the pH of the acid in your stomach, so around pH 2 or lower. So these are organisms that live at huge ranges. This one turns out it's a little bit higher pH than seawater. So why not take these capabilities that allow these organisms to live in these different environments and again put them in organisms that are going to do the production for us? This is something my students over the years have called the hell cell. And I really put it to you that there is not a better name for these organisms.
But if you can't do that, or maybe at some point you think that would be good, but what if you could just start over again? Maybe you don't want a squishy cell membrane made out of lipids. Maybe it would be better if we had some kind of production factory that takes advantage of biological systems but is more resistant to radiation, or has a titanium shell, or is made of stainless steel chloroplast, you know, whatever. I'm throwing out wild ideas right now. So you start over again. You make life 2.0.
And there are a lot of people who are working on that. Most people are using kind of a Franken-cell approach where they're taking apart or taking capabilities that are modern and trying to put something back together, which sounds almost like it's cheating, but I don't know about you, I can't take cells, put them in a blender, and put them back together. There's something that we haven't figured out. But then there are others who are particularly interested in the origin of life who are taking the other approach and saying there is one example that we have of life evolving from non-life on Earth, and that's us, that is the life that we see. How did that work? And so starting from that approach.
And I can tell you that I have colleagues that are very, very close to at least that first approach. So one of these days you will see that in the paper, you know, so-and-so created life, and then there will be, you know, a big uproar and discussion about whether it counted or not. But it's out there, and there are people working very hard on it, and again, a lot of really, really cool research.
Well, another gap that sounds maybe a little prosaic is laundry. And I will fully admit that this was my pandemic project. Had a young colleague in the UK who came to visit, who it turns out started a company called Oxwash, and it turns out he's got all these technologies. He's also spent some time at Kennedy Space Center. And so he got really excited when I suggested maybe we could take some of his technologies and apply them to space.
And so I started doing a little digging around, and if you start googling how do astronauts wash their clothes, what you will find is astronauts do not wash their clothes. It is too massive to bring a washing machine. So again, this was COVID. We were shut down. And so I did a little more Googling, and you start to learn things like the average weight of men's medium-size cotton boxers is 90 g. That's an interesting fact you learned tonight. You can start to throw bras and women's underwear together and get up to about 70 or 80, and then you start multiplying it up. Or you can go to astronaut colleagues and find out how often they change clothes on the ISS, which is not probably as often as you do, I hope.
And then you take that number and you figure out that there's maybe going to be six astronauts going to Mars, and it's going to take about two and a half years round trip. And you start putting these numbers in your calculator, and it turns out you come up with two metric tons of laundry. That's scary. And as I tell people, I'm a biologist and I could build a washing machine for under two metric tons. Seriously, that's ridiculous.
And so we started to talk to Kyle Grant about that and have come up with a way to take advantage of some of his technologies with acoustics and so on to build a very tiny washing machine that can wash individual items, we think as quickly as in 18 seconds. Now, you start thinking about terrestrial spin-offs. I don't know about you, but when I send something to a laundry at a hotel, I figure 50% chance of getting it back. What if you had this little machine at the end of the hall that could do your clothes in 18 seconds? Would that be incredible? We have astronauts that have volunteered to be part of this project. They are frantic for this. So we're really excited that this has now finally gotten the interest of NASA and we can move forward.
What does this have to do with biology? Well, one thing is I could say that obviously part of washing your clothes is reducing the bioload. You're reducing the contamination, and it's all to keep us healthy, etc., etc. But it also turns out there's one other little angle, and that is that to really get your clothes clean, particularly being able to use a cooler temperature, thus saving power, and we want to save power, mass, and volume, we take advantage of the fact that there are enzymes that have already evolved or can be made to digest things like what you spill on your shirt during lunch or dinner, or blood stains, or alcohol, or fats, or DNA, or whatever you've managed to spill. And so if you can take some of these enzymes, you're now able to help again with that mass, power, volume in your cleaning operation.
Okay, so I've given you a lot of really weird, far-out ideas taking advantage of nature's genetic hardware store. And people say to me, well, that's all very nice, but it's never going to happen. And so I like to point out that we are trying to move a lot of this into space. And so the first time I was able to have a space mission was to have a secondary payload on a German satellite called Eu:CROPIS. And that was Euglena crops in space. And what the Germans were trying to do is grow miniature tomatoes on recycled urine. Sadly, it didn't work because they lost communication. So it may have worked, but they don't know.
