1 00:00:07,510 --> 00:00:11,260 Good evening and a warm welcome to the Oxford Martin School. 2 00:00:11,260 --> 00:00:18,050 I'm obviously delighted this evening to welcome Sonia Kontagora here. 3 00:00:18,050 --> 00:00:21,790 Sonia, OK, turn that one off. 4 00:00:21,790 --> 00:00:28,780 Thank you. This is being webcast and recorded, so let's just hear Sonia rather than someone else. 5 00:00:28,780 --> 00:00:40,510 And we are delighted to welcome Sonia Concerto, who's been associated with the Oxford Martin School since 2008, when I was the director. 6 00:00:40,510 --> 00:00:48,550 We created a programme on nanomedicine with Sonia and another Sonia, Sonia Garrus, 7 00:00:48,550 --> 00:00:57,530 and illustrative of the fact that the Oxford Martin School works on absolutely tiny issues in terms of size, 8 00:00:57,530 --> 00:01:02,560 not importance, like Nano and Sonia will describe just how tiny they are. 9 00:01:02,560 --> 00:01:14,800 The nanoparticles and those which are in scale are universal like cosmology, and that is indicative of the breadth and depth of what we do. 10 00:01:14,800 --> 00:01:20,500 But all the issues are of huge relevance to the future of humanity, 11 00:01:20,500 --> 00:01:31,240 and certainly I've become convinced that nano and I know medicine that Sonia works on is one such issue. 12 00:01:31,240 --> 00:01:37,870 Sonia has been absolutely pioneering in this. She's an associate professor of biological physics. 13 00:01:37,870 --> 00:01:44,410 Should explain to you what that is. In the university and creates the lab, 14 00:01:44,410 --> 00:01:54,880 which when I was fortunate enough to go to visit it in so nano through a forced atomic microscope blew my mind and I'm sure she will. 15 00:01:54,880 --> 00:02:02,830 All of you. She's here this evening to launch her new book, Nano Comes to Life, published by Princeton University Press. 16 00:02:02,830 --> 00:02:06,850 And we're delighted also that she'll be able to sign copies of the book afterwards, 17 00:02:06,850 --> 00:02:12,460 which are for sale and have a drink with anyone that's interested in the back. 18 00:02:12,460 --> 00:02:28,080 So thanks to you for coming, and particularly thanks to Sonia for giving us this opportunity to hear going to comes to life. 19 00:02:28,080 --> 00:02:31,260 Thank you, John. As I say in the acknowledgements of the book, 20 00:02:31,260 --> 00:02:38,670 I think the origins of the book actually comes from the ideas I got working for the Oxford Martin School and the opportunities that they 21 00:02:38,670 --> 00:02:47,940 gave me many years ago to engage with the public and with the wider audiences that were interested in the science I was developing. 22 00:02:47,940 --> 00:02:53,290 And I could have not, I think, come to this book without having been a member of the last day of school before. 23 00:02:53,290 --> 00:03:00,840 So let's start with this picture. For many of you, biology had a lot of the biology that you come in. 24 00:03:00,840 --> 00:03:09,780 The press looks like something like that, or at least a promise that the press and the media show about biology at the moment. 25 00:03:09,780 --> 00:03:19,530 We have a more or less male hand manipulating our DNA and linking bits of DNA, which I suspect they it looks like a base, 26 00:03:19,530 --> 00:03:26,550 but for these pictures, like a gene to our intelligence and the colour of our eyes. 27 00:03:26,550 --> 00:03:34,380 This picture has no scientific foundation, and the history when we arrive to this place is important for this story. 28 00:03:34,380 --> 00:03:45,510 I'm going to tell you today. So for most of the 17th century, 18th century, 19th century and 20th century science, especially physics, 29 00:03:45,510 --> 00:03:51,510 and I was interested in looking at the constituents of matter what matter was made of. 30 00:03:51,510 --> 00:03:53,550 And the microscope was invented. 31 00:03:53,550 --> 00:04:02,910 Importantly, Robert Hooke here in Oxford was one of the pioneers of microscopy was the first one to determine that Living Matter was made of cells. 32 00:04:02,910 --> 00:04:06,780 And he called himself because reminded them of the places of the little cells 33 00:04:06,780 --> 00:04:12,780 within with the monks used to live in in the plants used to live in complex. 34 00:04:12,780 --> 00:04:21,330 That's where cells are called cells. Now the story continues of people looking into the constituents of biological marker. 35 00:04:21,330 --> 00:04:27,810 We've always been obsessed with ourselves and what we are made of, and how can we use that for medicine? 36 00:04:27,810 --> 00:04:34,710 We want to cure ourselves for technology and, of course, for our social and political purposes. 37 00:04:34,710 --> 00:04:45,990 All this information is very complex. So we are right in the 1950s to the point where the molecules that make life finally become visible to humans. 38 00:04:45,990 --> 00:04:55,740 So for most of the 20th century, the only way you can say you can see the constituents of biological systems were through X-ray diffraction. 39 00:04:55,740 --> 00:05:00,210 So we are made of proteins of DNA and other biomolecules, 40 00:05:00,210 --> 00:05:12,750 and these proteins and DNA and molecules are made of their nano size, and you can see that with an optical microscope at all. 41 00:05:12,750 --> 00:05:21,330 The only way you can see this is by because the light doesn't allow you to see things below 300 nanometres. 42 00:05:21,330 --> 00:05:30,510 So X-ray diffraction is about throw in x rays to crystals of molecules and then by the diffraction of the light that comes from the other side, 43 00:05:30,510 --> 00:05:35,610 you can reconstruct the shape of the molecule. The most famous example is DNA. 44 00:05:35,610 --> 00:05:43,080 And of course, you'll have heard probably of Watson and Crick, who got the Nobel prise for determining the structure of DNA out of the diffraction 45 00:05:43,080 --> 00:05:49,740 patterns of the DNA that experiments that Rosalind Franklin were doing at King's College. 46 00:05:49,740 --> 00:05:59,340 This is a very complicated story of science politics in which she did this fragments with a student with a samples coming from Switzerland, 47 00:05:59,340 --> 00:06:07,320 from the DNA of the sweetbreads of Swiss skulls. But the Nobel prise were given back to the guys that actually didn't do the experiments, 48 00:06:07,320 --> 00:06:11,940 but arrived to the lab and got the information and eventually came to the double helix. 49 00:06:11,940 --> 00:06:18,570 So this is one of the most studied complex stories of gender politics in science, actually, 50 00:06:18,570 --> 00:06:25,080 because she she didn't get the Nobel prise and she actually died because of the cancer that was produced because of experiments. 51 00:06:25,080 --> 00:06:30,420 So the 1950s was all about getting crystal structures like this, 52 00:06:30,420 --> 00:06:40,770 one of proteins that were increasingly important to try to construct a picture, to try to understand what were the structures that make life. 53 00:06:40,770 --> 00:06:48,240 This is the reason why we have now. Synchrotron is actually near Oxford because this single dose can produce very powerful X-rays, 54 00:06:48,240 --> 00:06:54,000 and we can get information and structure information about proteins in crystals that very small. 55 00:06:54,000 --> 00:07:01,050 The problem with this approach is that the way you study your proteins for the constituents of matter are not in the living environment. 56 00:07:01,050 --> 00:07:09,750 To extract them, you make crystal and then you make these structures and all these together with genetics and the way we do science 57 00:07:09,750 --> 00:07:18,420 in the 20th century has produced a picture of biology in which you have many little bits that are interconnected, 58 00:07:18,420 --> 00:07:22,800 and we have absolutely no rationale to understand all this. 59 00:07:22,800 --> 00:07:26,790 This has promoted an idea of biology that tells. 60 00:07:26,790 --> 00:07:32,130 You that you have DNA from DNA. You produce protein. 61 00:07:32,130 --> 00:07:39,240 And the most simple interpretation you can do of DNA of biology is like, I've tried to understand DNA from DNA. 62 00:07:39,240 --> 00:07:42,900 You understand everything you need to know about biology. 63 00:07:42,900 --> 00:07:50,010 So our body also says the theory you have DNA and then the proteins would read it in agree, create more proteins. 64 00:07:50,010 --> 00:07:53,910 And then we are billed by the information that is inside our genes. 