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Join us on our quest for the extraordinary!
Sam McKee (@polymath_sam) has 9 university qualifications across 4 subjects including doctorates in history and philosophy of science and molecular biology. He researches both at two British universities and contributes to both space science and cancer research. Meet fellow polymaths and discipline leaders working on the frontiers of research from all over the world. Be inspired to pursue knowledge and drive the world forwards.
Watch and share interviews with professors, lecturers, researchers, engineers, scientists and astronauts, right here! We talk to the most extraordinary people working on the frontiers for humanity, driving research forwards and changing the world that we live in. We dive deep with thinkers, academics and true icons - many of whom you won't yet have heard of.
Listen to us here and on podcast whilst you drive, exercise, do chores, and be inspired to pursue extraordinary in your own life.
www.sam-mckee.co.uk
Polymath World (00:01.281)
Hello and welcome to the Polymath World channel. And I'm so excited today because we're digging into two of my favorite subjects, synthetic biology and Mars, with someone who I've long admired and had the real pleasure of meeting back in October in Los Angeles. Thank you so much for joining me today, Dr. Tiffany Vora. I'm really excited to talk to you.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (00:19.384)
I'm delighted to be here. Thanks so much for the invitation to this conversation.
Polymath World (00:24.567)
Well, I first came across you on YouTube giving lectures on synthetic biology and Mars. And I had just written an article for the conversation about synthetic biology on Mars with no idea that someone was doing it way better than me already elsewhere. So I was very intrigued and then delighted to see that you were speaking at the Mars Society Conference. And I will put a link to your talk there in the description because I'd love people to find your work. But before we dig into your career,
We've not done something on synthetic biology here before, so could you describe it for the lay people who've maybe not come across it before?
Dr. Tiffany Vora (01:01.87)
Sure, so synthetic biology is a scientific discipline where we combine biotechnology, computer science, genetic engineering, a couple of other disciplines in order to program living things to take on new or different functions or to make new parts. It's kind of like using biology as a technology, as a programmable technology to have a living thing do or make a thing that you want.
Polymath World (01:30.091)
Yes, it's a whole new world. I can't wait to get into this a whole lot more, but we always start with your journey. so were you really set on being a biologist when you were a child? Were you really into engineering?
Dr. Tiffany Vora (01:46.798)
No. So I guess when I was a child, I think I had a scientist in me already, but I think every child does. If you're curious about the world around you, then you're a scientist and little kids have that in spades. It's really amazing. My father was a chemist. So I grew up washing glassware in his laboratory on the weekends, which I guess people don't do anymore, but that's what I did when I was a kid. And so I actually assumed I was going to be a chemist for a long time.
And then when I was in high school, I worked in my father's lab for a couple of summers and I spent, it was an industrial process chemistry lab, and I spent the entire summer measuring the carbon content of water. Do you know what the carbon content of water is in a manufacturing plant? It's zero, and it needs to be zero.
every single day or you have a problem. And I got to the end of that second summer and I thought to myself, I don't think I can do this for the rest of my life. Like I cannot just keep measuring zero. So that's when I was in my first year in university at that point. And so I was coming to realize that I was really interested in biology. At the time, I thought that meant being a doctor. Because until I went to university, I had never met anybody who worked with the natural world who wasn't
actually a doctor. So I came into university thinking I was pre-med, I was pre-med, doing really heavy science curriculum at New York University where I did my undergrad work. And then sometime in my sophomore year, I joined a genetics lab. I had kind of been flagged by one of my professors as someone who had some good potential. They put me in a senorhabditis elegans genetics lab.
And I started to realize over the course of a year that I was more interested in the things that people didn't know than the things that people did know, which started giving me this itching feeling that medical school was really not the place for me. My parents were not thrilled by that. I remember my father saying to me, just take the MCAT for fun. And I was like, there's nothing fun about that exam.
Polymath World (03:54.603)
Ha ha ha.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (03:55.342)
So I ended up after my undergrad going and working for a pharmaceutical company for a bit, which was really great experience in the industry, getting to see what that side of things looked like. And then after spending a little less than a year in industry, I started graduate school. And so I decided to do a PhD in molecular biology at Princeton. And so I started there and I did that for about six years.
And it was a really great time to be in that field because it was just as computer science and biology and physics were coming together in really strong ways. There had been some of that before, obviously, but when I trained as a biologist as an undergrad, basically if you could multiply, that was enough math to be a biologist. And then suddenly, not only was I in this new field, but I was helping to invent it.
And I was realizing every day that I did not know the things that I needed to know in order to work in this new field. I didn't have enough advanced statistics and some other types of mathematics that I needed. I didn't know how to program. So I was suddenly teaching myself to program while I was in graduate school. Spoiler alert, I am still a lousy programmer. I can do it, but it's not pretty. So thank goodness for LLMs who can help us with our coding.