What I thought was really cool about the satellite and why we were interested is that it spun at different rates. So we could run experiments in microgravity, so basically zero gravity; one-sixth Earth's gravity, which would be mimicking the moon; and one-third Earth's gravity, which would be mimicking Mars. And so this secondary payload that we had, we called PowerCell. And it took advantage of the different gravity regimes to try to test some of these basic synthetic biology technologies in space. And without boring you with data slides, because I never show data slides at night if I can help it, it did work. Basically, some things are going to be immune to gravity, and some things we will need to count on
it. But right now, we are particularly working with Starlab. Now, Starlab is one of the space stations that is going to be commercially run but got some seed money from NASA, and it's rather interesting. Unlike the International Space Station, it's being built as single units and then they will be launched in space. There'll be a series of Starlabs ultimately. You can see there are a lot of companies involved. Ohio State University is the main academic partner, and through them we've gotten a foothold in it to try to get some of our fungal mycelial work in.
So here is an artist's conception of an inside floor inside Starlab. And what you see is a lot of metal and so on. I'm not sure why they had the table. Remember, up and down is sort of relative, and in the absence of gravity it may not look quite like that. But we believe that that's not a very pleasant place to be in. We believe that by adding fungal mycelia to this operation, we can make it more biophilic. We can cut down on the flammability and on the noise from the shock and vibe. In fact, if we set our minds to it, there are a lot of things that we could do with it.
The inside of the living quarters are being run by an organization that has, as they pointed out, a lot of experience with that, and that's Hilton Hotels. So, there is a photograph I took of a room at Hilton Hotels the morning before I had a meeting with the vice president of Hilton. He probably had not actually seen that room, but I thought he might enjoy this. This was his favorite slide. I said, "Okay, here is one of your rooms. What in here could have ultimately been made by fungi?" And the answer is darn near everything. So, we've now been in touch with actually the Hilton Bankside, which has a vegan room, and is now interested in the mycelial room and so on. So if you set your mind to it, you could actually grow a lot of that interior, or at least put a veneer on so you're not staring at stainless steel all day.
And so again, Chris has come up with some very cool ideas for, for example, sleeping pods. Currently, astronauts get strapped to the wall. I hear you get used to it eventually, but it doesn't look like it would be all that much fun, and particularly again for long duration, maybe tourists and so on. Chris's idea is we have these pods. They're black because they've got pigment in them to help protect the people from radiation, and then it comes down so you get sort of that feel of being in a bed even though you're in a microgravity environment. So I don't know about you, I would love a bed like that. Is that not cool?
But not just for technology. When we take advantage of nature's genetic hardware store, and particularly when we add synthetic biology, when we're doing new things with biology, treating life from the perspective of an engineer, we can also ask what-if questions. So for example, I usually maintain that one of the oldest questions we've had as humans is: are we alone in the universe? Now obviously the alpha level questions are what's for dinner and how do you make a baby and that kind of stuff, but after that, we know very well from earliest recorded time that people looked up to the stars, and it would be inconceivable to me that they weren't also thinking about this question of: are we alone?
But we don't even know really what has happened on planet Earth or what the potential was, because we only have one narrative for life on Earth. And as Darwin said, it's sort of like taking a book and taking 90% of the chapters out, and then 90% of the paragraphs, and 90% of the sentences, and 90% of the remaining words, and 90% of the letters that are remaining, and trying to piece the whole original book back together. It's extremely difficult. We have a sense of what's happened during the last four billion years, but we don't have a really clear picture.
And so, as I like to say, it would be as if I walked into an English department and said, "I'd like a job as professor of literature." And the department chair, looking at me skeptically, says, "And exactly how many books have you ever read?" And I proudly say, "One." I would be laughed out of the room, but that's exactly the situation we're in as evolutionary biologists. We only have this one narrative.
But when you start engineering life, we can start to ask these what-if questions. What if we had used different enzymes? What if we had used different nucleotides in our DNA? What if instead of left-handed amino acids, we used right-handed amino acids in our bodies? What if? What if? And so that's what we can now start to do in the lab. So synthetic biology allows us to speed up evolution and ask these what-if questions. Maybe even going back to what we think was some period in time and letting the clock run again. Would it have happened again the same way? We don't even know these alpha level questions.