65 00:07:53,910 --> 00:08:01,590 And there's nothing we can do about it. So this is this composes a landscape with many other sciences in the 20th century, 66 00:08:01,590 --> 00:08:06,030 which is called a reduction in vision of the world in which we look at the world by the 67 00:08:06,030 --> 00:08:12,240 building blocks is DNA and DNA makes proteins and the interactions of the proteins makes us. 68 00:08:12,240 --> 00:08:20,130 And if we could know more or less how these things interact with each other, we could we could create or understand how we work. 69 00:08:20,130 --> 00:08:24,600 This has been also the basis of the development of technology in the 20th century. 70 00:08:24,600 --> 00:08:27,480 We will look at atoms and interactions between atoms, 71 00:08:27,480 --> 00:08:34,890 so we will create technologies based on this idea that if you look into the world, you will find bits. 72 00:08:34,890 --> 00:08:41,400 And by the interactions of the beat, you come up with ideas that you can start fabricating transistors or medicine in medicine. 73 00:08:41,400 --> 00:08:46,470 This means that most of the efforts of medicine in the 20th century was to create 74 00:08:46,470 --> 00:08:52,500 drugs that didn't bind proteins of DNA to block the process from happening. 75 00:08:52,500 --> 00:08:56,430 So if you have a disease is because there's some protein went wrong, 76 00:08:56,430 --> 00:09:00,420 and the reason what it went wrong is because some of your genes is not functioning the way it would. 77 00:09:00,420 --> 00:09:06,780 So it's a linear chain in which if you stop either the protein of the DNA, you will stop the disease. 78 00:09:06,780 --> 00:09:09,630 This was also very interesting for many political agendas, 79 00:09:09,630 --> 00:09:15,900 especially during colonialism that use DNA and Darwinism to say there are some people better than others, 80 00:09:15,900 --> 00:09:21,210 and we could classify people by their genetics and know who is better and who is worse. 81 00:09:21,210 --> 00:09:22,950 So in the 20th century, 82 00:09:22,950 --> 00:09:32,310 really the idea that everything was building blocks and that we could interact with building blocks and produce of our technology was the dominant. 83 00:09:32,310 --> 00:09:40,560 The problem with that is that pharmaceutical companies were reaching a point where they were not and still now developing new drugs. 84 00:09:40,560 --> 00:09:43,890 The drugs they developed are not always effective. 85 00:09:43,890 --> 00:09:51,540 The reason for this is that, for example, when you have cancer and you find your chemotherapy for drug, the drug may or may not reach the tumour. 86 00:09:51,540 --> 00:09:58,170 And when it reached the tumour, the cells deals with this drug. Initially, you kill the cells, but other cells would evolve. 87 00:09:58,170 --> 00:10:02,340 And after a few months, their cells become resistant to your drug. 88 00:10:02,340 --> 00:10:08,100 So biology doesn't actually on nature, doesn't actually work in a reductionist way. 89 00:10:08,100 --> 00:10:12,150 And we know that we are able all our building blocks when they come together. 90 00:10:12,150 --> 00:10:18,390 They create very complex beings. We are able to think we are always we are able to to feel. 91 00:10:18,390 --> 00:10:25,260 So things have started to change. And this is the beginning of nanotechnology in the nineteen eighties, 92 00:10:25,260 --> 00:10:33,960 when the first instruments that would allow to see matter at the nanometre scale atoms one by one or matter at the nanometre scale up here. 93 00:10:33,960 --> 00:10:40,410 So these are images of this kind of internally microscope when you see here is the surface of copper. 94 00:10:40,410 --> 00:10:46,080 And when you see, here are the atoms of our atoms of iron sitting on top. 95 00:10:46,080 --> 00:10:49,080 So these microscopes allow you to see atoms one by one. 96 00:10:49,080 --> 00:10:53,670 And what this guy did, Don Adler and IBM was to learn how to pick up with this kind of tunnelling, 97 00:10:53,670 --> 00:10:58,440 microscope these atoms and arrange them in a circle. 98 00:10:58,440 --> 00:11:03,480 This is the first time humans are able to build anything atoms one by one. 99 00:11:03,480 --> 00:11:11,040 And what you see in the middle is a ripple is because the electrons are in the metal and they run freely here. 100 00:11:11,040 --> 00:11:14,970 They can run freely inside the quantum corral, as he called it. 101 00:11:14,970 --> 00:11:20,910 They form a ripple, which is a visualisation of the quantum mechanics. 102 00:11:20,910 --> 00:11:29,280 Particles behave as waves as well as particles. And another thing you see here is that the reductionism I tell you before most of the 20th 103 00:11:29,280 --> 00:11:34,680 century where people wanted to do with technology was to build things using building blocks. 104 00:11:34,680 --> 00:11:38,400 But you also see that nature is reacting in a complicated way. 105 00:11:38,400 --> 00:11:42,870 Nature doesn't produce single atoms. Moving around produces a wave. 106 00:11:42,870 --> 00:11:52,470 This is what we call an emergent phenomena. So in nature, the interactions of building blocks don't give rise to more building blocks like Lego. 107 00:11:52,470 --> 00:11:58,500 They can build really complex behaviours, and life is one such complex behaviour. 108 00:11:58,500 --> 00:12:03,840 So using these techniques, which is a part of I'm one of the most improved microscopes. 109 00:12:03,840 --> 00:12:10,050 We started to become interested not only in studying atoms and nanomachines made of metals, 110 00:12:10,050 --> 00:12:18,030 but we started to become interested in how nature created the best nano machines that we know of proteins. 111 00:12:18,030 --> 00:12:23,130 So by the 1980s, we had a starting to get information from crystal structures. 112 00:12:23,130 --> 00:12:31,870 The proteins will have very complex. It is a structures that let people think that they will also work off nanomachines. 113 00:12:31,870 --> 00:12:41,200 The breakthroughs again and started to come in in the 1980s, where people started to see how our proteins were not just doing chemistry. 114 00:12:41,200 --> 00:12:47,050 You know, we have this vision of biology, which proteins just bind to chemicals and produce chemical reactions. 115 00:12:47,050 --> 00:12:51,670 But actually, these chemical reactions were catalysed or driven by nanomachines. 116 00:12:51,670 --> 00:12:56,680 This is perhaps the most beautiful, one of the most beautiful nanomachines. This is the 80 percent base. 117 00:12:56,680 --> 00:13:01,900 You have kg of those in your body because they are responsible of produce ATP, 118 00:13:01,900 --> 00:13:06,730 a molecule that turns around and that we need for all our chemical reactions. 119 00:13:06,730 --> 00:13:14,050 So ATP is not producing in the body like in a in a test you would do is produced by 120 00:13:14,050 --> 00:13:20,620 this nano machine is a tiny thing that sits in its membranes of your mitochondria. 121 00:13:20,620 --> 00:13:26,440 Sucks protons, the protons move. This makes it rotate and that moves the top. 122 00:13:26,440 --> 00:13:33,190 So when the top moves, binds ATP and is able to churn proteins, why is that? 123 00:13:33,190 --> 00:13:39,790 Because at the nano scale, you're so small that when you bind a molecule, you bind it. 124 00:13:39,790 --> 00:13:44,710 You stretch it. When you move, you stretch it so you make the electrons jump. 125 00:13:44,710 --> 00:13:54,790 So the key to biology at the nanoscale is that you couple mechanics with chemistry, an electrostatic to produce maximum efficiency. 126 00:13:54,790 --> 00:13:59,950 So doing this like this, you produce ATP in kilograms 60 kilograms a day in your body. 127 00:13:59,950 --> 00:14:02,110 Not if you were going to do it in this bucket. 128 00:14:02,110 --> 00:14:08,800 It would take you a really long time, but you do it constantly because you are able to use mechanics to churn out. 129 00:14:08,800 --> 00:14:15,460 This was discovered by Duke Energy, who was the first one who ever proved that this thing rotates. 130 00:14:15,460 --> 00:14:21,280 The atomic force microscopes that I use allows us for the first time to see 131 00:14:21,280 --> 00:14:26,560 proteins of proteins sitting in your membranes one by one or DNA like here, 132 00:14:26,560 --> 00:14:34,870 which is not the beautiful molecule that comes from X-ray diffraction, but a complex tangle very twisted, full of energy, full of mechanical energy. 133 00:14:34,870 --> 00:14:40,960 And that mechanical energy is the one that allows it to interact with the outside world and with proteins around it. 134 00:14:40,960 --> 00:14:46,510 And indeed, our microscopes allow us to see proteins moving in real time. 135 00:14:46,510 --> 00:14:51,280 These are microscopes that I'm showing you the movement of our molecular motors. 136 00:14:51,280 --> 00:14:54,460 Let me show you this one here. This is myosin. 