Good evening and a warm welcome to the Oxford Martin School.
I'm obviously delighted this evening to welcome Sonia Kontagora here.
Sonia, OK, turn that one off.
Thank you. This is being webcast and recorded, so let's just hear Sonia rather than someone else.
And we are delighted to welcome Sonia Concerto, who's been associated with the Oxford Martin School since 2008, when I was the director.
We created a programme on nanomedicine with Sonia and another Sonia, Sonia Garrus,
and illustrative of the fact that the Oxford Martin School works on absolutely tiny issues in terms of size,
not importance, like Nano and Sonia will describe just how tiny they are.
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.
But all the issues are of huge relevance to the future of humanity,
and certainly I've become convinced that nano and I know medicine that Sonia works on is one such issue.
Sonia has been absolutely pioneering in this. She's an associate professor of biological physics.
Should explain to you what that is. In the university and creates the lab,
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.
All of you. She's here this evening to launch her new book, Nano Comes to Life, published by Princeton University Press.
And we're delighted also that she'll be able to sign copies of the book afterwards,
which are for sale and have a drink with anyone that's interested in the back.
So thanks to you for coming, and particularly thanks to Sonia for giving us this opportunity to hear going to comes to life.
Thank you, John. As I say in the acknowledgements of the book,
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
gave me many years ago to engage with the public and with the wider audiences that were interested in the science I was developing.
And I could have not, I think, come to this book without having been a member of the last day of school before.
So let's start with this picture. For many of you, biology had a lot of the biology that you come in.
The press looks like something like that, or at least a promise that the press and the media show about biology at the moment.
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,
but for these pictures, like a gene to our intelligence and the colour of our eyes.
This picture has no scientific foundation, and the history when we arrive to this place is important for this story.
I'm going to tell you today. So for most of the 17th century, 18th century, 19th century and 20th century science, especially physics,
and I was interested in looking at the constituents of matter what matter was made of.
And the microscope was invented.
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.
And he called himself because reminded them of the places of the little cells
within with the monks used to live in in the plants used to live in complex.
That's where cells are called cells. Now the story continues of people looking into the constituents of biological marker.
We've always been obsessed with ourselves and what we are made of, and how can we use that for medicine?
We want to cure ourselves for technology and, of course, for our social and political purposes.
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.
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.
So we are made of proteins of DNA and other biomolecules,
and these proteins and DNA and molecules are made of their nano size, and you can see that with an optical microscope at all.
The only way you can see this is by because the light doesn't allow you to see things below 300 nanometres.
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,
you can reconstruct the shape of the molecule. The most famous example is DNA.
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
patterns of the DNA that experiments that Rosalind Franklin were doing at King's College.
This is a very complicated story of science politics in which she did this fragments with a student with a samples coming from Switzerland,
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,
but arrived to the lab and got the information and eventually came to the double helix.
So this is one of the most studied complex stories of gender politics in science, actually,
because she she didn't get the Nobel prise and she actually died because of the cancer that was produced because of experiments.
So the 1950s was all about getting crystal structures like this,
one of proteins that were increasingly important to try to construct a picture, to try to understand what were the structures that make life.
This is the reason why we have now. Synchrotron is actually near Oxford because this single dose can produce very powerful X-rays,
and we can get information and structure information about proteins in crystals that very small.
The problem with this approach is that the way you study your proteins for the constituents of matter are not in the living environment.
To extract them, you make crystal and then you make these structures and all these together with genetics and the way we do science
in the 20th century has produced a picture of biology in which you have many little bits that are interconnected,
and we have absolutely no rationale to understand all this.
This has promoted an idea of biology that tells.
You that you have DNA from DNA. You produce protein.
And the most simple interpretation you can do of DNA of biology is like, I've tried to understand DNA from DNA.
You understand everything you need to know about biology.
So our body also says the theory you have DNA and then the proteins would read it in agree, create more proteins.
And then we are billed by the information that is inside our genes.
And there's nothing we can do about it. So this is this composes a landscape with many other sciences in the 20th century,
which is called a reduction in vision of the world in which we look at the world by the
building blocks is DNA and DNA makes proteins and the interactions of the proteins makes us.