So, as I say in my other life as an astrobiologist, there would be nothing, I think, more exciting in biology than to find a second origin of life. I mean, when I was growing up, we had an example of one solar system. And now with missions like the Kepler mission, we know literally about thousands of solar systems in our galaxy. And we know that there are a multitude of galaxies. But with life, we're still at that stage of only having one example. So again, imagine if we had a million examples of life, and we could say most life forms do this and some do that and some do that. But right now, I would be happy for an N of two. But even replaying the tape would get us somewhere.
So let me leave you with a few final thoughts, and let's go back to that black box that holds what I think of as the once and future technology. It's going to enable our future, but it has also enabled our past, and we can take advantage of what has come before and do new things with it and lead us out into the future. It is a technology that has basically built on a micromachine. It does carbon chemistry, nanotechnology, and it makes things, all with exquisite precision that humans simply cannot match. It has a very, very long, distinguished history, you know. So, it's not exactly a new technology. It's been around. And so, when people say, well, photosynthesis, it's like, yeah, you know, come back to me when you have a 3.8 billion year track record and tell me how good you are. Okay.
So we have these cycles on the Earth. We have biological cycles. We have plants that take the raw ingredients, the sunlight, the water, the carbon dioxide, these raw ingredients from planet Earth, and they convert it into organic materials that something like a cow might eat. And then we might take advantage of the cow. We might use the leather, we might use the meat or whatever. And it's all recycled by bacteria and fungi and so on.
We have a tech path which is pretty much one way at this point. We extract metals and so on. We make things, we use them, we dispose of them, we pollute them. With the sort of metal recycling that my lab's doing, we're hoping that we can close some of this loop. We can make it a cycle instead of a one-way.
And we go out into space. We're really, really good at recycling some things. The saying is that yesterday's coffee is tomorrow's coffee. Think about it for a second. We are really good at recycling water. And that's a good thing, because it's really expensive to take things into space. We're not so good about recycling tech.
Is there a biological cycle on the Moon? Of course not, because the Moon is dead. Is there a biological cycle on Mars? We have no idea. Probably not at this point, because there is little if any liquid water, and it probably comes in tiny, tiny droplets, if at all. But there may well have been in the past. Can we take advantage of these raw materials so we don't need to bring them with us? Boy, a lot of these look like the raw materials on planet Earth. Why shouldn't we? We've got life taking advantage of them on the Earth. Why can't we see a future where we do the same sorts of things, except off-planet, taking advantage of life as a technology and synthetic biology?
Now the problem is that we have all these constraints that I told you about. We have the upmass, the up volume, we've got the cost, we've got the storage, reliability and so on. And so these are constraints that I have to deal with that other people perhaps don't, because they have the power and they've got plenty of room and the volume and so on. So maybe they don't care. They're worried about maybe their investors in the next quarter. I don't. I've got totally different constraints.
Does this depress me? No. Do I look depressed? No, I'm not depressed. Because I believe the constraints really force you to be creative. And once you're creative, that's when you can start having the game-changing solutions, not when you're doing the same old. And I believe that by looking at what we can do in the future in space, we're now talking about radical sustainability, because we have no choice. We don't have the supplies of other sorts of materials that we have on the Earth. And so once we start to look at this sort of technology for off-planet, with that breathing room of the fact that we have no choice and therefore it's got to work, we're not worrying about this quarter's investment. We're worrying about: it's got to work long term. We now have game-changing solutions that I really believe will revolutionize both life on planet Earth and life past the Earth.
And so with that, I will say ad astra, which means to the stars, and thank many, many, many people who have helped with this work over the years, including ones who are currently in my lab, ones who are currently in the audience, currently online, and the many years that we sponsored the Stanford-Brown team that pioneered a lot of these projects. And thanks very much for coming out. Really appreciate it.
Lynn, thank you so much for that fascinating talk.
Did I hit the record of the longest time span?
You may have. And you really are a great example of what it looks like to be a long-term thinker in action and in the world. And I'm sure there's a lot of people in our audience that are eager to learn more about your approach to curiosity and how you come up with your ideas. What inspires you, and what are the sort of support systems around you, from your lab to your educational platforms, that keep inspiring you to come up with amazing ideas like this?