137 00:14:54,460 --> 00:15:03,760 Myosin is another protein that is in every living system, and it sits in your cells in acting filaments, some proteins that act like track. 138 00:15:03,760 --> 00:15:08,020 The cell is so crowded that it cannot just rely on things moving around. 139 00:15:08,020 --> 00:15:14,530 So this thing that is able to walk on the track, move things around your cell. 140 00:15:14,530 --> 00:15:19,240 The reason why biology works and this is one of the questions we were starting to do 141 00:15:19,240 --> 00:15:26,080 with our microscopes are such efficiency is because it couples in its structure, 142 00:15:26,080 --> 00:15:33,610 the capacity to produce function so that one of the main things I tell in my book is that there's a moment 143 00:15:33,610 --> 00:15:39,940 where nanotechnology is really start to change biology just when we start to see molecules like this. 144 00:15:39,940 --> 00:15:43,990 So the people that took these movies were mainly physicists and engineers. 145 00:15:43,990 --> 00:15:47,470 And what they care, we're not interested in these maps of the biology. 146 00:15:47,470 --> 00:15:54,610 So the DNA of the interaction between molecules that we're interested in, why I'm how can you create something like that? 147 00:15:54,610 --> 00:15:58,840 Why evolution chose this as structures to create our lives? 148 00:15:58,840 --> 00:16:03,370 And how does this work? So they had an engineering thinking about this. 149 00:16:03,370 --> 00:16:11,050 The reason that this work is because when you're so small, you're a nanoscale, you feel the water around you. 150 00:16:11,050 --> 00:16:13,930 So in the water, around you hits you. 151 00:16:13,930 --> 00:16:22,660 You are able to use it a bit like a windmill when when the wind goes around the world just due to your mechanical structure to produce a movement. 152 00:16:22,660 --> 00:16:30,670 So biological molecules are able to use just water and temperature to produce movement and catalyse chemical reactions. 153 00:16:30,670 --> 00:16:38,860 So this was the beginning of bio nanotech, in my opinion. And then other people like Eric Dressler, who was not associated also to the to the school, 154 00:16:38,860 --> 00:16:43,600 were important in this story because they started to create the narratives of nanotechnology. 155 00:16:43,600 --> 00:16:52,030 He created a very influential book, Engines of Creation, where he previously predicted the things we're actually doing now in the lab. 156 00:16:52,030 --> 00:16:59,860 And at the same time, chemists and materials scientists were starting to be able to create artificial structures with DNA. 157 00:16:59,860 --> 00:17:05,440 So in the 1998 80s, we have, on the one hand, the physicist coming with the tools to understand biology, 158 00:17:05,440 --> 00:17:10,360 to see why biology built itself on the nanoscale chemists and major scientists, 159 00:17:10,360 --> 00:17:15,130 building nanomaterials and a confluence of all this sort of science is trying to 160 00:17:15,130 --> 00:17:20,230 understand why biology happens on the nanoscale and how can we deal with it. 161 00:17:20,230 --> 00:17:27,850 So one of the first things nanotechnology did was, OK, now we can reach the nanoscale. 162 00:17:27,850 --> 00:17:36,970 How can we use this to improve medicine? So the first attempts of nanomedicine were about bringing drugs better to tumours? 163 00:17:36,970 --> 00:17:44,770 So when you have a tumour, you need to put very high concentrations of drugs in order for the drugs to be effective, killing the tumour. 164 00:17:44,770 --> 00:17:51,970 The reason is because the drugs, the reasons why we have such big side effects is because in order to the drugs to retain enough concentration, 165 00:17:51,970 --> 00:17:55,900 the tumour, you need to raise the concentration so much that it actually kills you. 166 00:17:55,900 --> 00:18:05,080 So actually, it was a Japanese scientist who discovered also just before the 1990s that nanoparticles had structures with accumulate in tumours. 167 00:18:05,080 --> 00:18:11,650 So everybody thought the reason for that is because tumours, when they grow, they form this veins around them to feed themselves. 168 00:18:11,650 --> 00:18:18,520 And these veins have a lot of holes. They are not perfect, and things like nanoparticles can go through them and accumulate. 169 00:18:18,520 --> 00:18:25,810 So people have spent the last 30 years building nanoparticles to reach tumours and try to kill them. 170 00:18:25,810 --> 00:18:30,070 There are many ways of trying to do this. They put chemicals on the nanoparticles. 171 00:18:30,070 --> 00:18:38,140 They put magnetic properties in the nanoparticles. So then you can use the magnetic field to heat them up and then kill the tumour by hitting it up. 172 00:18:38,140 --> 00:18:40,660 Others are able to absorb light. 173 00:18:40,660 --> 00:18:51,010 The problem with all of this effort is that it relied pretty much in finding the tumour in an in a non non various specific way. 174 00:18:51,010 --> 00:18:58,060 There was no mathematical modelling, there was no thinking it was just trying to find a magic bullet that would kill the tumour. 175 00:18:58,060 --> 00:19:03,100 Very few nanoparticles have been approved for use in medicine. 176 00:19:03,100 --> 00:19:08,530 Very, very few. And the field is got stuck mainly because of the same reasons. 177 00:19:08,530 --> 00:19:11,080 The pharmacology has got a stuck. 178 00:19:11,080 --> 00:19:18,820 They were trying to kill or reach the targets without thinking very much without taking into account the complexity of biology. 179 00:19:18,820 --> 00:19:26,890 And so far, although they are very good with mice in the lab or with cell cultures, they haven't reached the promise they produce. 180 00:19:26,890 --> 00:19:35,680 One of the main problem is that the body is very good at clearing nanoparticles so your kidneys and your liver get rid of them. 181 00:19:35,680 --> 00:19:43,750 That's why they're there for. Because we also evolve with nanoparticles, so so far we need to think harder. 182 00:19:43,750 --> 00:19:45,700 And the good news on this, I would tell you later, 183 00:19:45,700 --> 00:19:53,770 is that people are starting to think harder and collaborate more with mathematicians and computer scientists to get this work to work better. 184 00:19:53,770 --> 00:20:02,530 Biosensing was another film that had a lot of promise. The idea that you could have a little paper strip with some electric or chemical detection 185 00:20:02,530 --> 00:20:06,520 and you would just put a drop of blood and you will know everything you have in your blood. 186 00:20:06,520 --> 00:20:15,550 This also have faith because again, people were trying to overstep the complications of biology, as you probably know for the story of Theranos. 187 00:20:15,550 --> 00:20:21,040 Even we have a movie of Theranos. People were thinking that this could be a problem that could be solved. 188 00:20:21,040 --> 00:20:26,260 It has not been so easy to solve. Good news art is that there's a lot of progress. 189 00:20:26,260 --> 00:20:33,430 Last week, I heard I think a Japanese company, Hitachi, announced for the first time a device which is relatively big and complicated, 190 00:20:33,430 --> 00:20:41,410 but would allow you to test a lot of molecules detecting a lot of tumours in blood, in a single, in a single chip. 191 00:20:41,410 --> 00:20:47,200 So things are getting there, but definitely they were not as simple as they were predicted. 192 00:20:47,200 --> 00:20:51,250 Again, Koreans think Korean University's collaboration. 193 00:20:51,250 --> 00:20:56,440 I think it was something they're also developing patches that would be able to sit on your skin and, 194 00:20:56,440 --> 00:21:01,750 for example, detect the levels of glucose and release insulin whenever you need it. 195 00:21:01,750 --> 00:21:10,780 These things are starting to happen. So the promises that nanotechnology did 20 years ago, 30 years ago are only now starting to happen. 196 00:21:10,780 --> 00:21:16,060 In the meantime, people were trying to do something else. 197 00:21:16,060 --> 00:21:23,980 So once we cut access to see DNA at the nano scale, there was a guy in New York met Simon, 198 00:21:23,980 --> 00:21:29,710 who saw who was actually going to lose his tenure because he was not getting any good results. 199 00:21:29,710 --> 00:21:33,670 And he thought, OK, I'm trying to get crystal structures of DNA and information. 200 00:21:33,670 --> 00:21:39,460 I can't do it. But he started to think of DNA as a building block. 