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.
This has been also the basis of the development of technology in the 20th century.
We will look at atoms and interactions between atoms,
so we will create technologies based on this idea that if you look into the world, you will find bits.
And by the interactions of the beat, you come up with ideas that you can start fabricating transistors or medicine in medicine.
This means that most of the efforts of medicine in the 20th century was to create
drugs that didn't bind proteins of DNA to block the process from happening.
So if you have a disease is because there's some protein went wrong,
and the reason what it went wrong is because some of your genes is not functioning the way it would.
So it's a linear chain in which if you stop either the protein of the DNA, you will stop the disease.
This was also very interesting for many political agendas,
especially during colonialism that use DNA and Darwinism to say there are some people better than others,
and we could classify people by their genetics and know who is better and who is worse.
So in the 20th century,
really the idea that everything was building blocks and that we could interact with building blocks and produce of our technology was the dominant.
The problem with that is that pharmaceutical companies were reaching a point where they were not and still now developing new drugs.
The drugs they developed are not always effective.
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.
And when it reached the tumour, the cells deals with this drug. Initially, you kill the cells, but other cells would evolve.
And after a few months, their cells become resistant to your drug.
So biology doesn't actually on nature, doesn't actually work in a reductionist way.
And we know that we are able all our building blocks when they come together.
They create very complex beings. We are able to think we are always we are able to to feel.
So things have started to change. And this is the beginning of nanotechnology in the nineteen eighties,
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.
So these are images of this kind of internally microscope when you see here is the surface of copper.
And when you see, here are the atoms of our atoms of iron sitting on top.
So these microscopes allow you to see atoms one by one.
And what this guy did, Don Adler and IBM was to learn how to pick up with this kind of tunnelling,
microscope these atoms and arrange them in a circle.
This is the first time humans are able to build anything atoms one by one.
And what you see in the middle is a ripple is because the electrons are in the metal and they run freely here.
They can run freely inside the quantum corral, as he called it.
They form a ripple, which is a visualisation of the quantum mechanics.
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
century where people wanted to do with technology was to build things using building blocks.
But you also see that nature is reacting in a complicated way.
Nature doesn't produce single atoms. Moving around produces a wave.
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.
They can build really complex behaviours, and life is one such complex behaviour.
So using these techniques, which is a part of I'm one of the most improved microscopes.
We started to become interested not only in studying atoms and nanomachines made of metals,
but we started to become interested in how nature created the best nano machines that we know of proteins.
So by the 1980s, we had a starting to get information from crystal structures.
The proteins will have very complex. It is a structures that let people think that they will also work off nanomachines.
The breakthroughs again and started to come in in the 1980s, where people started to see how our proteins were not just doing chemistry.
You know, we have this vision of biology, which proteins just bind to chemicals and produce chemical reactions.
But actually, these chemical reactions were catalysed or driven by nanomachines.
This is perhaps the most beautiful, one of the most beautiful nanomachines. This is the 80 percent base.
You have kg of those in your body because they are responsible of produce ATP,
a molecule that turns around and that we need for all our chemical reactions.
So ATP is not producing in the body like in a in a test you would do is produced by
this nano machine is a tiny thing that sits in its membranes of your mitochondria.
Sucks protons, the protons move. This makes it rotate and that moves the top.
So when the top moves, binds ATP and is able to churn proteins, why is that?
Because at the nano scale, you're so small that when you bind a molecule, you bind it.
You stretch it. When you move, you stretch it so you make the electrons jump.
So the key to biology at the nanoscale is that you couple mechanics with chemistry, an electrostatic to produce maximum efficiency.
So doing this like this, you produce ATP in kilograms 60 kilograms a day in your body.
Not if you were going to do it in this bucket.
It would take you a really long time, but you do it constantly because you are able to use mechanics to churn out.
This was discovered by Duke Energy, who was the first one who ever proved that this thing rotates.
The atomic force microscopes that I use allows us for the first time to see
proteins of proteins sitting in your membranes one by one or DNA like here,
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.