Well, let me start in the middle, because I really can't thank them enough. There are some people from my lab in the room. I hope they're still here. And obviously I don't do all this lab work. In fact, they probably actively keep me out of the lab so that I don't destroy their experiments. And none of this could be done without the really fabulous postdocs I've got here right now and the graduate students and the undergraduates and the colleagues that I've been privileged to work with over the years. So, you know, again, I'm sort of the ringleader, but I'm not the person who's produced all the data. So I'm enormously grateful to all of them.
But let me get back to your question. I think that there are two ways that I come up with ideas. One is with the technology. It's really someone gives me a problem and I think, hm, how could we solve this biologically? Because other people are engineers. I'm not really an engineer. I say really because I guess I've turned into an engineer. So I've learned over the last 20 years that there is actually a philosophical difference between being an engineer and being a scientist. So in my previous life, and still part of my life, I'm a scientist. Scientists take the world as it comes, and they look out there and they say, "Oh my gosh, you know, isn't this amazing?" As an evolutionary biologist, you look at life and you say, "Look what nature has wrought." Or if you're a geologist, you look at the rocks or the planets or the solar system. And that is incredible, because there is such an incredible world around us. You know, when I say world, I really mean universe.
So that's incredible. But it turns out there's another kind of creature called an engineer. And they look at all this and they say, "That's all very nice, but let me make something new today." And it turns out that I rather enjoy that as well.
And so the engineering part really is driven by someone saying, "I have a need. We can't possibly take two metric tons of laundry to Mars and back. We can't drink the water there, and it's going to be ridiculous to take all the water with us." Or in fact, NASA's very good about providing technology taxonomies, and you just look and you find, oh, 6.12 point whatever, we need this. And I said, oh, you know, I thought we can do that. And so that's how we come up with some of the ideas, and I try to be clever about it.
And then scientifically, I think my personal strength is because I'm a fairly broadly trained evolutionary biologist. Sadly, I don't think as many people going through with biology degrees today really have a concept of the diversity of life. And the diversity of life out there is incredible, and they're not taking advantage therefore not just of nature's genetic hardware, sorry, because that sounds, you know, very engineering and maybe slightly exploitive, but looking at how nature has solved all sorts of problems and going, "Oh my gosh, that's cool. I've got to figure out how that works. I have to really figure this out or that, because that is just so incredibly cool."
That's amazing. So, one aspect of your work is about knowledge, and another is about having a sense of how things work from experiments and experience. And I'm curious what would be your advice to young people who look at you as a role model and think, I want to advance science in these ways when I'm older. They have more access to information than ever before. But what are the kind of things that people need to learn offline to get a sense for doing this kind of work?
Well, again, it sort of depends at what level you are, and I know a high school student is on tonight, for example, who is asking me exactly that question. And I would say one thing is that you need to have a really good grounding in science. Take the science classes, and it's not just for the factual knowledge, because yes, in some ways you can get that online, but it's also to learn how a professional thinks. How does a professional scientist look at something and judge it? And it's not just a scientist, a geologist. How did they approach the world? How does a paleontologist approach the world? How does a chemist approach the world?
So it's partly that, really learning that, and then being trained broadly, because I really feel that one of my strengths is making connections between and among fields, and I think that's incredibly important for our future. It's hard to believe, but biology, chemistry, and physics are not god-given disciplines. They are human constructs. Planetary science wasn't actually a discipline till 30 or 40 years ago. Someone made it a discipline. We didn't have bioengineering, you know, and astrobiology crosses disciplines. So you can't really think of disciplinary boundaries at a university or a school as being rigid. You just have to think of them as sort of working taxonomic units, maybe, and learn what you can and feel free to cross those disciplines, which I do basically every single day.
One of the things you spoke about in your talk was a fascination about the possibility of playing the tape back in a different way, that maybe evolution could have forked in one direction or another at a different time. What moments in evolutionary time, looking back, would you love to see if it could have forked another way?
