28. Flower Design and DIY Bio w/ Sebastian Cocioba

In this episode, we talk to Sebastian Cocioba, a self-taught, independent researcher who designs flowers and develops tools that lower the entry barrier for others to do biology research. We talk with Sebastian about his unique path to Engineering Biology, his experience with DIY biology, the importance of open science, the role of citizen scientists in engineering biology, and much more!

During the episode, Sebastian mentions that he recently started a YouTube channel, which you can find here.

https://www.youtube.com/@ATinyGreenCell

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Episode transcripts are the unedited output from Whisper and likely contain errors.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to EBRC and Translation. We're a group of graduate students and postdocs working to bring you conversations with members of the engineering biology community. I'm Andrew Hunt, a postdoc in the Baker Lab at the University of Washington. And I'm Ais to visit Ketisewi, a recent graduate from the PhD program in molecular engineering and sciences at University of Washington, from Ketis and Salson Lab at the moment. Today we are talking to Sebastian Kuchoba, who is a self-taught MSU biologist whose research focuses on plant engineering and the development of tools that lower the entry barrier for others to do biology research. Sebastian is also a vocal proponent of open source and DIY biology. Thanks so much for joining us today. My pleasure. So just to get us started, could you tell us a bit about your background, your journey into synthetic biology and really what first got you interested in doing research yourself? Okay. So full disclosure, I hold no formal degree. I'm entirely self-taught. I'm a self-described amateur biologist with a focus on plant bioengineering. And where everything started, that's a great question. Every time I get asked this question, I always kind of try to go a little bit further back. But honestly, I'm a biotech immigrant, right? So I was like coming in as synthetic biology was really getting its like sea legs and whatnot. And so I started the earliest I could remember like my first restriction digest was like in 2011 or something like that, right? And I had like no idea what I was doing. I've always wanted to science in some capacity. I found the craft really fascinating, like the actual hand motions, the kinesiological aesthetics. Before I had all of the intellectual curiosity of it, I just felt like that was something I wanted to do. And I felt it like a very manual way to like tease knowledge out of the ether and turn it into something tangible. And so this is obviously like in hindsight with 2020 looking back, but plants were always like a big focus for me just because they're everywhere. They're so morphologically diverse. And I didn't know I was so attracted to morphological diversity until much later on. But like I didn't realize that that was the case. Because when people asked us like, oh, why flowers? The immediate response was that they're so different, right? Like of the plant, the flowering organ is one of the most morphologically diverse tissues on earth, right? Of all living things. And it's just so interesting to see like a pragmatic system that sips starlight and then all of a sudden you have this flamboyance, this expression, right? And that just captivated me all the time. Every time I saw a flower in bloom, it would just stop me in my tracks because it was just such a departure from my day-to-day life, right? And just like all the things I see, all the static of gray things and glass and metal and just like the kind of the banalities of day-to-day life and all of a sudden you see this bloom, right? And it just whenever I'm walking down the street, I'm always looking down at the weeds, at the weirdos on the corners just because there's so much like untapped biodiversity that we haven't really explored. And the more I learn about it, the more I'm interested in it. So looking back in hindsight, the real thing was just I want to explore. And I noticed that my biggest attraction are in the things that people don't really care about. And I realized later on in life that I don't have to justify liking things that people don't care about. Yeah. And so I'm interested in the weird flowering types, right? There's like 450,000 land plant species on earth and maybe 300 are in the market, right? And we get exposed to like the canonical things. Like you ask a kid, draw a flower and it's like almost always kind of a daisy, right? With like a random assortment of petal count. But I'm more interested in just like how plastic the morphology is and how far it can go and then how far we as humans can push that even further by tweaking stuff. And so I didn't know I was able to tweak stuff. I thought I would just at most could just like breed plants together in the same family and then just kind of be in the passenger seat of evolution, right? I've just seen here's the splendor of nature and I can just go like, wow, that's really cool, right? And just kind of process that and experience it from like a spectator sport, right? I had no idea I could poke around. And then my very short stint at university, I was a bio major and that's when I kind of got bit by the research bug because I was at a university where there wasn't that many, for me personally, interesting like research focuses. A lot of it was just medical research, cancer, HIV, HIV, cancer, cancer, cancer. And there was this one plant lab and it was like, cool. During high school, I was flipping orchids to kind of just have some pocket change. I learned from growing orchids to tissue culturing them. I made like a small grow box flow hood so that you can actually do sterile technique. And eventually that skill actually translated to me immediately getting a research technician position at that lab. So I went in and they're just like, why are you here? And they said, I told them just like, I really like plants and I have to do research in order for me to graduate. So I would love to do research in your lab because it's not medical stuff, which I'm not interested in. And he was just like, oh God, you're not a pre-med. Thank God. Yes. Okay. Let's do this. And so immediately I got thrown, like a research paper hit my face and just like, here, replicate this. We're trying to develop a protocol. And he's like, do I have to respond to anyone or do anything? He's like, no, no, you're free. Just do the thing. And that was my first taste of like that academic freedom. And it's like, wait, I'm at the helm of my own ship. And he's like, kinda sure. You have your project, do the project. And that changed my life. And I'm just like, okay, I want to do this. And then some family and financial stuff happened that I had to drop out of university, but the research bugs still bit me really hard. And so at that point, I'm just like, can you do this at home? Like first legally, can you do this at home? Right. So like checking into like biosafety level one and what the legislature is and like actually at one point had to hire a lawyer to figure out is this possible? Am I breaking law? Right. And so like biosafety level one laws in the US are kind of this weird gray area where no one says you can or can't do