201 00:21:39,460 --> 00:21:46,360 Actually, he says that he saw this picture, but it was actually his half brother was a crystallography, 202 00:21:46,360 --> 00:21:54,190 and that's why he was creating these pictures that look like crystals. And his so he saw this sort of robotic fish before tales. 203 00:21:54,190 --> 00:21:57,010 And he thought. And they match with each other. 204 00:21:57,010 --> 00:22:07,600 Perhaps I could build something with DNA like that that much like perfectly, another bit of DNA like that and I could create a structures. 205 00:22:07,600 --> 00:22:15,220 He started a field called US. DNA technology was interest is on building any structure with DNA. 206 00:22:15,220 --> 00:22:19,450 But in this case, DNA doesn't have any genetic interest. 207 00:22:19,450 --> 00:22:25,090 All they have is a building block, like a building block like Legos. 208 00:22:25,090 --> 00:22:32,770 The field of DNA now. As I say in the book became visible when DNA origami was invented because there 209 00:22:32,770 --> 00:22:38,890 was a guy in Caltech who found that you could get any string of DNA from a virus, 210 00:22:38,890 --> 00:22:47,350 create staples in the computer and get your initial string to fold in literally any shape you wanted. 211 00:22:47,350 --> 00:22:54,490 This was one of the initial dreams of nanotechnology create self-assembly structures that you could design in a computer. 212 00:22:54,490 --> 00:23:02,620 These days, people do 3-D structures of all sorts of shapes with DNA cubes, little teddy bears. 213 00:23:02,620 --> 00:23:07,090 These are real things that people do. So nanotechnology is becoming an established field. 214 00:23:07,090 --> 00:23:11,770 DNA nanotechnology in which people are able to build all sorts of structure. 215 00:23:11,770 --> 00:23:16,150 Now the main problem DNA technology is what do we do with these structures? 216 00:23:16,150 --> 00:23:21,730 They're very nice and they're very small, but it's difficult to use them in any practical application. 217 00:23:21,730 --> 00:23:28,270 Again, there'd been thought as useful material for DNA nanomedicine. 218 00:23:28,270 --> 00:23:30,730 This is one of my contributions to the field. 219 00:23:30,730 --> 00:23:37,760 I work with this Japanese scientist to make this DNA handles that could assemble on cells and other ideas that may have some. 220 00:23:37,760 --> 00:23:42,040 This handles to pull from the cells, but it's very unclear how we can do that. 221 00:23:42,040 --> 00:23:47,770 And feet in Oxford and other people have managed to make something very interesting with DNA, 222 00:23:47,770 --> 00:23:52,900 which is to make DNA as a truck where you can assemble drugs. 223 00:23:52,900 --> 00:23:59,320 One of the main problems of drug development and pharmacology is not only that when you have a drug, you don't reach the target. 224 00:23:59,320 --> 00:24:00,760 And even if you reach the target, 225 00:24:00,760 --> 00:24:07,630 the cells get rid of it is that is very difficult to produce new drugs because there's limits to synthetic chemistry. 226 00:24:07,630 --> 00:24:13,390 So what these guys do is to use DNA a little bit like the molecules I were showing you before. 227 00:24:13,390 --> 00:24:18,610 To grab untwist molecules so they can produce chemistry in an easier way is coming. 228 00:24:18,610 --> 00:24:20,690 Finally, to the general press. 229 00:24:20,690 --> 00:24:30,480 To my surprise, last week in the Times, people were talking about DNA technology and they mentioned my book, and it's maybe even happier. 230 00:24:30,480 --> 00:24:36,430 Maybe that's why I saw this. But it was nice to see that for the first time. 231 00:24:36,430 --> 00:24:44,050 The press is looking at DNA. In this case, it was reporting a beautiful results of people that were trying to bind viruses, 232 00:24:44,050 --> 00:24:51,730 not just by making a single molecule, but by making a very complex, a star shaped molecule that would just really grab viruses. 233 00:24:51,730 --> 00:24:55,750 What I thought was beautiful about this idea is that our body does that. 234 00:24:55,750 --> 00:25:04,150 Our body not only uses DNA as genetic material. Our body actually your immune cells when you have a sepsis or a very big infection. 235 00:25:04,150 --> 00:25:11,440 This blow themselves. So they create networks of DNA in your blood vessels and they contract the bacteria. 236 00:25:11,440 --> 00:25:19,330 So in a way, we are discovering something. That evolution, of course, has covered many, many, many millions of years before us. 237 00:25:19,330 --> 00:25:25,900 The DNA is not only a genetic material, but it's also a structural material. 238 00:25:25,900 --> 00:25:30,040 Other people are trying to do the same thing with proteins. 239 00:25:30,040 --> 00:25:38,200 So this is a much more powerful way of doing nanotechnology because you can literally create any shape out of the protein. 240 00:25:38,200 --> 00:25:48,460 And this is already a different game. DNA, nanomedicine, the still in this reductionist approach, I told you at the beginning building blocks. 241 00:25:48,460 --> 00:25:52,630 Simple ideas targeting single molecules. 242 00:25:52,630 --> 00:25:56,200 But in the case of a protein nanotechnology, things are different. 243 00:25:56,200 --> 00:26:02,950 A little bit different. For many years, people were dreaming of having a computer programme that would be able to 244 00:26:02,950 --> 00:26:08,350 predict the shape of the proteins once you know the gene where it comes from. 245 00:26:08,350 --> 00:26:10,330 This have been impossible. 246 00:26:10,330 --> 00:26:16,330 It's thought it was an impossible problem because proteins have very complex structures and computers don't have enough power. 247 00:26:16,330 --> 00:26:19,870 Or so they thought it was just a question of power. 248 00:26:19,870 --> 00:26:26,500 So these guys have started to do a lot of crowdsourcing, getting the computers of many people, computers all over the world. 249 00:26:26,500 --> 00:26:34,690 It's actually a beautiful programme, the process of project to try to compute the protein, the structures, and eventually they succeeded. 250 00:26:34,690 --> 00:26:42,640 They have a competition. And for the first time ever, they the people that we're competing, we're giving the sequence of genes. 251 00:26:42,640 --> 00:26:46,960 And one group, David Baker's Group, came up with a correct the structure. 252 00:26:46,960 --> 00:26:50,530 The reason they have a programme that will predict the correct structure is not 253 00:26:50,530 --> 00:26:54,540 because they have better computer programmes and better physics in the programme. 254 00:26:54,540 --> 00:26:59,770 They have something different. They have encoded in the programme evolution, 255 00:26:59,770 --> 00:27:07,120 and this is something that I think it has never been done before to create a new structure or understand a new structure. 256 00:27:07,120 --> 00:27:13,300 If you don't only go with brute force with physics, in the case of very complex biological structure, 257 00:27:13,300 --> 00:27:18,820 you need to take into account the evolution, the genetic history of where things come from. 258 00:27:18,820 --> 00:27:26,050 This changes the game, the conceptual game. We're not trying anymore by brute force. 259 00:27:26,050 --> 00:27:34,710 You get building blocks and see how they assemble together. We're taking into our calculation the evolutionary history of the Earth. 260 00:27:34,710 --> 00:27:41,160 We've taken was starting to embed in our thinking emergence, which I find very beautiful. 261 00:27:41,160 --> 00:27:48,060 And of course, once you be able to create it, start predicting proteins in your computer. 262 00:27:48,060 --> 00:27:52,260 The first thing that people thought is, but now we can design proteins. 263 00:27:52,260 --> 00:27:57,300 So they went to the computer designing proteins that don't exist in nature. 264 00:27:57,300 --> 00:28:06,870 And then they created a gene to encode for the protein, and they put it back in yeast or a bacterium to use the bacterium to create your protein. 265 00:28:06,870 --> 00:28:15,180 And they succeeded. They succeeded in very robust proteins, but they manage, again, a very different way of fabricating. 266 00:28:15,180 --> 00:28:20,520 This is not like DNA. Nanotechnology is not building blocks on physics coming together. 267 00:28:20,520 --> 00:28:25,830 What you're doing here is to use the building power of nature using a cell. 268 00:28:25,830 --> 00:28:34,260 We don't know how the cell does it. And we don't care. But we can use the power of the cell to create atomically precise materials. 269 00:28:34,260 --> 00:28:38,250 And I think this is the biggest game changer that is happening in science right now. 270 00:28:38,250 --> 00:28:39,630 And I will give you a few examples. 