Oh wow. So I think a little bit like people who are time travelers and change history. So if we just reverse the clock till lunch today, yes, we could come up with a million different outcomes. But the farther back we go, the better the chance of a completely different trajectory. So I think one thing that would be fascinating would be to wind back to either right before the origin of life and see if it could have originated differently, and maybe you have to go even a little further
back to see if there were different inputs, and then that period of time right after life evolved. I don't believe for one moment there was one evolution of life. I think there were lots and lots of attempts at that were slightly different or maybe radically different, but one of them won out, and it's not even necessarily the best one in evolution, you know. So, the old joke is, how do you keep from being eaten by a bear? Well, you just run faster than your friend, you know. You just have to be better. And so, life is probably full of all sorts of examples of that where something was just a little bit better at that particular time, and maybe it would have been different.
My heart goes out to the dinosaurs. It wasn't their fault that day that the asteroid landed. You know, they really could not have done much about it, with the exception of building bomb shelters or something, but you know, they did everything right. Things also happen extraterrestrially. And that, I think, is another thing that I've really gotten in the last 30 years of my life with astrobiology and being at NASA: thinking as an evolutionary biologist beyond, as we were talking a moment ago, beyond thinking simply of nature, red in tooth and claw, and interactions among organisms. But what about the physical environment? What about the atmosphere? What about the really bad hair day when an asteroid hits you? You know, because all these things have influenced the trajectory of life. So those are the times I'd really like to go back to.
Fascinating. And looking forward, let's say over the next couple decades, of what experiments are possible, if biomes could be built extraterrestrially, what technologies and biologies would you be most excited to try to combine and see what might be possible?
Well, I think I'm going to correct the question a little bit in that of course they will be possible. It's a matter of where we want to spend our resources as humans and in our nation. But I have every confidence that we can build biomes off planet. We basically do that with ISS. We have a fair amount of resupply, but I don't think we're talking about building on the moon and cutting them off for the next, you know, thousand years. We're still going to have some resupply. It's more difficult. My efforts are along the lines of trying to minimize the resupply and trying to take advantage of what's there.
So, I've seen suggestions. You know, we've got our habitats where you have to, you know, any habitat, you've got to provide heat and oxygen and pressure and so on if humans are going to live in it. You can do a similar sort of thing, say, in lava tubes. You can't take advantage of the solar radiation then, so for photosynthesis, you're going to have to use energy to produce light. I did see a really interesting suggestion of a glass house recently. Ice houses are out there. There are all sorts of, you know, interesting possibilities. I think at the end of the day, and houses really are habitats, at the end of the day it's going to be a mix, just like when you build a house, you don't build it 100% of stone. You have some stone, you've got maybe a concrete foundation, you've got windows made of glass and so on. So I think at the end of the day we're really interested in adding that to the palette of materials. But I think that there's no question that we can build a biome. And by the way, I've also heard people suggest that they should just bag the entire moon or the entire planet Mars. I think that's somewhat more technologically challenging.
What do you mean, bag the moon?
Literally put it in a case, and then you have a pressurized system and you can start to, you know, build it. I mean, you can also heat up or bomb the polar ice cap with the carbon dioxide and heat up Mars for some period of time with extra CO2, and then you create an atmosphere. There's some really radical ideas out there. I'm not quite ready for that, and I don't think that we should be doing that scientifically at this point because of the possibility that there could be life there.
Fascinating. And what kind of culture on Earth do you think is needed in the future to support advancement of this kind of curiosity, discovery, and progress?
I'm glad you said culture, because I think the curiosity part is innately built into us as humans. I mean, I think virtually every child is born innately curious. And sadly, we have an education system that I think beats a lot of that out of children. But I think as humans, we're curious. We want to know what's out there. We want to know about the future.
I really love to tell the story of when I was doing some field work in Kenya and had the privilege of going into a school that was in the slums of Nairobi. And this was a time after war. A lot of these kids were orphans. Some of them were dragging kids that probably were their orphaned siblings. And this school was not even in session that day. And I came in to talk about the potential for life in the universe. And these classrooms were packed. And these were kids maybe from 6 to 15, because a couple of these high school kids would get to go to a proper high school and have a future, you know, beyond this. But by golly, they were there, and they knew the planets and they knew all this stuff. Not because they were getting a grade and not because, you know, some teacher told them. It's because, again, I think it speaks to our innate curiosity, and it was a chance for them to learn about something really important.
