You're watching the life cycle of a Streptomyces coelicolor. It's a strain of bacteria that's found in the soil where it lives in a community with other organisms, decomposing organic matter. Coelicolor is a beautiful organism. A powerhouse for synthesizing organic chemical compounds. It produces an antibiotic called actinorhodin, which ranges in color from blue to pink and purple, depending on the acidity of its environment. That it produces these pigment molecules sparked my curiosity and led me to collaborate closely with coelicolor. It is an unlikely partnership, but it's one that completely transformed my practice as a materials designer. From it, I understood how nature was going to completely revolutionize how we design and build our environments, and that organisms like coelicolor were going to help us grow our material future.
你们现在所看到的 是天蓝色链霉菌的生命周期。 这是一种在土壤里面发现的细菌, 它和其他生命体共生, 来分解有机物质。 这种蓝色链霉菌是一种美丽的生命, 是合成有机化合物的重要“工厂”。 它会产生一种名为 放线紫红素的抗生素, 这种抗生素的颜色 会根据土壤的酸度, 由蓝色到粉红色再到紫色之间变换。 它产生这些色素分子的能力 激起了我的好奇, 也让我和这种酶链菌 开始了紧密的合作。 这是一种看似不可能的搭档关系, 但正是它让我彻底地成为了 一位实际意义上的材料设计师。 从这件事里,我明白了大自然 是怎样彻底变革 我们对环境的设计和构造的, 也明白了像链霉菌这样的生物, 将会助力人类打造未来的材料。
So what's wrong with things as they are? Well, for the last century, we've organized ourselves around fossil fuels, arguably, the most valuable material system we have ever known. We are tethered to this resource, and we've crafted a dependency on it that defines our identities, cultures, our ways of making and our economies. But our fossil fuel-based activities are reshaping the earth with a kind of violence that is capable of dramatically changing the climate, of accelerating a loss of biodiversity and even sustaining human conflict. We're living in a world where the denial of this dependence has become deadly. And its reasons are multiple, but they include the privilege of not being affected and what I believe is a profound lack of imagination about how else we could live within the limits of this planet's boundaries.
那么,现有的材料有什么问题呢? 实际上,从上个世纪开始, 我们就围绕着化石燃料 组成了人类社会, 化石燃料可以说是我们所知道 的最有价值的材料系统。 我们离不开这种资源, 还对它产生了依赖, 这种依赖决定了我们的地位、文化, 以及我们生产制造的方式和我们的经济。 但我们基于化石燃料 的种种活动正在重塑地球, 通过一系列能够显著改变 气候的粗暴方式, 我们使物种多样性的衰退加速, 甚至激化了人与人之间的冲突。 我们生活在一个 任何试图拒绝这种依赖的尝试 都是自取灭亡的世界中。 这种状况的成因有很多, 但其中包括了我们免于受 其他物种干涉的特权, 以及,在我看来,我们严重缺乏 对于如何在这个星球的限制下 进行生存繁衍的想象。
Fossil fuels will one day give way to renewable energy. That means we need to find new material systems that are not petroleum-based. I believe that those material systems will be biological, but what matters is how we design and build them. They mustn't perpetuate the destructive legacies of the oil age.
化石能源终究会被可再生能源所代替, 这就意味着我们需要找到一种全新的, 不是基于石油的物质体系。 我相信这个物质体系 将会是关于生物的, 但是真正重要的是如何去 设计和打造这些生物材料。 它们不应继续延续 石油时代的破坏性遗存。
When you look at this image, what do you see? Well, I see a highly sophisticated biological system, that through the use of enzymes, can move and place atoms more quickly and precisely than anything we've ever engineered. And we know that it can do this at scale. Nature has evolved over 3.8 billion years to be able to do this, but now through the use of synthetic biology, an emerging scientific discipline that seeks to customize this functionality of living systems, we can now rapid prototype the assembly of DNA. That means that we can engineer the kind of biological precision that makes it possible to design a bacteria that can recycle metal, to grow fungi into furniture and even sequester renewable energy from algae.