But so that was how I came to the end of my PhD having worked on a variety of what now we call systems biology, but at the beginning it was just very, very much the beginning of that. Meanwhile, during that time, I had gotten a grant from NASA. NASA actually funded my undergraduate research, which was on detecting DNA protein interactions in bacterial cells.
seems kind of quaint right now, but at the time it was pretty hard and nobody was doing it in a whole genome way the way I was trying to do it. So NASA was funding me, which was great. And then my first year in graduate school, I picked up a copy of Bob Zubrin's The Case for Mars. And if you want, we can talk a bit more about my Mars journey, but that's really where I started getting into the Mars end of the science things.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (06:05.144)
Prior to that, I actually was a, I grew up in Florida in the 1980s. So I used to stand in my backyard and watch shuttle launches when I was a kid. So I always kind of grew up in this sort of space community, but it wasn't until graduate school that I started kind of actively participating. So fast forward from there, I finished my PhD. I took a job as a professor at the American university in Cairo. So I lived in Egypt for two years before the revolution.
Polymath World (06:12.8)
Wow.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (06:32.686)
just before the revolution and that was a great experience. I cannot strongly enough encourage people to leave their country and go somewhere else. I learned more about being an American by leaving America than I ever did by being in my country. So that's just a really great growth opportunity. So I was there for a couple of years and then I left Egypt and I came to California where I live now. I previously taught at Stanford University. I ran
I've started three companies. ran my own science writing and communication business for almost 15 years. And then I started working with a group called Singularity University, which is this really cool international community of people who are thinking about technology and how that could influence the future. So I come to that from a biotech lens. I live in Silicon Valley. I'm interested in biotech and everything that it touches.
Of course, I'm super biased. think biotech is awesome for everything and I hope we'll get a chance to talk about that. But I'm in a really lucky position now where I work with the Geotech Center for the Atlantic Council in Washington as a nonpartisan think tank, trying to help government people understand tech and where it might be going. I work with a variety of clients around the world. The way I put it is I get to work with smart people working on hard problems and that's a real privilege.
Polymath World (07:54.807)
That's the best life. mean, where else would you want to be on the cutting edge of the frontier? And space very much is the frontier. It always will be. And there's this wonderful fusion of worlds with you of biotech and molecular biology, which has never been hotter. But I say to students all the time, biology has never been hotter than it is now. It's the hottest it's been since maybe the 1950s.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (08:22.402)
This is the best time to be a biologist. mean, it's always been a great time for me. But when I look now at the tools and the systems and the processes, and when we start putting humans and AI and machines together in the laboratory, it's unbelievable to me what people can accomplish now relative to even 20 whatever years ago when I was a graduate student. It is shocking to me how much faster and more powerful our tools are. It's amazing. And remember,
Today is the most boring biotech is ever going to be. It's only going to get crazier from here. So it's a great, great time to be entering the field.
Polymath World (08:58.817)
That's a great way of putting it. You mentioned tools. We have tools now that didn't exist before. And you're applying these tools to not only big problems on Earth with synthetic biology, but space. And space science as well, you could argue, has never been hotter. I think with students, they kind of take space for granted because there's never been a day in their life where everyone has been on Earth.
And unfortunately, a lot of people aren't aware of what goes on on the International Space Station, of the man or woman on the street. But you are thinking so much bigger than this in terms of space science. You're thinking about Mars and other worlds. So why don't you introduce us to your work and this fusion of synthetic biology and Mars?
Dr. Tiffany Vora (09:47.128)
Sure. So one of the hats that I wear is as the vice president of innovation partnerships at Explore Mars, which is a nonprofit looking to support a sustainable future for humanity on Mars and beyond in the 2030s, which reminder will be here any minute, right? 2030s is super soon. And my particular role here, because I live in Silicon Valley, because I'm so embedded in a variety of innovation ecosystems around the world,
My job is to get innovators and companies who don't think they're space companies today to understand that they could be in 20 years, 30 years, 50 years. So what's their space strategy? How do their products and services enable a world in which humans are living off earth, potentially permanently? That's a whole other conversation we can have. And my goal, my not so secret agenda is to never again have to answer the question.
Why should we spend money on space when we have so many problems here on Earth? They're the same problems. It's just in space, you can't cheat the way you can on Earth, right? On Mars, if it becomes too expensive or too inconvenient to have your renewable energy, you can't go drill for oil or chop down a tree. There isn't any oil. There aren't any trees. You have to actually solve the problem. Or if it's human health care or a reliable protein source or whatever it is, you have to actually solve the problem.