And I think that we have to realize that humans are not just well-fed cows. Yes, it's good to eat. Yes, you know, I'm very fortunate. We're all fortunate in this room that we are, you know, well-fed and we have this luxury. But part of what makes us human is this innate curiosity. And so I think we will do all these things simply because we are human. That is part of being human.
Beautiful. Well, we have a lot of questions from the audience here, and I'd like to get into a few of them. The first one is from Joseph Kurrin. Is there anything fundamental in life that will keep it from growing in space?
Well, it depends what you mean. Wherever Maros, that's a great, great question. There are a couple of physical problems with space. You know, again, depends where you are. Gravity could be anywhere from basically zero to bone-crunching. You know, again, depends where you are. And that's going to affect how you're going to be able to grow. If you're not protected, radiation is going to be basically a game stopper right there.
As I mentioned, the Bacillus subtilis spores, not all of them survived six years in space. Some of them did, which was pretty, I hate to use the word miraculous, but at least some of them did. So, radiation is definitely a stopper for multicellular organisms. The gravity becomes really important. We need oxygen. Not all life on Earth needs oxygen. We all need carbon because we're all made of carbon. We all need water. So, it depends where you are. But I'm going to assume that the question really is about humans, and that you do need the radiation protection. And that, I think, is a lot of the problem with going to Mars: having adequate protection for that period of time and having adequate gravity so that you don't have one-way disintegration of your systems. I mean, these astronauts, when they come back, are in not great shape. They, you know, have a lot of bone loss, muscle loss. I know they're working on countermeasures for all these things, but it's all difficult. You get solar flares periodically, solar particle events that you can't predict, that can also cause radiation problems. I mean, it's not easy. It really is not easy.
This question is from Juan Leon. What are the ways that these technological breakthroughs from space can be used to make life more affordable on Earth, particularly with regard to housing and medicine?
Oh, well, I think because we have to think about space as a very low-resource environment. And as I was trying to emphasize, I don't work for a company. I never have worked for a company, but I know, obviously, people who do work for companies, and there is enormous pressure to meet shareholders and, you know, certain business milestones and so on. My pressure is more: it's got to work, and if it takes a little longer, it takes a little longer, but it's got to work with a very unusual set of constraints. And so I think that allows us to make changes and discoveries and solutions that it would be difficult to have if you were just focusing on doing it on the Earth, because the investors wouldn't have the patience, and they'd say, "Well, we already have a solution for that." I mean, there's a solution for everything on the Earth today. There are multiple solutions, and so you're going to have to wedge out another solution.
But think about fuel, for example, or energy. You know, we've got petroleum, we've got coal, we've got wind, we've got solar, we've got, you know, propane. We've got all sorts of solutions. We don't on Mars. So, you're starting with a clean slate. Well, could we do something with solar? Maybe. Could we do something with the wind? Well, the atmospheric pressure is a hundredth of that of the Earth. Maybe, maybe not. You know, can we take advantage of a biological solution? So you're really forcing yourself to think of something completely new that then may turn out to be so good you can bring it back.
And I think I tried to make that point with the medicines. The pressure is not on companies to make very tiny quantities of drugs. An orphan drug in the United States is 20,000 or fewer Americans. 20,000 is a lot of people. I'm focusing on one to six, because if they need it, they need it. And so again, I believe that our solutions will actually revolutionize planet Earth.
This question from Taran: you shared about mushroom houses and DNA wires. What have you tried that hasn't worked, and what did you learn from that experience?
I like to think of things that haven't worked yet [laughter] rather than haven't worked. I'm dealing with some data from last week that I wish looked a little bit better from Brookhaven National Labs. But I think the DNA wires is a perfect example, and I think that's part of being a scientist, is to know when it's time to quit.
So that was a part of a project which I mentioned, Simon Veion's brainchild in 2013, and he was an undergraduate at Brown at the time, and he had this idea, and it didn't work and it didn't work and it didn't work all summer, and the other projects were working very well. And we were competing in Boston at the competition, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, in probably October. And I remember there was a time I called the people working with Simon, and Simon, into my office in sort of the end of July and said, "Look, you know, you've got one month left. We have two options. Either you keep going, and it may work in another month or it may not, but nothing's worked so far. Or you call it quits now and you join another project so you have something to present." And one student said, "I'll do whatever's good for the team." One student said, "I'll do whatever Simon says." And Simon said, "I'm not quitting." And sure enough, the next week it all started to work.