当你们在看这幅图的时候, 你们看到什么了? 我看到了一个高度成熟的生物系统。 通过使用酶, 这些生物能比我们人类 更快速和准确地 移动和放置原子。 我们知道它还能规模化操作。 大自然进化了超过 38 亿年 才能达到这样的地步, 但是现在通过使用合成生物学—— 一门新兴的科学, 能够根据需求定制 一个生命系统的功能—— 我们现在已经可以快速地 制作出 DNA 的相似原型。 这意味着,我们可以 人为地改变生物精度, 使我们能够设计出 能回收金属的细菌、 能在家具中培育真菌的细菌、 甚至是可以从藻类植物上获取 可再生能源的细菌。
To think about how we might access this inherent brilliance of nature -- to build things from living things -- let's consider the biological process of fermentation. I've come to think of fermentation, when harnessed by humans, as an advanced technological toolkit for our survival. When a solid or a liquid ferments, it's chemically broken down by bacterial fungi. The byproduct of this is what we value. So for example, we add yeast to grapes to make wine. Well in nature, these transformations are part of a complex network -- a continuous cycle that redistributes energy. Fermentation gives rise to multispecies interactions of bacteria and fungi, plants, insects, animals and humans: in other words, whole ecosystems. We've known about these powerful microbial interactions for thousands of years. You can see how through the fermentation of grains, vegetal matter and animal products, all peoples and cultures of the world have domesticated microorganisms to make the inedible edible. And there's even evidence that as early as 350 AD, people deliberately fermented foodstuffs that contained antibiotics. The skeletal remains of some Sudanese Nubian were found to contain significant deposits of tetracycline. That's an antibiotic that we use in modern medicine today. And nearly 1500 years later, Alexander Fleming discovered the antimicrobial properties of mold. And it was only through the industrialized fermentation of penicillin that millions could survive infectious diseases. Fermentation could once again play an important role in our human development. Could it represent a new mode of survival if we harness it to completely change our industries?
在考虑如何获取这种大自然的宝藏, 即在活的生命体上构造新事物时, 我们应该先来看看发酵的生物过程。 我认为,在被人类利用以后, 发酵就成了 保障人类生存的先进工具。 当一个固体或者液体物质被发酵时, 它实际上是被细菌化学分解了。 在这个过程中产生的副产品 正是我们所需的。 例如,我们酿造红酒时 在葡萄中加酵母。 当然在大自然中,这种转变只是 错综复杂的关系网中的一部分, 这种网络是一种重新分配能源 的周而复始的循环。 发酵促成了跨越多个物种的互动: 从细菌和真菌, 到植物、昆虫、动物和人类: 换句话说,是整个生态系统的互动。 我们了解这些强大的微生物相互作用 已经有上千年历史了。 你可以观察到通过对谷物、 果蔬和动物制品进行发酵, 世界上的所有民族和文化 都在利用微生物 让不能吃的东西变得可以食用。 而且有证据表明,早在公元 350 年 人类就开始有意发酵 含有抗生素的食物。 在苏丹努比亚人的遗骸中 发现了很明显的四环素沉积现象, 这是一种我们现代社会 也在用的抗生素。 1500 年之后, 亚历山大·费莱明发现了 有抗菌特质的霉菌。 只需要通过工业的青霉素发酵, 就能让数百万人 从传染病中存活下来。 在人类的发展史中, 发酵一次又一次发挥了重要作用。 如果我们利用生物 来彻底改变我们的工业, 这种改变的结果能否成为 一种新的生产方式?
I've worked in my creative career to develop new material systems for the textile industry. And while it is work that I love, I cannot reconcile with the fact that the textile industry is one of the most polluting in the world. Most of the ecological harm caused by textile processing occurs at the finishing and the dyeing stage. Processing textiles requires huge amounts of water. And since the oil age completely transformed the textile industry, many of the materials and the chemicals used to process them are petroleum based. And so coupled with our insatiable appetite for fast fashion, a huge amount of textile waste is ending up in landfill every year because it remains notoriously difficult to recycle. So again, contrast this with biology. Evolved over 3.8 billion years, to rapid prototype, to recycle and to replenish better than any system we've ever engineered.