for space. And so that's what I really love about bringing these innovations together and broadening that space ecosystem. Synthetic biology, I think, is going to be a really great set of tools for that because biology itself is a technology that makes more of itself. Biology is a self-replicating technology. So when we think about upmass constraints, for example, like it's
It's expensive and it's heavy and it burns too much fuel to be able to carry with you everything you need. Like let's just talk about food and medicine. If you were doing a manned or a crewed mission to Mars, you know, you're probably looking at two and a half years round trip if you basically didn't even hang out there that long, if you just stayed long enough for the planets to move around so that your transit distance was as short as possible to come home. That's still a good two and a half years. Let's say you've got a crew of six. That's a lot of food.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (12:08.47)
And that's a lot of medicine, especially the medicine piece is interesting because you can't send out to your local pharmacy to pick up whatever you need if somebody gets sick. The supply chain is just way too long. So you have to have everything with you that you could possibly need. And that's just too much mass. So the biology community is saying, why not use biology to do that? Because what you can do with synthetic biology is you can program
bacteria, you can program yeast, you can then freeze teeny teeny tiny amounts of those organisms, take them with you. And then let's say, Sam, you get sick in a way you need this particular biologic, I defrost that little bit of yeast that I froze back on earth and brought with me, I put it in its little incubator, and then it grows more and more of itself and it starts making that thing on demand that you really need right now. And that's kind of, I would say, the real
the real value proposition of synthetic biology. It takes us from a take paradigm to a make paradigm. And the good news is there are lots of folks around the world who are doing this work with their own hands. I've been fortunate enough to work closely with several of them here in the United States, but around the world, this type of work is going on. It's really interesting. And as our computational models get even more powerful, we'll become more and more capable.
of making new things with biology that we don't know how to do yet because we don't actually know we can do it. It's gonna get more interesting from here.
Polymath World (13:43.946)
Yes, you've hinted at a couple of different tools I'd like to zoom in on here. Firstly, there's computational biology and we're in an alpha fold world. We're in a world now where we say, okay, what is the structure of the illness I'm trying to solve and the protein that can solve it or the macromolecule and the protein folding problem seems all but solved thanks to computational methods now. We've also got gene editing.
And I think a lot more people have heard of CRISPR these days than was the case even just a little while ago. But we also have base editing, prime editing. We've got gene editing tools that we didn't have before. And then there's this thing of using model organisms basically as factories to produce the goods that you need. I mean, pick whatever you like, but how can we harness these to solve these problems off world?
Dr. Tiffany Vora (14:42.168)
So what you've hinted at are a suite of tools, and there's a couple more I might add there, that would enable an end-to-end discovery test, discovery test build learn cycle, in which you're able to build on not just what evolution has already spent four billion years on our planet working out, but also to use some of these tools to make new things, new proteins, new functions that to our knowledge have never been tested.
never been seen before on earth. So you mentioned Alpha Fold. Alpha Fold is my absolute favorite AI implementation. know, ChatGPT is not the killer app for AI. Biotech is the killer app for AI. And we're going to be seeing this. just to like put a little, sharpen a little bit what you said here about Alpha Fold. So Alpha Fold is an algorithm. There are many of these algorithms. Alpha Fold is the most famous one from DeepMind, which is currently a Google company.
Polymath World (15:25.057)
Clearly.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (15:38.112)
that will predict a protein's structure from its sequence. So I said that in one sentence, but that's been the holy grail of molecular and cellular biology for 100 years, right? When I was a graduate student, it could take you eight years to figure out a protein's structure. And now what AlphaFold does is it makes predictions, just like with anything you do with AI, you have to go check. But if that moves you seven years faster down that...
Polymath World (15:54.561)
Yes.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (16:06.338)
you know, innovation pipeline, that's fantastic. But here's where things, in my opinion, get really interesting. So that was like alpha fold one through three, where they were looking at proteins. There have been subsequent Google DeepMind algorithms that looked at not just the three dimensional structures of proteins, but the three dimensional structures of all of life molecules, and how they fit together. If that sounds like a drug discovery bonanza to you, you're right. That's exactly the kind of thing we're thinking about there.
But then they also came up with another algorithm called Alpha Proteo, which will design entirely new proteins from scratch. So again, like looking beyond what nature has already done. And now there's Alpha Genome, which is even crazier. Alpha Genome, you can put a million base pairs of DNA into it and it'll predict splicing variants and expression levels and tissue expression and what a sniff will do to change it and histone binding patterns and transcription factor binding sites and all of these things.
When I look at that example, I measured all of that stuff too when I was in graduate school, but I did it with my hands and sometimes I had to invent the technique first before I could actually measure the thing. And now there's an app for that, right? So if you think not just about a single protein, which may be alpha proteo or alpha fold would give us the power to do, but the capacity to embed that in a larger biological context, in a genome, in a living thing.
and then to model how that thing will behave and to say, I need to tweak this a little bit. I need to add a binding site here. I need to rewire this so that the repressor becomes an activator, like whatever it is. Suddenly now we have all these tools that can make this so much more faster and more powerful than ever before. I also like the idea of when we think about using cells as factories, remember a cell's prime directive is to be a cell.
It's not actually to do the thing you want it to do. So using these tools to reprogram the cell to actually care about being a factory instead of caring about just making little baby yeasts, that's a big breakthrough. And then in Tiffany's Magic Fantasy Land, what we also have are multifactory consortia of organisms working together. that's orders of magnitude more complex.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (18:26.316)
And that's where these computational tools in particular will really come in handy to figure out how to actually make these systems that work, know, synthetic microbiomes or whatever you want to call it. That's what we're talking about here. And so what I love is that there are just so many applications of this, right? There's health, there's food, there's energy, there's materials, there's sensors. Living things can be all of those things if we know how to harness the biology properly.