And that mechanical energy is the one that allows it to interact with the outside world and with proteins around it.
And indeed, our microscopes allow us to see proteins moving in real time.
These are microscopes that I'm showing you the movement of our molecular motors.
Let me show you this one here. This is myosin.
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.
The cell is so crowded that it cannot just rely on things moving around.
So this thing that is able to walk on the track, move things around your cell.
The reason why biology works and this is one of the questions we were starting to do
with our microscopes are such efficiency is because it couples in its structure,
the capacity to produce function so that one of the main things I tell in my book is that there's a moment
where nanotechnology is really start to change biology just when we start to see molecules like this.
So the people that took these movies were mainly physicists and engineers.
And what they care, we're not interested in these maps of the biology.
So the DNA of the interaction between molecules that we're interested in, why I'm how can you create something like that?
Why evolution chose this as structures to create our lives?
And how does this work? So they had an engineering thinking about this.
The reason that this work is because when you're so small, you're a nanoscale, you feel the water around you.
So in the water, around you hits you.
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.
So biological molecules are able to use just water and temperature to produce movement and catalyse chemical reactions.
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,
were important in this story because they started to create the narratives of nanotechnology.
He created a very influential book, Engines of Creation, where he previously predicted the things we're actually doing now in the lab.
And at the same time, chemists and materials scientists were starting to be able to create artificial structures with DNA.
So in the 1998 80s, we have, on the one hand, the physicist coming with the tools to understand biology,
to see why biology built itself on the nanoscale chemists and major scientists,
building nanomaterials and a confluence of all this sort of science is trying to
understand why biology happens on the nanoscale and how can we deal with it.
So one of the first things nanotechnology did was, OK, now we can reach the nanoscale.
How can we use this to improve medicine? So the first attempts of nanomedicine were about bringing drugs better to tumours?
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.
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,
the tumour, you need to raise the concentration so much that it actually kills you.
So actually, it was a Japanese scientist who discovered also just before the 1990s that nanoparticles had structures with accumulate in tumours.
So everybody thought the reason for that is because tumours, when they grow, they form this veins around them to feed themselves.
And these veins have a lot of holes. They are not perfect, and things like nanoparticles can go through them and accumulate.
So people have spent the last 30 years building nanoparticles to reach tumours and try to kill them.
There are many ways of trying to do this. They put chemicals on the nanoparticles.
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.
Others are able to absorb light.
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.
There was no mathematical modelling, there was no thinking it was just trying to find a magic bullet that would kill the tumour.
Very few nanoparticles have been approved for use in medicine.
Very, very few. And the field is got stuck mainly because of the same reasons.
The pharmacology has got a stuck.
They were trying to kill or reach the targets without thinking very much without taking into account the complexity of biology.
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.
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.
That's why they're there for. Because we also evolve with nanoparticles, so so far we need to think harder.
And the good news on this, I would tell you later,
is that people are starting to think harder and collaborate more with mathematicians and computer scientists to get this work to work better.
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
and you would just put a drop of blood and you will know everything you have in your blood.
This also have faith because again, people were trying to overstep the complications of biology, as you probably know for the story of Theranos.
Even we have a movie of Theranos. People were thinking that this could be a problem that could be solved.
It has not been so easy to solve. Good news art is that there's a lot of progress.
Last week, I heard I think a Japanese company, Hitachi, announced for the first time a device which is relatively big and complicated,
but would allow you to test a lot of molecules detecting a lot of tumours in blood, in a single, in a single chip.
So things are getting there, but definitely they were not as simple as they were predicted.
Again, Koreans think Korean University's collaboration.
I think it was something they're also developing patches that would be able to sit on your skin and,
for example, detect the levels of glucose and release insulin whenever you need it.
These things are starting to happen. So the promises that nanotechnology did 20 years ago, 30 years ago are only now starting to happen.
In the meantime, people were trying to do something else.
So once we cut access to see DNA at the nano scale, there was a guy in New York met Simon,
who saw who was actually going to lose his tenure because he was not getting any good results.
And he thought, OK, I'm trying to get crystal structures of DNA and information.