我一直在致力于为纺织工业 开拓新的材料系统。 尽管这是我热爱的工作, 但是我不得不承认纺织行业 是最污染环境的行业之一 的这个事实。 大部分纺织品加工过程中 造成的生态破环 都出现在后期和染色阶段。 不仅因为生产纺织品 的过程需要大量的水。 而且自从石油时代 完全改变纺织行业以来, 很多用于生产的原材料 和加工用的化学物质 都是来源于石油的。 再加上我们对快时尚的贪得无厌, 导致大量的纺织废弃物 年复一年地被填埋, 这是因为这些废旧时尚品 很难被回收利用。 再一次把现有工业 和生物工业比较一下。 后者是个已经进化了 38 亿年, 能快速生产原型, 进行回收和补充的系统, 胜过我们既往设计的一切系统。
I was inspired by this immense potential and wanted to explore it through a seemingly simple question -- at the time. If a bacteria produces a pigment, how do we work with it to dye textiles? Well, one of my favorite ways is to grow Streptomyces coelicolor directly onto silk. You can see how each colony produces pigment around its own territory. Now, if you add many, many cells, they generate enough dyestuff to saturate the entire cloth. Now, the magical thing about dyeing textiles in this way -- this sort of direct fermentation when you add the bacteria directly onto the silk -- is that to dye one t-shirt, the bacteria survive on just 200 milliliters of water. And you can see how this process generates very little runoff and produces a colorfast pigment without the use of any chemicals.
我曾被它巨大的潜力所启发, 希望借由当时一个 看起来比较简明的问题 去探索它。 如果一个细菌可以产出一种色素 那我们如何将它运用于布料染色呢? 我最喜欢的方式之一是 直接在丝绸上种植天蓝色链霉菌。 你会看到这些小殖民者们 是如何在自己的领土上发挥作用的。 接着,如果你再添加很多很多的细胞, 他们就能产出足够 浸染整块布料的染料。 关于用这种染色方式神奇的一点是, 通过这种直接的发酵, 即你直接将细菌放在丝绸上后, 如果你要为一件T恤染色, 那么只需要给细菌们 提供 200 毫升的水。 你可以看到这个过程 只需要非常少的水量, 而且不用任何的化学药品 即可生成永不褪色的染料。
So now you're thinking -- and you're thinking right -- an inherent problem associated with designing with a living system is: How do you guide a medium that has a life force of its own? Well, once you've established the baseline for cultivating Streptomyces so that it consistently produces enough pigment, you can turn to twisting, folding, clamping, dipping, spraying, submerging -- all of these begin to inform the aesthetics of coelicolor's activity. And using them in a systematic way enables us to be able to generate an organic pattern ... a uniform dye ... and even a graphic print.
现在你可能会想—— 对,你们想的是对的—— 伴随着设计一个有生命的系统 而来的问题是: 人类要如何去驾驭 一个有着生命力的媒介? 事实上,一旦你提供了 链霉菌生长的基本条件, 使它能持续产生足够的染料, 你就可以开始拧、叠、 夹、沾、喷、 浸…… 等所有这些能形成 天蓝色链菌酶分布的美感的操作。 通过系统化地使用它们, 我们可以诱导一个有机图像、 一种均匀分布, 甚至一个特定画面的产生。
Another problem is how to scale these artisanal methods of making so that we can start to use them in industry. When we talk about scale, we consider two things in parallel: scaling the biology, and then scaling the tools and the processes required to work with the biology. If we can do this, then we can move what happens on a petri dish so that it can meet the human scale, and then hopefully the architecture of our environments.
另外一个问题是, 如何让这些手工制作方法大规模化, 从而使我们得以将其 应用在工业生产中。 当我们讲到大规模化时, 我们会同时想到两件事: 让生物生长大规模化, 以及与生物打交道时 所需的工具和流程的规模化。 如果我们能做到这些, 我们就能把在培养皿上的东西 变成能满足人类需求的规模, 甚至有望满足整个生态架构的需求。
If Fleming were alive today, this would definitely be a part of his toolkit. You're looking at our current best guess of how to scale biology. It's a bioreactor; a kind of microorganism brewery that contains yeasts that have been engineered to produce specific commodity chemicals and compounds like fragrances and flavors. It's actually connected to a suite of automated hardware and software that read in real time and feed back to a design team the growth conditions of the microbe. So we can use this system to model the growth characteristics of an organism like coelicolor to see how it would ferment at 50,000 liters.