Polymath World (18:55.007)
Yeah, we had Professor Kenneth Miller on recently, who's professor of biology at Brown. And he said, you know, in his, in his lifetime, biology went from being an observational science to an experimental science, you know, just as much a hard science, a practical tool where you're manipulating organisms. And that's, that's happened in such a brief period. But we are in such an explosive period now with, with CRISPR being so cheap and alcohol just taking a few seconds.
It all seems so so new and with it seems like nothing is impossible, but we're dealing with Mars here and we're talking about life. mean You don't get that much more extreme and hostile to life than Mars. So How can we yes we can use these tools to keep us alive on on the way there? But what more can we do with it and why Mars in particular?
Dr. Tiffany Vora (19:50.51)
Sure. So for me, the reason I'm a Mars girl is because as a biologist, the thing that I want to know more than anything else is are we alone in the universe? And it just so happens that the next planet over is our best shot at seeing quickly whether there's something else that's not us, Terran life out in the universe. So I'm super keen to see biologists on Mars.
I'll be honest, I'm super keen to see me on Mars. I'll just be perfectly frank. But looking for either, so that, there's three options. There has never been life on Mars. There was life on Mars previously and it's no longer there. Or there's currently life on Mars. And depending on who you ask, you'll get different odds of those things happening. But now we're talking about a fourth option, which is importing Earth life to Mars.
Polymath World (20:22.291)
Excellent, great.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (20:45.996)
which is both a tremendous opportunity, but in my opinion is also a really strong responsibility, right? So we talk, for example, about planetary protection. It's easy to think of planetary protection as protecting Earth from bringing something nasty back from Mars. Honestly, I'm just as worried about the other way. I would hate for us to disrupt any life that might be on Mars with Earth life because we're trying to use these technologies for various things. So what that means,
is if you're talking about synthetic biology for Mars, you have to have a very rigorous containment system. Now, the good news is right now, the vast majority of life on Earth, if you just dropped it on Mars, it can't survive there. Mars is the least nasty place in the solar system besides Earth, but it's still pretty nasty, right? You got radiation, got your atmosphere is frozen and on the ground, you've got all kinds of issues. It's dark, it's cold.
Polymath World (21:30.913)
Thank
Dr. Tiffany Vora (21:46.142)
You've got perchlorates in the soil, is basically like soil full of bleach and salts, which is just not what life wants, Earth life wants. There's very little liquid water, if any. So the conditions are not great for Earth life on Mars in general, but we can actually use that as a benefit, right? So if we're using bacteria as growth, as little factories, I'm growing them in some kind of tank. And essentially the assumption is that they get out of the tank,
they're not gonna make it. I can even do something stronger than that and I can program in genetic kill switches and things like this or make it so that the bacteria need a particular nutrient that they can only get from me. They could never get on the surface of Mars. And then that would also make it more likely that we could protect Mars from earth contamination. So that would be really useful. So once we start applying these ideas to Mars, sure, there's some more problems that'll happen.
But let's say what I wanted to do was make a protein using bacteria on Mars in a little tank. Well, frankly, that sounds like a problem I'd like to solve here on Earth, too. And there are already companies that are doing that here on Earth. So how do we join those two things and say, well, what I want is a completely closed-loop protein system that is contamination-free. Well, couldn't I use that in a low-resource setting on Earth? Could I use it in a war zone? Could I use it in a famine area?
How could I use that? and by the way, it's got to be really robust. You don't want to have to fix it and it can't use a lot of energy. Well, that also sounds perfect for a conflict zone or famine zone or something like that, right? So it's in my opinion, it's a lot of the same pieces. And if you push it even further, then you get to terraforming. And that's where stuff gets really interesting and people become quite emotional about terraforming. So terraforming is
Polymath World (23:42.266)
You
Dr. Tiffany Vora (23:43.65)
you know, taking a planet and making it more Earth-like to make it more amenable to life from Earth. So if you imagine a future in which humans can walk around on Mars without a suit, a pressure suit, you're talking about a terraformed Mars, right? And using biology to do that is a really smart way to do it because it's how it happened on Earth, right?
atmosphere on Earth switching to an oxygen containing atmosphere happened because of biology, right? That's not the way our planet started. So there's so many pieces here that make it so interesting and we just are so lucky that there are so many smart people working on various parts of this puzzle. What will it look like a hundred years from now? I don't know the answer to that, but there's faint signals now if you look around to what people are working on that show you what could be possible if we decide that's what we want.