271 00:28:39,630 --> 00:28:47,550 In other sciences, we are moving away from building blocks and physics, and we're trying to take into account complexity, 272 00:28:47,550 --> 00:28:52,950 the complexity of our evolutionary history and also the complexity of the living world 273 00:28:52,950 --> 00:28:58,470 around us to create new ways of doing technology and indeed new ways of doing computation. 274 00:28:58,470 --> 00:29:04,830 Another wonderful thing this group did was to create a virus out of proteins that don't exist in nature. 275 00:29:04,830 --> 00:29:08,400 So they create proteins are like the proteins of a virus, 276 00:29:08,400 --> 00:29:15,210 and then they put RNA that encodes for that protein and they let it assemble and they put it in a cell culture. 277 00:29:15,210 --> 00:29:18,660 It assemble in the cell culture and it started evolving. 278 00:29:18,660 --> 00:29:27,210 So that means by using the building principle of nature, you kind of start creating technology that evolves with time. 279 00:29:27,210 --> 00:29:31,110 This is again a very different way of thinking of technology. 280 00:29:31,110 --> 00:29:38,940 In the meantime, biological physicists like me were starting to think deeper about the nanoscale and the origin of life, 281 00:29:38,940 --> 00:29:45,000 and not only the origin of life as a physics, classic physics movement structure. 282 00:29:45,000 --> 00:29:53,190 What I saw you at the beginning engineering principles, but maybe thinking deeper why Earth created life, 283 00:29:53,190 --> 00:30:03,840 why life emerges from the nanoscale, and what life always, always has to be related to information and storage to computer power. 284 00:30:03,840 --> 00:30:09,870 So for us these days, DNA and this is a movie of DNA is a very different molecule. 285 00:30:09,870 --> 00:30:17,220 So if you think or I think about viruses, life on Earth emerges from polymers, from proteins, from DNA. 286 00:30:17,220 --> 00:30:23,910 Because, as you know, the universe you probably heard in the universe, entropy always grows. 287 00:30:23,910 --> 00:30:29,550 Yet we are built from the opposite for removing entropy from becoming more order. 288 00:30:29,550 --> 00:30:34,560 How is this possible? Because when you're a polymer and you're wriggling in water, 289 00:30:34,560 --> 00:30:39,390 you can become folded and more complex folded if you dissipate energy into the environment. 290 00:30:39,390 --> 00:30:42,600 This is what in physics we call non-equilibrium thermodynamics. 291 00:30:42,600 --> 00:30:53,130 That means that if you fold and persist and become more complex, the only way you persist is by encoding yourself information about your environment. 292 00:30:53,130 --> 00:31:02,680 The environment makes you. You are entangled with the environment, and the entanglement is the information in our structure. 293 00:31:02,680 --> 00:31:08,250 It comes from the very universe that creates us is the information about the universe. 294 00:31:08,250 --> 00:31:11,940 This is again a very different way of looking at biology, and that's how I will tell you later. 295 00:31:11,940 --> 00:31:20,310 I think it changes the way we will do technology. Our techniques increasingly don't let us look just as proteins or DNA. 296 00:31:20,310 --> 00:31:29,550 It lets us understanding how DNA and proteins assembling living cells and indeed how organisms develop. 297 00:31:29,550 --> 00:31:35,010 This is a fly, an embryo of the fly, and the movie is showing you how the cells of the fly, 298 00:31:35,010 --> 00:31:43,740 move and differentiate become different and shape as the as the as the fly, as the embryo starts growing. 299 00:31:43,740 --> 00:31:51,210 So as you can see here, we're moving now to a place where we start linking all the scales of biology, 300 00:31:51,210 --> 00:31:55,440 from DNA to protein to cell to organ development. 301 00:31:55,440 --> 00:32:05,010 And we're untangling all our abilities from physics, chemistry, mathematical modelling, simulation. 302 00:32:05,010 --> 00:32:09,000 And as I told you before, and increasingly be will becoming more and more important. 303 00:32:09,000 --> 00:32:13,380 We will embed evolution in our way. We look at life. 304 00:32:13,380 --> 00:32:19,170 So one of those theses and the things I talk about in the book is that nanotechnology 305 00:32:19,170 --> 00:32:26,010 allowed us to bring physicists to look at about molecules in the living environment. 306 00:32:26,010 --> 00:32:35,340 I'm from the convergence of sciences that this PROVOQUE has allowed us for the first time to embrace at least biological complexity. 307 00:32:35,340 --> 00:32:42,690 And this goes beyond just medicine that goes beyond the way we interact when we understand ourselves. 308 00:32:42,690 --> 00:32:46,770 There are wonderful convergence happening is not only systems looking at biology, 309 00:32:46,770 --> 00:32:55,770 mathematics and simulation, we all coming together to solve the problem of life. 310 00:32:55,770 --> 00:32:59,970 Meanwhile, in computer departments, something similar was happening. 311 00:32:59,970 --> 00:33:05,730 For many years, people were trying to create algorithms that were able to translate. 312 00:33:05,730 --> 00:33:14,370 I had started myself on that field. I did computational linguistics in the 1990s or to recognise faces, and they all failed for many, 313 00:33:14,370 --> 00:33:18,840 many years until the neural networks and started to become very powerful. 314 00:33:18,840 --> 00:33:27,540 And we started getting the news that a computer was able to play chess better than humans and Google then Translate then recognise people. 315 00:33:27,540 --> 00:33:32,760 The reason this happened is because the algorithms also abandon the reductionist approach. 316 00:33:32,760 --> 00:33:42,480 We didn't know any more how the algorithm works. Well, the algorithm was doing was to mimic in the structure the layers structure of our brain. 317 00:33:42,480 --> 00:33:49,440 So machine learning algorithms and especially neural networks have been is a structure and imitation 318 00:33:49,440 --> 00:34:00,210 inspired by our own brain that is able to recognise and we still don't know how and why they recognise. 319 00:34:00,210 --> 00:34:03,780 So physicists like me, well, maybe more clever than me. 320 00:34:03,780 --> 00:34:09,150 Max Tegmark think that the reason that deep neural networks are very good at 321 00:34:09,150 --> 00:34:14,310 recognising the world is because the reproduce the structure of the universe. 322 00:34:14,310 --> 00:34:16,470 So let's go back to my DNA picture. 323 00:34:16,470 --> 00:34:24,540 I told you before DNA and biology is able to get into the structure information about the environment so you can survive. 324 00:34:24,540 --> 00:34:30,540 You become a computer of survivor and our brain, which is connected with all our parts of the body, 325 00:34:30,540 --> 00:34:35,010 encodes in itself all the evolutionary history of Earth. 326 00:34:35,010 --> 00:34:43,590 All our entanglement with nature to be able to survive. So we can recognise the universe that created us in the first place. 327 00:34:43,590 --> 00:34:48,820 So we're in a moment where we're doing computing in a way that we didn't do before. 328 00:34:48,820 --> 00:34:52,230 We're starting to build technology in the way we never did before. 329 00:34:52,230 --> 00:34:58,650 We're building with nature, with the complexity of nature in which we still don't understand and skipping this. 330 00:34:58,650 --> 00:35:04,110 And this is a beautiful thing that I don't think my videos play. 331 00:35:04,110 --> 00:35:09,720 I was showing you other examples of of new computing that people are trying to understand. 332 00:35:09,720 --> 00:35:16,230 What you have here in the video that doesn't play is the map of the Tokyo Underground. 333 00:35:16,230 --> 00:35:23,760 The thing is that this map is not made out of ink on paper is built by slime mould. 334 00:35:23,760 --> 00:35:26,550 This is a type of movement that works on wood. 335 00:35:26,550 --> 00:35:34,770 And people have found out that if you put food, for example, here in the hope in the main hubs of the Tokyo train stations, 336 00:35:34,770 --> 00:35:43,560 they moved just because of the mould and has a structure and grows and wants to feed itself is able to compute the 337 00:35:43,560 --> 00:35:53,520 minimum paths between those places in the map because embedded in living organisms is the capacity to compute. 338 00:35:53,520 --> 00:35:55,260 As I was telling you before, 339 00:35:55,260 --> 00:36:06,510 in this case for feeding and people are starting to look at this biological computers to look for four ways of solving complex mathematical problems. 