Wow.
So sometimes you just, it's a risk-benefit as sort of the boss, and you know, should we push it one more week? Alina out there has had the same sort of situation recently. You know, do you keep pushing it with one organism, and it doesn't work and it doesn't work? And she spent about a year sort of working extremely hard and banging her head against a wall, and it wasn't working, and finally said, "Yeah, let's just try something else." And bam, worked. So, that's part of the experience of having to know when, but, you know, I'm hardly infallible.
Wow. It's really inspiring to hear about the mindset behind all of the breakthroughs and experiences that you've shared with us today. Speaking of mindsets, another impressive thing is your fluency with very long time scales. And I'm curious about how you feel about thinking long term and how you situate yourself across billions, hundreds of millions of years, and the present.
Well, I'm really glad you asked that. I was inspired because of the title, Long Now, and so it got me thinking about time some more. And I'll tell the story that about 10 years ago or so, I was asked to speak at the International Horological Society. Timepieces: turns out this is a timepiece because it doesn't make noise; clocks have to make noise. So they asked me to put together a talk on time and biology, and it made me realize that biology is perhaps unique in that we have all different time scales going on in our bodies. We've got things going on at the femtosecond time scale all the way to, you know, seconds, to, you know, then we get into time scales that we're all used to. Minutes, hours. You probably think this talk's gone on for hours already. Didn't, actually. You know, we can warp our vision of time. Days, years.
And then we were up to about maybe a hundred years. And that's something that I think we can envision. I had a grandmother who made it almost to 101. She could easily envision 100 years, and I can, you know, picture her lifespan pretty easily. 200 years, with the American Revolution, is 250 years. You can pretty much do that because it's two and a half times a hundred years. But then you start thinking about thousands of years, and you're now in the sort of time scale of human evolution, tens of thousands of years to hundreds of thousands of years, and it starts to become really fictional. And then you start talking about millions of years, and it's nothing for a geologist, and it's an awful long time for the human mind to grasp. And then I start rolling off numbers like half a billion. Turns out we think that Venus may have been almost like Earth up to as recently as half a billion years ago. And you think, how could she even say as recently? And I can say that. I practice. You know, the universe is 13.6 billion years old. I can say these things, and then I go home, and it's like, oh my gosh, you know, that's a really long time, because I do believe that it is beyond human comprehension. I can talk about these numbers. I know rationally they're true, but I am, like I think all humans, centered in that seconds, maybe fraction of a second, to hundreds of years time scale of something that we really can understand at a gut level.
That's wonderful. For my closing question, I want to ask what kind of support and partnership and collaboration would you want to invite in to your work that could really help move it ahead in leaps and bounds in the coming years?
Well, right now there are a lot of really incredible advances in nanotechnology, in bioinformatics, which, you know, there have been Nobel Prizes recently, the last few years, in bioinformatics. We used to, you know, well, I mean, and now it's called computer AI, you know, bio-whatever. You know, there are new names for these things, but it's really taking the power of computers and
So unlike, you know, the professors that I had, one in particular I was close to was the world's expert in sponge phylogeny, and that may sound esoteric, but to know as many different species of sponges as he did with that kind of intimacy is something that we'd lost to a large extent. But then we have the advantage of being able to go through the information that's out there on all these species of sponges and being able to put it together. I still believe we need the human, you know, aspect to look and really understand and ask the interesting questions and really be able to sift through some of it. But I think the bioinformatics is really, you know, AI-assisted design has just been incredible, including designing new proteins and enzymes and so on.
So the nanotech, the bioinformatics, synthetic biology, the ability to take bits of life and do new things with them, it's incredible. It's going to do, you know, incredible things in, you know, the sort of areas that I mentioned and many others over the next really 10 to 20 years or sooner. It's, everything is just moving so quickly in
so many fields and certainly engineering as well. Something I know less about but I've learned is incredibly important, and we still need to know more about, is the diversity of life. Evolution has tried so many things that we still don't know about that could be useful for us or just simply really, really interesting.
So those are the things that I'm excited about, and putting them together in novel ways if at all possible.
All right. Well, we've got our marching orders. [laughter] Dr. Rothschild, thank you so much for this inspiring talk.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
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