Polymath World (24:40.375)
And as usual with space, all these potential ideas and breakthroughs have massive benefits for Earth. You've hinted at some of them. I was hesitant to bring up terraforming, and I'd like to talk to Eric here, but I wrote an article on this as well. And it's so preferable to anything like sending loads of nukes to Mars to
Dr. Tiffany Vora (24:53.646)
Yeah
Polymath World (25:07.551)
melt the ice caps or massive space mirrors to do the same thing. Because it's like what happened on Earth. We think of cyanobacteria and we owe our life to them. Given the scale of the size of Mars, how viable is this, do you think? Generating and manipulating microorganisms to do what we need them to do, but on that kind of scale.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (25:33.026)
I think it depends how long you're willing to wait, right? So it was not fast on earth. I mean, I guess on a geological time scale, was fast, but like from a human perspective, it wasn't particularly fast. So are you willing to wait a hundred years? Are you willing to wait 10,000 years? Are you willing to wait a million years? That sort of gives you a sense of what types of scales, if we had biology only to look at. And if you look at groups like pioneer labs,
Polymath World (25:36.076)
guys.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (26:02.764)
They're doing some really interesting work with they've modeled terraforming in a couple of different ways to try to see like what's kind of the minimum viable product where you would say, okay, this is the definition of terraforming. We're going to call this terraforming, right? Is it when there's liquid water on the surface? Is it when you can walk around without a pressure suit? Like what's, what's the actual thing? So I would point people to their work, which is fantastic to take a look at that. So.
It wouldn't be fast, right? The nukes would be faster, but I'm not convinced that planetary change happening faster is what we should be going for. We're living through that now on Earth and it is highly disruptive, right? So I think it is possible, but it depends how hard you're willing to work, how much money you're willing to spend and how long you're willing to wait.
Polymath World (26:54.455)
Yes, absolutely. And it's not too much of a step to see how these sorts of ideas could help us deal with massive problems on Earth like climate change. We've been using synthetic biology in ways that people can understand. Take maybe an oil slick, for example. We have a massive oil spill. Use microorganisms for bioremediation to clear up that mess.
and get the environment back on its feet. mean, people can understand that, but I'd like to drill down a bit more into the synthetic biology here. What does this look like in a day-to-day, week-to-week world for Dr. Tiffany Warrar? Do you have particular microorganisms you like, particular techniques you like? It's still only recently been legalized to the scale that we can crisper a lot of stuff here in the UK in the last two years.
It is new. What does your work look like and what's the scale of it?
Dr. Tiffany Vora (27:55.278)
So it's complicated for a variety of reasons. I would say we're still scale-wise looking at individual pieces. I'm particularly interested in labs and companies that are taking more of a platform approach rather than engineering everything as a one-off, which is how we used to do things, right? So, you know, for example, other daily examples of life, know, insulin.
doesn't come from ground up human bodies. Insulin comes from bacteria, right? That was the sort of the classic Genentech thing way back in the day. Like that's where the original stuff came from. So we're still seeing quite a bit of that. I'm also excited by companies that are doing things like using microbes to take CO2 that is off-gas from a concrete factory, for example, a cement factory. They literally bolt their...
their laboratory onto the side of the manufacturing plant. And then those microbes convert that CO2 into protein or into monomers that you could use to make things like yoga pants or fats or oils or things like that. And that's really interesting to me because one of the things biology is really good at is taking a waste of one process and using it as the input to another process.
And again, if we're talking about space, we are talking about closed loop systems, right? You can't just off gas your CO2. If there's one thing Mars has a lot of, it's carbon dioxide. So we're gonna wanna know how to use that. But so getting those loops in place here on earth is also really going to benefit us. So for me, what it looks like day to day, I am not in the laboratory myself today. My work has taken me in a slightly different direction, but what I do,
is I go around the world and I spend a lot of time on Zoom talking to these innovators and these founders who are working on these problems, helping them get funding, helping them get exposure, helping them get those early clients. You have a problem in synthetic biology where the capital expenditure investment is actually quite high at the beginning. Biology is hard and you need stuff in order to do it. And yeah, that stuff has gotten cheaper and cheaper and there's some really great innovation models, but the
Dr. Tiffany Vora (30:19.49)
the input at the beginning is, it's a heavy lift at the beginning to get stuff to work or to the big kind of valley of death is getting it out of the lab and scaling it. Biology actually does not scale very well. That's often where these things fail. But if you're coming to it from a mindset as if you were making widgets or whatever, you know, that large scale manufacturing mindset, biology doesn't play that way.
So looking for people who are looking to not actually make it bigger in a bigger tank, but like lots of little tanks or have it be decentralized and how do you fund that? That's why the governments have historically been really important early funders of this kind of R &D. And what I would really love to see, and we have some of these now in the US and I think you're getting some of them in the UK, are kind of these almost like public foundries where you don't have to build your own.
manufacturing lab or your own containment facility, you can use this government foundry in order to do the early parts of your prototyping and your MVP before you have to get your first proof of principle plant or something like that. And that's when then when the capital stuff comes in and it becomes really important that you have investors who understand what you're doing and understand that it's going to be hard and it's probably going to take a while. You mentioned space is really extreme and that's absolutely true. Mars always has
surprises for us. And the truth is biology does too. I mean, that's one of the reasons I'm a biologist. Biology always surprises you just when you think you've solved the problem. Biology's like, surprise, you didn't think of this. And then you have to solve that problem too. And you can either view that as a threat or you can view it as an opportunity, right, for more innovation. So that's where the landscape is from where I'm looking. It's everything from folks at iGEM competitions
Polymath World (32:09.959)
Thank you.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (32:13.432)
coming up with brand new things all the way up to how do we get a real plant out there in the world making this stuff every single day.