340 00:36:06,510 --> 00:36:13,500 And people again, are getting inspiration from this to come to build new algorithms, new maybe machine learning algorithms, 341 00:36:13,500 --> 00:36:21,720 things that integrate all this information, but is not only living organisms that are able to compute. 342 00:36:21,720 --> 00:36:26,010 This is a radical experiment that was done by Jim Jim Susskind in UCLA. 343 00:36:26,010 --> 00:36:29,700 He was also one of the pioneers of a scanning probe microscopy. 344 00:36:29,700 --> 00:36:40,950 And what he did was to get a plate full of nanowires of silver and created a massive network in between the nanowires really highly interconnected. 345 00:36:40,950 --> 00:36:47,820 And then it started feeding the patterns of the traffic of Los Angeles on this way with electrical signals. 346 00:36:47,820 --> 00:36:56,130 As the signals go through, this thing learns why, because you're so small that the signal going through you changes your own structure. 347 00:36:56,130 --> 00:36:59,580 As I told you with the DNA environment changes you. 348 00:36:59,580 --> 00:37:05,790 And if they feed you information suddenly after a after a while, after a few days, 349 00:37:05,790 --> 00:37:12,630 the device would start to predict the patterns of the of the of the traffic in Los Angeles. 350 00:37:12,630 --> 00:37:22,470 So what we're learning here is that the universe encodes in complex, interconnected matter that is receiving signals from the outside world. 351 00:37:22,470 --> 00:37:31,220 Electrical signals, mechanical signals. Chemical signals. The capacity of computing, again, we see this in immunotherapy. 352 00:37:31,220 --> 00:37:39,350 I mean, drugs, I'm working within it with chemotherapy efficiency is very limited, in some cases, very limited. 353 00:37:39,350 --> 00:37:47,240 But most of the treatments that have been put together in the last years and they have been approved for use in humans are immunotherapy. 354 00:37:47,240 --> 00:37:54,230 Why? Because this is again, a known reduction is a process. We're not targeting the single gene, we're not targeting the single protein. 355 00:37:54,230 --> 00:38:01,640 We use the immune system of our body, our whole cell, the computer power of the whole cells to keep disease. 356 00:38:01,640 --> 00:38:09,110 Nanotechnology finally is becoming useful because when nanoparticles are very bad at killing tumours are not so good. 357 00:38:09,110 --> 00:38:17,150 They're very good at targeting the cells of the immune system because they accumulate in our spleen. 358 00:38:17,150 --> 00:38:22,460 That means nanoparticles can be used as a kind of vaccines or trainers of the immune system, 359 00:38:22,460 --> 00:38:28,490 so the immune system can go and attack the tumour using cells, not just molecules. 360 00:38:28,490 --> 00:38:31,880 And that's why we have the results we have in these days with immunotherapy, 361 00:38:31,880 --> 00:38:38,060 with many people getting complete perversion of their tumour on their under two cancers. 362 00:38:38,060 --> 00:38:43,940 People and technologies are also creating nanopore as materials that work as cancer vaccines. 363 00:38:43,940 --> 00:38:47,420 So you create a little material that you implant near your tumour. 364 00:38:47,420 --> 00:38:55,250 And this is full of information from the immune system of your body to so that it recognises cancer cells and gets rid of them. 365 00:38:55,250 --> 00:39:01,010 This is what you could call an implantable cancer vaccine. This is under clinical trials right now. 366 00:39:01,010 --> 00:39:06,380 And the last example what I'm telling you the combination not only of nanotechnology, 367 00:39:06,380 --> 00:39:13,790 but all these new science that is emerging in the 21st century that puts together computers, 368 00:39:13,790 --> 00:39:21,230 mathematics, physics and indeed non reductionist approaches to technology are changing the game. 369 00:39:21,230 --> 00:39:28,220 So of course, it's always been a dream of medicine to be able to replace disease, organs or organs that we lose. 370 00:39:28,220 --> 00:39:37,140 And this is something that humans cannot do. When you, your tissues are usually built of a lot of nano cables on cells embedded in the nano cables, 371 00:39:37,140 --> 00:39:41,990 this is the nano cables are college in another proteins of your body, 372 00:39:41,990 --> 00:39:47,420 so the cells will stick to them and they feel their mechanical and electrical environment around them. 373 00:39:47,420 --> 00:39:54,560 When you have a disease, what happens when you have a scar, for example, this information at the nanoscale is broken. 374 00:39:54,560 --> 00:40:01,460 The cells don't have information. How to fill in the gap. The start changing the structure that they start churning collagen. 375 00:40:01,460 --> 00:40:08,330 And you end up with the scar tissue. So what we are learning in the last 20 years is that cells, 376 00:40:08,330 --> 00:40:14,330 you can control the way cells behave if you give them mechanical and even electrical signals. 377 00:40:14,330 --> 00:40:23,240 So there was a beautiful experiment done many years ago already that showed that stem cells the same kind of stem cells and you put them, 378 00:40:23,240 --> 00:40:27,500 for example, on a plate as hard as bone or a plate as soft as brain. 379 00:40:27,500 --> 00:40:32,780 And you left them these cells, one would turn into bone and the other one would turn into a brain cell. 380 00:40:32,780 --> 00:40:39,080 So people are trying to construct materials that would steer cells to behave the way you want. 381 00:40:39,080 --> 00:40:45,440 So you can create artificial tissues. So there's been some success with cartilage, the press, the press. 382 00:40:45,440 --> 00:40:50,030 You saw the reports, experiments of track hair transplantation. 383 00:40:50,030 --> 00:40:57,470 In this case, you could track yes from a donor. They're not artificially removed the cells and then you can implant them. 384 00:40:57,470 --> 00:41:04,250 You can insert the cells of the patient and then implanted and you get very high success. 385 00:41:04,250 --> 00:41:12,650 This new materials are also starting to be able to reconnect nano materials to reconnect a spinal cord injuries. 386 00:41:12,650 --> 00:41:18,110 And perhaps the most interesting is that people are starting to be able to 3D print organs 387 00:41:18,110 --> 00:41:24,470 using combinations of materials on cells and to use and reproduce organs on a chip. 388 00:41:24,470 --> 00:41:33,050 These organs on a chip are useful, we think, to understand how organs communicate with each other in the body and also for drug testing. 389 00:41:33,050 --> 00:41:37,970 So just to confirm what I was predicting in my book a couple of weeks ago, 390 00:41:37,970 --> 00:41:46,250 the first liver on a chip has been useful to identify toxicity in human blood and the models of drugs. 391 00:41:46,250 --> 00:41:52,060 This hope of this is that we will not need animal testing in the future. 392 00:41:52,060 --> 00:42:01,240 For doing your drug therapy much more reduce. So the picture I'm getting you hear is that medicine is moving towards a world where 393 00:42:01,240 --> 00:42:05,920 we will be able to continue or better monitor what is happening in your body, 394 00:42:05,920 --> 00:42:16,120 targeting better the things that happen in your body. And it will be the measurements will be a combination of nano probably cells combining 395 00:42:16,120 --> 00:42:21,070 our reductionist approaches with the emergent approaches of using whole cells. 396 00:42:21,070 --> 00:42:25,510 There will be more mathematical model that includes machine learning, 397 00:42:25,510 --> 00:42:31,210 neural networks and indeed the evolutionary history where I culture your smart mathematical mind. 398 00:42:31,210 --> 00:42:37,480 And somehow I was talking the other day to some audience thought we're getting closer to the dream of traditional medicines. 399 00:42:37,480 --> 00:42:40,090 So if you know a little bit of Chinese medicine, 400 00:42:40,090 --> 00:42:46,480 you know that what Chinese medicine is telling you is that the whole body's connected got physics is important, 401 00:42:46,480 --> 00:42:53,050 that you cannot disentangle yourself from the environment and the methods of traditional medicine are usually, 402 00:42:53,050 --> 00:42:58,690 for example, getting your pulse, someone very trained to understand how your whole body is behaving. 403 00:42:58,690 --> 00:43:04,780 So all the struct., all the things I've been telling you before actually are taking us to a very smart version of all that, 404 00:43:04,780 --> 00:43:13,330 trying to get a lot of signals with very clever machine learning algorithms to understand better what is going on in your body. 405 00:43:13,330 --> 00:43:18,190 One of the things I discuss in the book is that all these development, 406 00:43:18,190 --> 00:43:26,830 what is bringing us is to the blurring of the of the boundaries between material sciences and biological sciences. 