I can't do it. But he started to think of DNA as a building block.
Actually, he says that he saw this picture, but it was actually his half brother was a crystallography,
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.
And he thought. And they match with each other.
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.
He started a field called US. DNA technology was interest is on building any structure with DNA.
But in this case, DNA doesn't have any genetic interest.
All they have is a building block, like a building block like Legos.
The field of DNA now. As I say in the book became visible when DNA origami was invented because there
was a guy in Caltech who found that you could get any string of DNA from a virus,
create staples in the computer and get your initial string to fold in literally any shape you wanted.
This was one of the initial dreams of nanotechnology create self-assembly structures that you could design in a computer.
These days, people do 3-D structures of all sorts of shapes with DNA cubes, little teddy bears.
These are real things that people do. So nanotechnology is becoming an established field.
DNA nanotechnology in which people are able to build all sorts of structure.
Now the main problem DNA technology is what do we do with these structures?
They're very nice and they're very small, but it's difficult to use them in any practical application.
Again, there'd been thought as useful material for DNA nanomedicine.
This is one of my contributions to the field.
I work with this Japanese scientist to make this DNA handles that could assemble on cells and other ideas that may have some.
This handles to pull from the cells, but it's very unclear how we can do that.
And feet in Oxford and other people have managed to make something very interesting with DNA,
which is to make DNA as a truck where you can assemble drugs.
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.
And even if you reach the target,
the cells get rid of it is that is very difficult to produce new drugs because there's limits to synthetic chemistry.
So what these guys do is to use DNA a little bit like the molecules I were showing you before.
To grab untwist molecules so they can produce chemistry in an easier way is coming.
Finally, to the general press.
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.
Maybe that's why I saw this. But it was nice to see that for the first time.
The press is looking at DNA. In this case, it was reporting a beautiful results of people that were trying to bind viruses,
not just by making a single molecule, but by making a very complex, a star shaped molecule that would just really grab viruses.
What I thought was beautiful about this idea is that our body does that.
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.
This blow themselves. So they create networks of DNA in your blood vessels and they contract the bacteria.
So in a way, we are discovering something. That evolution, of course, has covered many, many, many millions of years before us.
The DNA is not only a genetic material, but it's also a structural material.
Other people are trying to do the same thing with proteins.
So this is a much more powerful way of doing nanotechnology because you can literally create any shape out of the protein.
And this is already a different game. DNA, nanomedicine, the still in this reductionist approach, I told you at the beginning building blocks.
Simple ideas targeting single molecules.
But in the case of a protein nanotechnology, things are different.
A little bit different. For many years, people were dreaming of having a computer programme that would be able to
predict the shape of the proteins once you know the gene where it comes from.
This have been impossible.
It's thought it was an impossible problem because proteins have very complex structures and computers don't have enough power.
Or so they thought it was just a question of power.
So these guys have started to do a lot of crowdsourcing, getting the computers of many people, computers all over the world.
It's actually a beautiful programme, the process of project to try to compute the protein, the structures, and eventually they succeeded.
They have a competition. And for the first time ever, they the people that we're competing, we're giving the sequence of genes.
And one group, David Baker's Group, came up with a correct the structure.
The reason they have a programme that will predict the correct structure is not
because they have better computer programmes and better physics in the programme.
They have something different. They have encoded in the programme evolution,
and this is something that I think it has never been done before to create a new structure or understand a new structure.
If you don't only go with brute force with physics, in the case of very complex biological structure,
you need to take into account the evolution, the genetic history of where things come from.
This changes the game, the conceptual game. We're not trying anymore by brute force.
You get building blocks and see how they assemble together. We're taking into our calculation the evolutionary history of the Earth.
We've taken was starting to embed in our thinking emergence, which I find very beautiful.
And of course, once you be able to create it, start predicting proteins in your computer.
The first thing that people thought is, but now we can design proteins.
So they went to the computer designing proteins that don't exist in nature.
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.
And they succeeded. They succeeded in very robust proteins, but they manage, again, a very different way of fabricating.
This is not like DNA. Nanotechnology is not building blocks on physics coming together.