Polymath World (32:23.201)
So I have a few questions on what you've just said. The first is I expect that perhaps the biggest missing resource right now is expertise, because it doesn't seem to be tech. Is it a growing field in terms of people entering it to train? is synthetic biology something that is easily accessible for young students who are looking to get into college and pursue graduate stuff, or at least in the US?
Dr. Tiffany Vora (32:52.75)
So let me take the second part of that first. So yes, and one of the reasons that synthetic biology is so accessible to students is this thing called IGEM, I-G-E-M, which is this international synthetic biology competition for high school students and university students. You might have a local team at your local university or something local to wherever you are when you're listening today. All you have to do is Google it and find out if there's a team nearby.
I love that and that's been going on for more than a decade, iGEM. It's not a new thing. And the idea is let's get people in, let's teach them the basics, let's put the tools in their hands and then let's see what they can do. And there's been some really amazing stuff to come out of iGEM that I just am flabbergasted that an 18 year old was able to come up with something so elegant or so creative using biology as the technology. So yes, you can absolutely get into it tomorrow.
if you wanted to, if you had an iGEM team in particular near you. The other thing that makes these tools more accessible is how demonetized they become. So, know, DNA sequencing, for example, has gotten so cheap in the last 20 years that it's pretty simple for you to pay to get a DNA sequence to read off the ACTG. Same with DNA synthesis, building up strands of DNA.
you can order those and have them shipped to you in the mail. I mean, it's literally like fill out the web form and then it gets mailed to you. So, and now there are also cheaper machines. The really good machines are not cheap, right? But you actually don't need the best quality to get something that's good enough because biology is actually really forgiving in a lot of ways. It'll fix some of your mistakes. It'll make new mistakes, but like the biology actually helps you out of it. And
That's one thing that I really love too, and that I always remind innovators of is biology has probably already solved the problem you're trying to solve. You don't have to do it from scratch. You just have to be looking in the right place in the biology and then listening to what the biology is telling you. So I think those are the best way to say that. And yes, we are seeing more people coming into the field, which I think is marvelous. And people are coming into it from various entry points now, right? So.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (35:16.098)
When I was a graduate student, you had people who had studied biology and people who had studied computer science, but nobody who had done the same, which meant we couldn't even talk to each other. We didn't even have a shared language, right? It was kind of a mess. I remember the first CS class I took, it was a disaster. I mean, just, I just couldn't understand anything that anybody was talking about. But now what we're seeing is from high school and beyond, people are training in both at the same time. They're training in...
programming, they're training in computer models, they're training in AI, and they're training in biology. And that's when things become really, really exciting. And what I'd like to suggest here is that there are a whole range of jobs in this field that have not been invented yet, because those jobs are at the interface of robotics and AI and humans. And if you are a young person, you have the chance to invent your own career. I can't tell you what it's going to be because it doesn't exist yet.
I was just talking to pharma companies about this a couple of weeks ago. I don't know what these jobs are, but you have a chance to figure it out and that's really exciting. And if you are at an organization, whether it's a big organization, a new organization, a small organization, your company can be the one that figures out what those new jobs are, right? It's pretty exciting. again, remember not only is today, you know, the dumbest biology is ever going to be, today is also the slowest it's ever going to be.
And it's also the slowest AI is ever going to be, which is terrifying, right? Think of the difference between November, 2022 and now it's crazy, right? This is it. This is as slow as it's ever going to be for the rest of our lives. So the opportunity space here is really, really large and is only going to get larger. You'll just be limited by your creativity.
Polymath World (37:03.063)
It is very very exciting. I have been frustrated in the past at the lack of attention genetics has got in the space science side of things on the ISS and the shuttle and things like that. But we have seen like Kate Rubins and Christina Koch and a few others do some DNA sequencing on the ISS and even one or two uses of CRISPR I believe.
We did have NASA astronaut Ricky Arnold on the show recently who did a little bit of genetics during his long duration stay. But other than that, there's the genes in space competition that kids run. given how important it is for living off world and given the opportunity that we're in and the kinds of things we're talking about, I'm surprised it's not more. But am I wrong there? Aren't NASA and the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency and the various partners
Are they really getting on board with the kinds of things that you're talking about?