407 00:43:26,830 --> 00:43:31,690 So people like me will be using nanotech nanoparticles to study biology, 408 00:43:31,690 --> 00:43:36,310 and then I will use the principles of biology to creating materials that don't exist 409 00:43:36,310 --> 00:43:41,410 in nature by understanding how we can get computers with nanowires and computers. 410 00:43:41,410 --> 00:43:45,520 With this line moulds, we might create things that don't exist at all. 411 00:43:45,520 --> 00:43:55,240 And I want to show you this beautiful example is a stingray cyborg stingray that was built by Kevin Parker in Harvard. 412 00:43:55,240 --> 00:44:02,070 It's made of plastic, and inside of the plastic has a lot of harsh cells that have been culture from a mouse. 413 00:44:02,070 --> 00:44:10,090 And the thing is able to follow the light and is being computer simulated to have the shape and the thing can move and it can swim. 414 00:44:10,090 --> 00:44:14,620 I think this is quite a prediction of the devices we will have in the future. 415 00:44:14,620 --> 00:44:22,000 You have computer, you have modelling, you have emergent phenomena, you have cells, you have polymers all in one. 416 00:44:22,000 --> 00:44:30,490 People are doing similar things, for example, in IBM, where they making computer chips that no, they are not anymore put down, 417 00:44:30,490 --> 00:44:39,070 but they are also getting the information from from just the structure of what you're putting there. 418 00:44:39,070 --> 00:44:48,820 So to summarise a bit the topics of my talk, I just say that in the 21st century, 419 00:44:48,820 --> 00:44:55,000 we have a convergence of science and technologies in biology that is changing the way we thinking about technology, 420 00:44:55,000 --> 00:44:58,990 the way we think about computing and the way we think about medicine. 421 00:44:58,990 --> 00:45:07,210 And that more and more we are emerging with complexity in computing, in materials, et cetera. 422 00:45:07,210 --> 00:45:10,780 So I tell you a little bit what I do with that I will finish. 423 00:45:10,780 --> 00:45:21,760 So I work here in the physics department and I work in many projects involving nanotechnology, atomic force microscopes and biological systems. 424 00:45:21,760 --> 00:45:30,280 I'm interested in plants. I'm interested in how plants grow and how they create their shape with Jerusalem in Department of Engineering. 425 00:45:30,280 --> 00:45:34,930 We're interested in how neurones couple mechanical and electrical signals to 426 00:45:34,930 --> 00:45:41,200 function to see if we can use ultrasound to treat conditions such as epilepsy. 427 00:45:41,200 --> 00:45:46,240 I work with people in engineering department also to create materials for tissue engineering 428 00:45:46,240 --> 00:45:52,420 and even little micro robots that can be used for moving things around in biology. 429 00:45:52,420 --> 00:45:57,460 Casey was sitting here, is working in my lab and collaborating with Sara. 430 00:45:57,460 --> 00:46:03,190 Walker is also here in understanding how pancreatic tumour actually kills you with physics, 431 00:46:03,190 --> 00:46:08,560 with astrophysics, and we're trying to see if we can treat them to reverse the deadly physics. 432 00:46:08,560 --> 00:46:19,870 And I'm starting also to work on the physics of cryopreservation, how we can create, how we can freeze materials and they can survive. 433 00:46:19,870 --> 00:46:31,300 I also make biosensors, so this is a work I'm doing with Osaka University in Japan to detect viruses with graphene transistors and to finish. 434 00:46:31,300 --> 00:46:38,830 I show you a little bit about how my work in plants is leading me to work with other people. 435 00:46:38,830 --> 00:46:48,070 So this is a plant and this is how a plant grows. Plants are very clever because they can move and they don't even have a brain, but they survive. 436 00:46:48,070 --> 00:46:55,170 The longest things are surviving on Earth are. They don't have brains and they cannot even run away when the weather is bad. 437 00:46:55,170 --> 00:47:00,900 And the reason is because they have amazing survival computing powers in their structure. 438 00:47:00,900 --> 00:47:07,890 So in their shape and all they have is shape, they're able to encode all the information that allows them their survival. 439 00:47:07,890 --> 00:47:12,370 So I'm very interested in how plants create their shapes. 440 00:47:12,370 --> 00:47:19,380 And when I was working on my plants and my shapes, I made a well. 441 00:47:19,380 --> 00:47:27,780 I talked to a friend of mine, which is a sculptor, and he was asking me about he wanted to change the materials of his sculptures, I think. 442 00:47:27,780 --> 00:47:34,360 And he was asking me about graphene, and his question got me thinking in something I had never thought of before. 443 00:47:34,360 --> 00:47:41,010 I'm obsessed with medicine and applications in medicine, but I never thought of constructing big with nanotech. 444 00:47:41,010 --> 00:47:50,070 All I know about constructing nanotech is polymer composites, the sort of things that you make your surfboards with or of fibreglass. 445 00:47:50,070 --> 00:47:56,970 But how you make something as clever as a plant, can you make artificial plants? 446 00:47:56,970 --> 00:48:01,770 So I was looking at his the sculptures, which he has in a park in Japan. 447 00:48:01,770 --> 00:48:05,820 And funnily enough, they have the dimensions of my plants. 448 00:48:05,820 --> 00:48:10,380 I think because he knows he was trying to get them to grow in the shape of a plant. 449 00:48:10,380 --> 00:48:18,990 And I told him, I can't build you anything of nanotech that is good enough because it doesn't exist. 450 00:48:18,990 --> 00:48:25,050 We can make a nano material that creates the amazing mechanical properties of plants. 451 00:48:25,050 --> 00:48:29,010 So I started thinking about wood and how wood is built. 452 00:48:29,010 --> 00:48:39,240 So wood. It's made of little tubes of cellulose, so as the plant grows, the shape of a plant is given by cellulose structure, 453 00:48:39,240 --> 00:48:45,510 so the pressure builds from the bottom of the plant and the promise pumped tended 454 00:48:45,510 --> 00:48:50,850 to create a shape just by creating structures with nanowires or cellulose. 455 00:48:50,850 --> 00:48:54,270 And then eventually, when you create wood, this solidifies. 456 00:48:54,270 --> 00:49:01,680 So you create an amazing nano material that is able to do all sorts of shapes and endure thousands of years. 457 00:49:01,680 --> 00:49:09,600 Some buildings are built in Norway or in Japan that are thousands of years old, and they still survive and they're made of wood. 458 00:49:09,600 --> 00:49:13,440 So I started to think, can we really construct materials again? 459 00:49:13,440 --> 00:49:20,880 I started to question the things I was questioning you before. Do our reductionist approach good enough to construct the materials of the future? 460 00:49:20,880 --> 00:49:25,450 We need to get rid of concrete. We need to get rid of a steel. 461 00:49:25,450 --> 00:49:29,400 If we are going to save the planet, how do we build the materials of the future? 462 00:49:29,400 --> 00:49:36,880 So I started to think of turning wood into something interesting that doesn't exist in nature, but uses structures. 463 00:49:36,880 --> 00:49:42,270 So I started thinking about making, for example, transparent wood. 464 00:49:42,270 --> 00:49:43,990 This is part of the work we're doing in the lab. 465 00:49:43,990 --> 00:49:54,870 So this is a chunk of red oak and we managed to remove the beginning and we can get it to be translucent and then we refill it with a. 466 00:49:54,870 --> 00:50:02,700 By doing that, we commit we create a material that is translucent or transparent and has better mechanical properties of wood. 467 00:50:02,700 --> 00:50:08,880 So we're mixing our site with nature and also better thermal properties than wood. 468 00:50:08,880 --> 00:50:16,830 And actually, a friend of the sculpture, which is an architect who works for Amanda Levant, architects in London, 469 00:50:16,830 --> 00:50:20,670 who met you may know for the extension of the Victorian Ivory Museum, 470 00:50:20,670 --> 00:50:26,580 asked me if I could give them some ideas because they had been invited to the Venice Biennale of architecture. 471 00:50:26,580 --> 00:50:28,510 And I convinced them to do this. 472 00:50:28,510 --> 00:50:37,560 So if you go to Venice next year and in May, you may see my first two structure that is built a bit like nano comes to life. 473 00:50:37,560 --> 00:50:44,010 So to finish, I will make a reflection of what does it mean beyond technology? 