What you're doing here is to use the building power of nature using a cell.
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.
And I think this is the biggest game changer that is happening in science right now.
And I will give you a few examples.
In other sciences, we are moving away from building blocks and physics, and we're trying to take into account complexity,
the complexity of our evolutionary history and also the complexity of the living world
around us to create new ways of doing technology and indeed new ways of doing computation.
Another wonderful thing this group did was to create a virus out of proteins that don't exist in nature.
So they create proteins are like the proteins of a virus,
and then they put RNA that encodes for that protein and they let it assemble and they put it in a cell culture.
It assemble in the cell culture and it started evolving.
So that means by using the building principle of nature, you kind of start creating technology that evolves with time.
This is again a very different way of thinking of technology.
In the meantime, biological physicists like me were starting to think deeper about the nanoscale and the origin of life,
and not only the origin of life as a physics, classic physics movement structure.
What I saw you at the beginning engineering principles, but maybe thinking deeper why Earth created life,
why life emerges from the nanoscale, and what life always, always has to be related to information and storage to computer power.
So for us these days, DNA and this is a movie of DNA is a very different molecule.
So if you think or I think about viruses, life on Earth emerges from polymers, from proteins, from DNA.
Because, as you know, the universe you probably heard in the universe, entropy always grows.
Yet we are built from the opposite for removing entropy from becoming more order.
How is this possible? Because when you're a polymer and you're wriggling in water,
you can become folded and more complex folded if you dissipate energy into the environment.
This is what in physics we call non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
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.
The environment makes you. You are entangled with the environment, and the entanglement is the information in our structure.
It comes from the very universe that creates us is the information about the universe.
This is again a very different way of looking at biology, and that's how I will tell you later.
I think it changes the way we will do technology. Our techniques increasingly don't let us look just as proteins or DNA.
It lets us understanding how DNA and proteins assembling living cells and indeed how organisms develop.
This is a fly, an embryo of the fly, and the movie is showing you how the cells of the fly,
move and differentiate become different and shape as the as the as the fly, as the embryo starts growing.
So as you can see here, we're moving now to a place where we start linking all the scales of biology,
from DNA to protein to cell to organ development.
And we're untangling all our abilities from physics, chemistry, mathematical modelling, simulation.
And as I told you before, and increasingly be will becoming more and more important.
We will embed evolution in our way. We look at life.
So one of those theses and the things I talk about in the book is that nanotechnology
allowed us to bring physicists to look at about molecules in the living environment.
I'm from the convergence of sciences that this PROVOQUE has allowed us for the first time to embrace at least biological complexity.
And this goes beyond just medicine that goes beyond the way we interact when we understand ourselves.
There are wonderful convergence happening is not only systems looking at biology,
mathematics and simulation, we all coming together to solve the problem of life.
Meanwhile, in computer departments, something similar was happening.
For many years, people were trying to create algorithms that were able to translate.
I had started myself on that field. I did computational linguistics in the 1990s or to recognise faces, and they all failed for many,
many years until the neural networks and started to become very powerful.
And we started getting the news that a computer was able to play chess better than humans and Google then Translate then recognise people.
The reason this happened is because the algorithms also abandon the reductionist approach.
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.
So machine learning algorithms and especially neural networks have been is a structure and imitation
inspired by our own brain that is able to recognise and we still don't know how and why they recognise.
So physicists like me, well, maybe more clever than me.
Max Tegmark think that the reason that deep neural networks are very good at
recognising the world is because the reproduce the structure of the universe.
So let's go back to my DNA picture.
I told you before DNA and biology is able to get into the structure information about the environment so you can survive.
You become a computer of survivor and our brain, which is connected with all our parts of the body,
encodes in itself all the evolutionary history of Earth.
All our entanglement with nature to be able to survive. So we can recognise the universe that created us in the first place.
So we're in a moment where we're doing computing in a way that we didn't do before.
We're starting to build technology in the way we never did before.
We're building with nature, with the complexity of nature in which we still don't understand and skipping this.
And this is a beautiful thing that I don't think my videos play.
I was showing you other examples of of new computing that people are trying to understand.