Dr. Tiffany Vora (38:06.158)
The short answer is yes, but it's a slow process, right? Because you have to have flight ready hardware, but you get caught in this loop where if you can't fly the hardware to test it, then you can't prove that it's flight ready, right? And so folks are trying to figure out ways, what's the bare minimum of genetics equipment you would need in order to...
do something useful up there, right? you know, people have pipettes and stuff like that. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about like the actual incubators and these other types of machines that we have to do things. And proving to a national space agency that your hardware is flight ready takes a while and it's expensive, right? So this stuff is happening. I think it's just slower than a lot of us would like. And again, for national space agencies, which tend to be very risk averse,
If you already have an abiotic solution that works, how much do you invest? How much money, how much time, how much cargo space do you invest in investigating a new solution to a problem you think you've already solved? It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy. So I think that there's actually a lot of really nice opportunity here for commercial space. Once we get the first commercial space stations up,
Polymath World (39:16.639)
Right.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (39:26.144)
That's a huge expanded footprint to be testing out things like that. Is there a business model in which these commercial space stations, for example, could be renting out their space to scientists at some price lower than the ISS? And remember, we lose the ISS at the end of the decade. So that's it, right? China has their space station and there's some other details there. People have talked about putting labs on the moon for the same reason, right? The moon's a lot closer than Mars. Wouldn't it make sense?
check stuff out on the moon and the moon at least is, know, the gravity is lower. There's absolutely no air. Like the moon is actually a much harsher environment than Mars is. Wouldn't it make more sense to test it there? Sure. But we got to get back to the moon first. We're not there yet, right? So you get caught in these cycles. One thing I'm interested in seeing groups like NASA and ESA doing is coming away from the old mentality that bacteria are things that make you sick.
And so you have to get rid of them and instead viewing them as sort of a key component of any mission for human health and for these other things. And then, you know, changing the way that they approach this type of work. But I've seen all kinds of stuff that people are doing, right? Lynn Rothschild at NASA Ames was working on using mycelium, which is like the little hairs or the roots of mushrooms to make bricks so that you could build a Mars habitat.
the mycelium that'll grow on regolith and then you could make bricks using these living things. Like that's cool. You've got folks working on astropharmacies. Again, like how can I program a whole bunch of Bacillus subtilis or whatever saccharomyces to be a apothecary that you take with you in one teeny tiny little container, right? And you take it up and you have to shield it. So I think we'll see more. I would love to see more faster if it were up to me.
Polymath World (41:21.719)
Brilliant. I'd love to ask you what are you hoping for? Looking at the next five years, maybe 10, how do you hope things play out? In terms of what's possible and what's on the horizon, what are you hoping for?
Dr. Tiffany Vora (41:40.514)
Well, I am a 2033 girl. I really like that magic launch window for getting humans to Mars in 2033. That would be a phenomenally aggressive timeline. Remember that one of the things we have to distinguish between is surviving and thriving. So can we send humans to Mars? Yes. If we did it today, would it suck? Yes, it would suck a lot, right? That doesn't mean we can't do it. It just means that it's dangerous and expensive and, you know, who knows? That doesn't mean it's impossible.
Polymath World (41:57.344)
Yes.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (42:10.252)
I think a lot about the old Antarctic explorers, the polar explorers and how they did these things. So if I'm looking at the next 10 years, I want to see humans back on the moon and humans on Mars in the next 10 years. I think both are possible. I think some of that might rely on geopolitics. I don't know if you want to go down that rabbit hole, but there's stuff going on that's important and is really impacting what we're doing with space.
I would love to see commercial space also really growing its sets of products and services in the next 10 years and looking beyond Leo. We've got a pretty strong Leo economy today, but what's going on with CIS, what's going on with Mars? Those are much harder business cases, at least in the short term. But I think in 10 years, if we want to see a thriving Mars economy in 30 years, we have to have the building blocks in the next 10 years. And it is possible.
It's not easy, but it does require again investment and vision and these types of things. Those are the two big things that I think about when I think about the next five to 10 years. And then if you're thinking about biotech in particular, I think we're going to be seeing certainly, well, it's already happening. mean, by the end of 2026 for sure, we'll see the first fully synthetic never before seen on earth molecules.
drug candidates, things like that happening. I think we'll be able to have much more powerful computational models that will help us model whole cells and whole cell consortias in ways that'll be really, really important for these types of things. And I think we're probably also going to see in the next year or two, the first appearance in daily life of one of these completely novel biological products. So you mentioned CRISPR.
Probably people don't know they've been eating CRISPR yogurt for 10 years. It's just that the yogurt companies didn't tell you, right? Like you already knew about CRISPR. You just didn't know you knew, right? And so when we look at various applications like that, another one of my favorite ones, a friend of mine runs this company that makes a probiotic, which is a genetically engineered probiotic that you're supposed to drink before you drink alcohol so that you don't get a hangover.
Polymath World (44:00.951)
You
Dr. Tiffany Vora (44:24.65)
And when I first, yeah, it's called Z-biotics. But when I first met him, I was like, come on, man, like, can't people just not drink that last glass of wine? And he said, you don't understand what we're trying to do. He said, we are trying to change people's minds about GMOs by having GMOs solve a problem that they don't like, which is hangovers. And I was like, yeah, okay. Like, sure, that makes sense. And it's easy for me to lose sight of that because as a biologist,
Polymath World (44:24.908)
Well.