如果费莱明还在世, 这些东西肯定在他的工具包里。 你所看到的就是我们目前 在规模生物学上 最好的猜想。 这是一个生物反应器; 就像一个包含酵母菌 的微生物酿酒厂。 那些酵母菌被设定产出 特定的化学商品和成分, 例如香氛和香料。 它实际上是与一套实时读取参数的 自动化硬件和软件相连的, 会把微生物的生长情况 反馈给设计团队。 我们可以用这套系统 去模拟细菌群落的生长情况、 去观察它们如何在 5 万升水里发酵。
I'm currently based at Ginkgo Bioworks, which is a biotechnology startup in Boston. I am working to see how their platform for scaling biology interfaces with my artisanal methods of designing with bacteria for textiles. We're doing things like engineering Streptomyces coelicolor to see if it can produce more pigment. And we're even looking at the tools for synthetic biology. Tools that have been designed specifically to automate synthetic biology to see how they could adapt to become tools to print and dye textiles. I'm also leveraging digital fabrication, because the tools that I need to work with Streptomyces coelicolor don't actually exist. So in this case -- in the last week actually, I've just designed a petri dish that is engineered to produce a bespoke print on a whole garment. We're making lots of kimonos.
我目前工作于 银杏生物工作室(Ginkgo Bioworks), 一家位于波士顿的生物技术初创公司。 我正在努力研究他们的生物扩展平台 如何与我的手工设计 纺织品细菌的方法对接。 我们正在研究天蓝色链霉菌 能否产生更多的染料。 我们甚至还在 人工合成生物领域寻找工具。 寻找那些被特定设计为 自动人工合成生物的工具, 能否被改造,为印刷 和染色纺织品所用。 同时我也借助了数字制造, 因为我所需要用来研究 天蓝色链霉菌的工具 其实并不存在。 在这种情况下—— 其实就在上个星期, 我设计了一个培育皿, 它能在一整件成衣上 制造出定制的印刷图案。 我们在制作大量的和服。
Here's the exciting thing: I'm not alone. There are others who are building capacity in this field, like MycoWorks. MycoWorks is a startup that wants to replace animal leather with mushroom leather, a versatile, high-performance material that has applications beyond textiles and into product and architecture. And Bolt Threads -- they've engineered a yeast to produce spider-silk protein that can be spun into a highly programmable yarn. So think water resistance, stretchability and superstrength. To reach economies of scale, these kinds of startups are having to build and design and engineer the infrastructure to work with biology. For example, Bolt Threads have had to engage in some extreme biomimicry. To be able to spin the product this yeast creates into a yarn, they've engineered a yarn-making machine that mimics the physiological conditions under which spiders ordinarily spin their own silk.
让人激动的是: 除了我之外, 还有其他在这个领域有所建树的群体, 例如 MycoWorks。 MycoWorks 是一家立志 用蘑菇革质来代替 动物皮革的初创公司, 蘑菇革质是一种多功能, 高性能的材料, 它在生产和建筑上比纺织物用途更广。 还有 Bolt Threads —— 他们发明出一种 能生产蛛丝蛋白的酵母菌, 蛛丝蛋白可以纺成 高度可定制的纱线, 有着防水、 高延展性和超强韧性的特性。 为了达到经济上的规模化, 这些公司就必须建造和设计 能进行生物工程的基础设施。 比如, Bolt Threads 必须在 一些极致的仿生上下功夫。 为了能让酵母产生的蛋白纺成纱线, 他们设计出了一个纺纱机器。 它能根据蜘蛛吐丝时的真实情景 模仿对应的生理条件。
So you can start to see how imaginative and inspiring modes of making exist in nature that we can use to build capacity around new bio-based industries. What we now have is the technology to design, build, test and scale these capabilities. At this present moment, as we face the ecological crisis in front of us, what we have to do is to determine how we're going to build these new material systems so that they don't mirror the damaging legacies of the oil age. How we're going to distribute them to ensure a sustainable development that is fair and equitable across the world. And crucially, how we would like the regulatory and ethical frameworks that govern these technologies to interact with our society.
所以,你们已经可以看出, 在开拓生物工程的领土时, 有那么多富于想象力和启迪性的模式。 我们现在所拥有的是 设计、建造、测试和扩展领土的能力。 在当前这个时刻, 我们正面临生态危机, 我们必须要 决定如何建立新的材料系统, 来免于重蹈石油时代的覆辙。 我们又该如何分配它们, 以在全球范围内公平地 实现可持续发展。 还有更重要的是, 我们要怎么让这些技术 的监管和道德框架 与我们的社会交互。
Biotechnology is going to touch every part of our lived experience. It is living; it is digital; it is designed, and it can be crafted. This is a material future that we must be bold enough to shape.
生物技术将会涉及到 我们生活的方方面面。 它是鲜活的, 也是数字化的, 它可以被设计,也可以被雕琢。 这就是材料的未来, 我们必须坚定不移地塑造它。
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
(掌声)