What you have here in the video that doesn't play is the map of the Tokyo Underground.
The thing is that this map is not made out of ink on paper is built by slime mould.
This is a type of movement that works on wood.
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,
they moved just because of the mould and has a structure and grows and wants to feed itself is able to compute the
minimum paths between those places in the map because embedded in living organisms is the capacity to compute.
As I was telling you before,
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.
And people again, are getting inspiration from this to come to build new algorithms, new maybe machine learning algorithms,
things that integrate all this information, but is not only living organisms that are able to compute.
This is a radical experiment that was done by Jim Jim Susskind in UCLA.
He was also one of the pioneers of a scanning probe microscopy.
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.
And then it started feeding the patterns of the traffic of Los Angeles on this way with electrical signals.
As the signals go through, this thing learns why, because you're so small that the signal going through you changes your own structure.
As I told you with the DNA environment changes you.
And if they feed you information suddenly after a after a while, after a few days,
the device would start to predict the patterns of the of the of the traffic in Los Angeles.
So what we're learning here is that the universe encodes in complex, interconnected matter that is receiving signals from the outside world.
Electrical signals, mechanical signals. Chemical signals. The capacity of computing, again, we see this in immunotherapy.
I mean, drugs, I'm working within it with chemotherapy efficiency is very limited, in some cases, very limited.
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.
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.
We use the immune system of our body, our whole cell, the computer power of the whole cells to keep disease.
Nanotechnology finally is becoming useful because when nanoparticles are very bad at killing tumours are not so good.
They're very good at targeting the cells of the immune system because they accumulate in our spleen.
That means nanoparticles can be used as a kind of vaccines or trainers of the immune system,
so the immune system can go and attack the tumour using cells, not just molecules.
And that's why we have the results we have in these days with immunotherapy,
with many people getting complete perversion of their tumour on their under two cancers.
People and technologies are also creating nanopore as materials that work as cancer vaccines.
So you create a little material that you implant near your tumour.
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.
This is what you could call an implantable cancer vaccine. This is under clinical trials right now.
And the last example what I'm telling you the combination not only of nanotechnology,
but all these new science that is emerging in the 21st century that puts together computers,
mathematics, physics and indeed non reductionist approaches to technology are changing the game.
So of course, it's always been a dream of medicine to be able to replace disease, organs or organs that we lose.
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,
this is the nano cables are college in another proteins of your body,
so the cells will stick to them and they feel their mechanical and electrical environment around them.
When you have a disease, what happens when you have a scar, for example, this information at the nanoscale is broken.
The cells don't have information. How to fill in the gap. The start changing the structure that they start churning collagen.
And you end up with the scar tissue. So what we are learning in the last 20 years is that cells,
you can control the way cells behave if you give them mechanical and even electrical signals.
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,
for example, on a plate as hard as bone or a plate as soft as brain.
And you left them these cells, one would turn into bone and the other one would turn into a brain cell.
So people are trying to construct materials that would steer cells to behave the way you want.
So you can create artificial tissues. So there's been some success with cartilage, the press, the press.
You saw the reports, experiments of track hair transplantation.
In this case, you could track yes from a donor. They're not artificially removed the cells and then you can implant them.
You can insert the cells of the patient and then implanted and you get very high success.
This new materials are also starting to be able to reconnect nano materials to reconnect a spinal cord injuries.
And perhaps the most interesting is that people are starting to be able to 3D print organs
using combinations of materials on cells and to use and reproduce organs on a chip.
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.
So just to confirm what I was predicting in my book a couple of weeks ago,
the first liver on a chip has been useful to identify toxicity in human blood and the models of drugs.
This hope of this is that we will not need animal testing in the future.
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
we will be able to continue or better monitor what is happening in your body,
targeting better the things that happen in your body. And it will be the measurements will be a combination of nano probably cells combining
our reductionist approaches with the emergent approaches of using whole cells.
There will be more mathematical model that includes machine learning,
neural networks and indeed the evolutionary history where I culture your smart mathematical mind.
And somehow I was talking the other day to some audience thought we're getting closer to the dream of traditional medicines.