Polymath World (44:44.086)
Mm.
Brilliant.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (44:52.364)
I got no problems with GMOs, right? Like hit me, I'm ready. But for marketing reasons and cultural reasons and stories that we tell ourselves, there are parts of the world, you're living in one of them, that is really got this hang up about GMOs. And between climate and space and these innovation spaces opening, I think we really need to change our stories that we're telling. Stories that are not backed by evidence. We need to really think about those things.
Polymath World (45:15.617)
him.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (45:20.642)
So I would love to see that as well. just one more thing, in the next 10 years, I would really love to see synthetic biology solve a problem that hits at both sustainability on Earth and sustainability elsewhere. And fortunately to me, those are the same problems. And so I think it'll be a carbon dioxide thing in a big way. And I think we'll actually see that.
Polymath World (45:45.235)
So exciting. I think we could talk all day about this. You know, I very much feel the same as you do on everything here. mean, apart from the space science, the thing I'm involved in personally that I'm most passionate about is genomic medicine. And I feel like genomic medicine is destined to be the future. If you want personalized, precision medicine and predictive medicine even, genomic medicine is the future.
But it's got to be the future in space. mean, surgery is not easy in space and then we have a lot of problems there. So the more we can do less invasive stuff, the better. And the key to that seems to be synthetic biology.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (46:27.244)
And if you want to push that even further, kind of as our closing thought, if you're talking about people living permanently off earth, remember we evolved for our gorgeous planet. We didn't evolve for Mars conditions. I'm surprised you didn't ask me about space babies. People always want to talk about space babies. But like, if you're talking about having a self-sustaining civilization on Mars, people are going to have to be produced there. And our earth bodies are not fit for purpose for that. So there are.
people who believe that it's actually a moral imperative to genetically engineer humans to be better suited for Mars, because otherwise you're just sending them somewhere to suffer, right? And that's morally questionable. And so I'm not gonna state an opinion on that, but we've got the tools and we've got the problem. The question is, how do you do this in a way that is responsible? Did you ever read that great Neil Stevenson book, Seven Eaves?
Polymath World (47:07.713)
Yeah.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (47:25.966)
You know
Polymath World (47:26.039)
No, but we have had Martin Rees on this channel and he's been a big advocate for CRISPR astronauts basically in the future.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (47:30.264)
Cool. Yeah.
Yes. so Seven Eaves, spoiler alert, the moon explodes on the first page of the book. It never explains why. One of the people who survives, fortunately, is the genetic engineer. And that is key to what happens later in the book. And the other one I would remind people of is Gattaca, that great movie from 1997 with Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. It's still, in my opinion, one of the best science fiction treatments of this question of genetically engineering or crispering humans.
whether permanently or in a patch system. And it's a fun old movie to check out.
Polymath World (48:10.249)
Yeah it is, it's something of a legend in the genetics community. If people want to find out more about you and your work, where should they go?
Dr. Tiffany Vora (48:18.008)
Come on over to TiffanyVorah.com. You'll find all of my articles and podcasts and videos all in one place. You can check out my YouTube channel where we've got a whole bunch of longer videos as well as little shorts that we put together. And please come check out my sub stack. It's called Be Voracious. I'm actually doing an Ask Me Anything session. I do them every couple of months. I've got one coming up tomorrow. But I have a variety of newsletters and activities and things like that that with my sub stack will come straight to your inbox.
And I would love to hear from you. That's a great way to stay in touch.
Polymath World (48:50.209)
Yeah, awesome. Always exciting. I'd love to finally ask you what advice you would give any young people watching this who are thinking, wow, know, that's the future I want to get into. Biology and space and where they intersect. What advice would you give them?
Dr. Tiffany Vora (49:06.902)
Okay, so a couple of things. The first is talk to people in the field. If you are a student, a unbelievably busy professor will put everything down in order to talk to you, right? I do it too. Like it's really important to us. So check out your local areas. Are there space meetups? Are there bio meetups? Is there a biotech makerspace near you that you can go hang out at? Are there lectures in the evenings at your local school, your university that you can go to? Just show up.
If you show up curious, you will be allowed in the door. Like that's the deal and it's so fantastic. That's number one. The second thing I would encourage you to do is not think that there is a single path in order to engage with this as a career. Whatever it is that I do today, I did not know that that was a job when I was 18. I had no idea. I was trained to do one thing, which was to be a university professor. And I was for some time and then I stopped. And it turns out there are these whole other paths.
that are open to you that you just don't know about. So I would advise you to hold your plans lightly and to be open to saying yes to interesting people and interesting opportunities, even if you're not quite sure, especially when you're young and you have a little more flexibility with some risk taking. Try to meet interesting people doing interesting things. They'll wanna talk to you too if you're interested.
Polymath World (50:30.079)
That's fantastic advice. It's been so wonderful talking to you. I could talk to you all day. I'm so delighted to have you on the show and thank you so much for coming and being with me today.
Dr. Tiffany Vora (50:39.64)
Thank you so much. Looking forward to our next chance to talk.