474 00:50:44,010 --> 00:50:50,040 So for most of the 20th century biology, we were looking at biology, 475 00:50:50,040 --> 00:50:56,370 talking about genes and talking about proteins like everything else, something we could modify. 476 00:50:56,370 --> 00:51:03,030 We could modify nature, we could produce agriculture just we didn't need to think about what we do with the soil. 477 00:51:03,030 --> 00:51:07,200 We had this idea that our molecules will save us, 478 00:51:07,200 --> 00:51:13,320 but actually we're leaving now in the moment with medicine is a stagnated unless we think differently. 479 00:51:13,320 --> 00:51:17,070 And indeed, we have the climate emergency, which is not brought over. 480 00:51:17,070 --> 00:51:23,310 But this idea of using our technology, just not with nature, but over nature. 481 00:51:23,310 --> 00:51:32,940 So I think one of the most important consequences of doing physics biology in the physics department is what I told you at the beginning. 482 00:51:32,940 --> 00:51:38,100 We are confronted with the idea that biology did not emerge from nature. 483 00:51:38,100 --> 00:51:45,570 The universe created us. We are entangled with the universe, our intelligence emergence from the entanglement with a universe, 484 00:51:45,570 --> 00:51:53,910 and that the best technologies we can create in the future will be entangle our intelligence with our environment. 485 00:51:53,910 --> 00:52:03,000 So I do think it changes the way we look at nature to transform the way we just do things over biology like we 486 00:52:03,000 --> 00:52:08,010 have seen these days with this guy in China that was doing CRISPR costs in the genes of these poor babies. 487 00:52:08,010 --> 00:52:12,450 And now it turns out today in the press that he didn't even modify the genes he wanted to do. 488 00:52:12,450 --> 00:52:19,950 Or we can actually work with nature in a different way that addresses nature's complexities and the complexities of humans, 489 00:52:19,950 --> 00:52:26,760 entanglement with nature to change the way we do technology and medicine in the future. 490 00:52:26,760 --> 00:52:32,640 So I also think this will bring us a new relationship with the arts, 491 00:52:32,640 --> 00:52:40,650 because what I've been telling you is that we are redefining what we mean by intelligence, what our intelligence comes from. 492 00:52:40,650 --> 00:52:49,620 And that means we have a new relationship with culture customs that we couldn't answer before, and they could only be answered through the arts. 493 00:52:49,620 --> 00:52:53,940 Perhaps we will start to be able to post them with our science. 494 00:52:53,940 --> 00:53:04,410 So I finish again with one of the sculptures of my friend because I think I've started a sculpture is a very good place to inspire us for the future, 495 00:53:04,410 --> 00:53:14,190 because the non-starters culture you have, the emotion of the artist represented or whatever is trying to show in matter, in a structure. 496 00:53:14,190 --> 00:53:26,160 And in the future, we will be able to actually start to understand how intuition or emotions emerge from the complexity of biology. 497 00:53:26,160 --> 00:53:30,380 And I think a sculpture on the arts will be very important. 498 00:53:30,380 --> 00:53:35,990 In interrogating the new science that will be coming from our labs. 499 00:53:35,990 --> 00:53:40,220 So I think in the future, we're going to see not even more mergers between sciences, 500 00:53:40,220 --> 00:53:48,530 but we're going to have more mergers between the sciences and the humanities, which I think was one of the purposes of writing my book. 501 00:53:48,530 --> 00:53:55,760 So to show you that, I'm not joking. This is the sculpture, and this is one of the protein structures created by the protein. 502 00:53:55,760 --> 00:54:03,530 Nanotechnology is they match. And I don't think it's by chance is, I think because humans, we create similar structures, whatever we try to do. 503 00:54:03,530 --> 00:54:08,840 So I finish with a sentence of my book, which summarises the intention of the book. 504 00:54:08,840 --> 00:54:14,990 Nature and history are inviting us to communicate and interact with the world in a deeper way, 505 00:54:14,990 --> 00:54:21,750 and hence the response than to expand the human capacity to connect with the universe in a more fruitful way. 506 00:54:21,750 --> 00:54:30,870 And thank you for your attention. 507 00:54:30,870 --> 00:54:46,440 Okay, thank you very much, Sonia, for an absolutely fascinating, stimulating, revelatory presentation and one which leaves me a huge hope, 508 00:54:46,440 --> 00:54:54,750 not least, that we might be able to deal with cancer and many, many other things, but also throwing up different areas of discipline. 509 00:54:54,750 --> 00:55:01,260 We've actually run out of time. You took your full hour. The guys did my computer this five minutes. 510 00:55:01,260 --> 00:55:12,720 OK, three minutes. Just one question I see done at the back and give a short answer because that way between people and drinks and selling a book. 511 00:55:12,720 --> 00:55:20,910 OK, so you mentioned that David Baker had won this contest on synthesising proteins by size 512 00:55:20,910 --> 00:55:25,230 and predicting the structure predicting the structure of proteins by using evolution? 513 00:55:25,230 --> 00:55:31,090 Yeah, but you didn't explain why. I'd be very curious if you could explain the what did he actually do in what way? 514 00:55:31,090 --> 00:55:35,010 Yeah, exactly. So for a long time, people were just trying to get, you know, 515 00:55:35,010 --> 00:55:40,170 your structure and then you just get the electrostatic between then and the physics between then and how it would fall. 516 00:55:40,170 --> 00:55:46,800 And that didn't work. So what he did was to look because we don't have information, a lot of information about the structure. 517 00:55:46,800 --> 00:55:49,950 You don't have information about the structure. So you know what bits are coming together. 518 00:55:49,950 --> 00:55:54,330 So what he did was to study the evolutionary history of those proteins in many, 519 00:55:54,330 --> 00:56:01,620 many animals in those gene sequences before and then trying to see what genes wearables together. 520 00:56:01,620 --> 00:56:10,140 And by figuring that out, you can start to figure out if they were near each other or not and if they were new to them, 521 00:56:10,140 --> 00:56:12,750 maybe the bits and your protein on the each other. 522 00:56:12,750 --> 00:56:19,440 So the thing of biological structures is that because they have been created by evolution, they are not just physics. 523 00:56:19,440 --> 00:56:24,090 Physics is part of it, but the whole structure comes because it works. 524 00:56:24,090 --> 00:56:27,930 It works in the environment and encodes what came before you. 525 00:56:27,930 --> 00:56:36,180 So you need to take into account the evolutionary history of your genes in order to predict the structure, which I think is very revolutionary. 526 00:56:36,180 --> 00:56:42,120 And I think it's just the beginning of something with trying to learn that in our algorithms for prediction, 527 00:56:42,120 --> 00:56:52,140 perhaps we need to bring in all the evolutionary history of of of of life on Earth because we don't come from a vacuum on physics alone is not enough. 528 00:56:52,140 --> 00:56:57,420 Like if you seek with DNA nanotechnology, with physics alone, you can be very beautiful teddy bears and things like that. 529 00:56:57,420 --> 00:57:03,870 But if you really want to be a virus, you need to do proteins because proteins have evolutionary history in them. 530 00:57:03,870 --> 00:57:08,970 Even their artificial proteins, because you're using the cells to produce them. 531 00:57:08,970 --> 00:57:14,580 That's why I think it's a very radical new way of thinking about computing and also technology, 532 00:57:14,580 --> 00:57:21,720 and we're just starting to understand what it means, I think. So who runs the complexity group in the aunts? 533 00:57:21,720 --> 00:57:28,110 And this is a good president. I know. So that really was fascinating. 534 00:57:28,110 --> 00:57:29,940 Of course, there's much more in the book. 535 00:57:29,940 --> 00:57:37,290 I don't know how you managed to, but you convinced Princeton University Press, which I never succeeded in doing, putting wonderful coloured plates. 536 00:57:37,290 --> 00:57:41,490 So it's a bargain. And this huge mountain. 537 00:57:41,490 --> 00:57:47,310 Sonia, thank you very much. Please do join us for a drink and get a copy of the book right behind you. 538 00:57:47,310 --> 00:58:19,200 Thanks to you all for coming.