So if you know a little bit of Chinese medicine,
you know that what Chinese medicine is telling you is that the whole body's connected got physics is important,
that you cannot disentangle yourself from the environment and the methods of traditional medicine are usually,
for example, getting your pulse, someone very trained to understand how your whole body is behaving.
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,
trying to get a lot of signals with very clever machine learning algorithms to understand better what is going on in your body.
One of the things I discuss in the book is that all these development,
what is bringing us is to the blurring of the of the boundaries between material sciences and biological sciences.
So people like me will be using nanotech nanoparticles to study biology,
and then I will use the principles of biology to creating materials that don't exist
in nature by understanding how we can get computers with nanowires and computers.
With this line moulds, we might create things that don't exist at all.
And I want to show you this beautiful example is a stingray cyborg stingray that was built by Kevin Parker in Harvard.
It's made of plastic, and inside of the plastic has a lot of harsh cells that have been culture from a mouse.
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.
I think this is quite a prediction of the devices we will have in the future.
You have computer, you have modelling, you have emergent phenomena, you have cells, you have polymers all in one.
People are doing similar things, for example, in IBM, where they making computer chips that no, they are not anymore put down,
but they are also getting the information from from just the structure of what you're putting there.
So to summarise a bit the topics of my talk, I just say that in the 21st century,
we have a convergence of science and technologies in biology that is changing the way we thinking about technology,
the way we think about computing and the way we think about medicine.
And that more and more we are emerging with complexity in computing, in materials, et cetera.
So I tell you a little bit what I do with that I will finish.
So I work here in the physics department and I work in many projects involving nanotechnology, atomic force microscopes and biological systems.
I'm interested in plants. I'm interested in how plants grow and how they create their shape with Jerusalem in Department of Engineering.
We're interested in how neurones couple mechanical and electrical signals to
function to see if we can use ultrasound to treat conditions such as epilepsy.
I work with people in engineering department also to create materials for tissue engineering
and even little micro robots that can be used for moving things around in biology.
Casey was sitting here, is working in my lab and collaborating with Sara.
Walker is also here in understanding how pancreatic tumour actually kills you with physics,
with astrophysics, and we're trying to see if we can treat them to reverse the deadly physics.
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.
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.
I show you a little bit about how my work in plants is leading me to work with other people.
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.
The longest things are surviving on Earth are. They don't have brains and they cannot even run away when the weather is bad.
And the reason is because they have amazing survival computing powers in their structure.
So in their shape and all they have is shape, they're able to encode all the information that allows them their survival.
So I'm very interested in how plants create their shapes.
And when I was working on my plants and my shapes, I made a well.
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.
And he was asking me about graphene, and his question got me thinking in something I had never thought of before.
I'm obsessed with medicine and applications in medicine, but I never thought of constructing big with nanotech.
All I know about constructing nanotech is polymer composites, the sort of things that you make your surfboards with or of fibreglass.
But how you make something as clever as a plant, can you make artificial plants?
So I was looking at his the sculptures, which he has in a park in Japan.
And funnily enough, they have the dimensions of my plants.
I think because he knows he was trying to get them to grow in the shape of a plant.
And I told him, I can't build you anything of nanotech that is good enough because it doesn't exist.
We can make a nano material that creates the amazing mechanical properties of plants.
So I started thinking about wood and how wood is built.
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,
so the pressure builds from the bottom of the plant and the promise pumped tended
to create a shape just by creating structures with nanowires or cellulose.
And then eventually, when you create wood, this solidifies.
So you create an amazing nano material that is able to do all sorts of shapes and endure thousands of years.
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.
So I started to think, can we really construct materials again?
I started to question the things I was questioning you before. Do our reductionist approach good enough to construct the materials of the future?
We need to get rid of concrete. We need to get rid of a steel.
If we are going to save the planet, how do we build the materials of the future?
So I started to think of turning wood into something interesting that doesn't exist in nature, but uses structures.
So I started thinking about making, for example, transparent wood.
This is part of the work we're doing in the lab.
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.
By doing that, we commit we create a material that is translucent or transparent and has better mechanical properties of wood.
So we're mixing our site with nature and also better thermal properties than wood.
And actually, a friend of the sculpture, which is an architect who works for Amanda Levant, architects in London,
who met you may know for the extension of the Victorian Ivory Museum,
asked me if I could give them some ideas because they had been invited to the Venice Biennale of architecture.
And I convinced them to do this.
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.
So to finish, I will make a reflection of what does it mean beyond technology?
So for most of the 20th century biology, we were looking at biology,
talking about genes and talking about proteins like everything else, something we could modify.
We could modify nature, we could produce agriculture just we didn't need to think about what we do with the soil.
We had this idea that our molecules will save us,
but actually we're leaving now in the moment with medicine is a stagnated unless we think differently.
And indeed, we have the climate emergency, which is not brought over.
But this idea of using our technology, just not with nature, but over nature.
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.
We are confronted with the idea that biology did not emerge from nature.
The universe created us. We are entangled with the universe, our intelligence emergence from the entanglement with a universe,
and that the best technologies we can create in the future will be entangle our intelligence with our environment.
So I do think it changes the way we look at nature to transform the way we just do things over biology like we
have seen these days with this guy in China that was doing CRISPR costs in the genes of these poor babies.
And now it turns out today in the press that he didn't even modify the genes he wanted to do.
Or we can actually work with nature in a different way that addresses nature's complexities and the complexities of humans,
entanglement with nature to change the way we do technology and medicine in the future.
So I also think this will bring us a new relationship with the arts,
because what I've been telling you is that we are redefining what we mean by intelligence, what our intelligence comes from.
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.
Perhaps we will start to be able to post them with our science.
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,
because the non-starters culture you have, the emotion of the artist represented or whatever is trying to show in matter, in a structure.
And in the future, we will be able to actually start to understand how intuition or emotions emerge from the complexity of biology.
And I think a sculpture on the arts will be very important.
In interrogating the new science that will be coming from our labs.
So I think in the future, we're going to see not even more mergers between sciences,
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.
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.
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.
So I finish with a sentence of my book, which summarises the intention of the book.
Nature and history are inviting us to communicate and interact with the world in a deeper way,
and hence the response than to expand the human capacity to connect with the universe in a more fruitful way.
And thank you for your attention.
Okay, thank you very much, Sonia, for an absolutely fascinating, stimulating, revelatory presentation and one which leaves me a huge hope,
not least, that we might be able to deal with cancer and many, many other things, but also throwing up different areas of discipline.
We've actually run out of time. You took your full hour. The guys did my computer this five minutes.
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.
OK, so you mentioned that David Baker had won this contest on synthesising proteins by size
and predicting the structure predicting the structure of proteins by using evolution?
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?
Yeah, exactly. So for a long time, people were just trying to get, you know,
your structure and then you just get the electrostatic between then and the physics between then and how it would fall.
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.
You don't have information about the structure. So you know what bits are coming together.
So what he did was to study the evolutionary history of those proteins in many,
many animals in those gene sequences before and then trying to see what genes wearables together.
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,
maybe the bits and your protein on the each other.
So the thing of biological structures is that because they have been created by evolution, they are not just physics.
Physics is part of it, but the whole structure comes because it works.
It works in the environment and encodes what came before you.
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.
And I think it's just the beginning of something with trying to learn that in our algorithms for prediction,
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.
Like if you seek with DNA nanotechnology, with physics alone, you can be very beautiful teddy bears and things like that.
But if you really want to be a virus, you need to do proteins because proteins have evolutionary history in them.
Even their artificial proteins, because you're using the cells to produce them.
That's why I think it's a very radical new way of thinking about computing and also technology,
and we're just starting to understand what it means, I think. So who runs the complexity group in the aunts?
And this is a good president. I know. So that really was fascinating.
Of course, there's much more in the book.
I don't know how you managed to, but you convinced Princeton University Press, which I never succeeded in doing, putting wonderful coloured plates.
So it's a bargain. And this huge mountain.
Sonia, thank you very much. Please do join us for a drink and get a copy of the book right behind you.
Thanks to you all for coming.