this as long as it's BSL one. Right. And so I stay in that gray area and you know, I adopted the NIH guidelines for recombinant work as my de facto law. Right. And so everything I work with, I dispose of properly. I get my automatically validated every six months, et cetera, et cetera. It just happens to be in the, you know, a room adjacent to my bedroom. And yeah, that was like ever since then, I've just been so fascinating. The more I learn about plants, the more I want to do more with them. Right. And it just happens to be that I don't shut up about my work. And then the social media thing happened where scientists that I follow and kind of fanboy about were just like, hey, do you want to work on a project together? And that just blew my mind. I didn't even know that was possible. Right. And so now I'm sitting here with like a couple papers in the pipeline, a couple already published and just, you know, I guess I'm a biologist now. Right. And that just kind of dawned on me. Like, I was like, okay, I guess I can do science, I guess. Right. Like I have enough of a tangible skill to be able to do that. And however I got here is not really a reproducible path because it's super precarious. And I relied a lot on the kindness of strangers in order for me to kind of move somewhere. I don't know if it's up or vertical or orthogonal. I don't know in which direction my career went, but my own career as I call it. But yeah, no, it's been a really insane ride, but it's very, very fun. And very cool. Thank you for sharing all that. Very fascinating. I really love how much aesthetics really played a role early on and just driving the interest. I feel like, I don't know, you don't get to hear about that part of it enough. Yeah. It's my research focus, so I get to choose which direction. And aesthetics is the biggest driving force for everything I do. Yeah, absolutely. So you tell us about how you got started, but as an amateur biologist and designer, what is your long-term goals and aspirations? And if you can tell us a little bit about what projects you are currently working on, that would be great. Sure. That's a fun question. So I want to be a flower designer when I grow up, if I grow up. If I ever get to that point. And so I want to be an artist. I want to use the flower as my canvas and sculpt and paint and do all kinds of stuff and maybe find my voice. I don't know. I've always been struggling with figuring out what my voice is. I tried a couple of musical instruments, I tried a couple of different forms of art to try to express myself. And a bit of an introvert, I don't like myself being loud. And I find that there's this quiet meditative practice in the craft of biology that I really love. And the aspect of being a flower designer is something that at first I thought it was just kind of silly. Just like, yeah, I want to be a flower designer. And now I want to be a flower designer. I actually want to do this. And so my long-term goals is developing not just a tool set, but the eloquence in the material. So in order to become a good painter, you have to paint. You have to paint a lot. You have to never stop painting. And I see this as no different. I do transformations every day. I do these type of things and not in a monastic discipline type of way, but just always engaging with the medium. And so my biggest long-term goal is actually finding my canvas organism. So I'm looking for the thing to paint onto. I have a list that it's slowly starting to get a little bit more specific of what kind of flower do I want to paint on or sculpt with. Because if you look at insect galls, a little bit of a tangent, there are these insects and mites and bacteria that all can form these strange little tumors on leaves and on plants. And certain species of insects, when they lay these eggs, the working theory is that the eggs secrete hormones and some type of an effector over time. And it reprograms the cells to produce these crazy structures. And when you look at those structures, you're like, okay, it's a ball. It's a star. That's kind of weird. And you cut into it and you see these superstructures inside. It's super elaborate and it's wild. And these are kind of ordinary. I don't want to say ordinary in that sense, but otherwise visibly simple plants, like an oak leaf. And then you have this crazy hairy star thing that's multidimensional. It boggles the mind how hormones over time can reprogram the shape in order to get to that point. And so it kind of dawned on me that the morphological plasticity of any one plant is enormous, right? That the shape space of these plants are so massive that maybe I don't have to hunt for what's the flower that looks almost like what I want to make and rather just have a bunch of characteristics of what I consider a model organism. So can I interface with it quickly? Are the petals large, right? I'm looking for large white petals because a lot of the stuff I do is color and I want to have enough of a blank canvas to express those subtle hues and stuff. And so can I interface with it? Is it known? I don't really care too much about how much of a model it is. It's just like, can I poke around inside and is it amenable to tissue culture? Everything else I'm willing to invest years and years, even decades of my life, to make sure that I know this thing. It's just that's the most important short-term goal. Do I have a canvas, right? So it's like I want to be an oil painter, but I have no pigments. I have no mine access and I have no cotton to stretch a canvas, right? So it's as fundamental as I want to do oil painting, I'm a caveman, right? So how do we get from one point to another? And since a lot of this I've been on my own for the majority of my ride, it's very much kind of a self-reliance type of situation. Like, okay, can I interface with any organism? Yes. Can I transform plants? Yes. What are the caveats? Eventually I have a complaint list, honestly. I'm just like, okay, I don't like rabidopsis because it does this. I don't like tobacco because it does this. My major goal is like, what am I painting on? So maybe I'll spend my whole life just looking for what to paint on. And I've come to terms with that. Maybe I was born like maybe 50 years too soon and the tools and the accessibility and the momentum necessary, not just resources, but just like the knowledge base necessary to interface at the level I want to, that level of abstraction is maybe not there yet, but I'm willing to build those tools. So my favorite project, my current project that I absolutely love, I call it Flowers for Everyone. Flowers for Everyone. And the main goal behind this is to develop a tool chain that is devoid of antibiotics and herbicides, right? So you want to be able to do molecular cloning in E. coli, shuttle vectors into agrobacterium, and then from agrobacterium transform plants, and then select the plants with no herbicides or antibiotics end to end, right? Which kind of goes against the conventional way of doing it, which requires antibiotics at every step when you're doing selection, when you're doing cloning, et cetera, et cetera. And the reason for that is access, right? So in the US, you can get Kenomycin essentially off the shelf as aquarium medicine, right? And that's like a life-saving frontline antibiotic. And in many countries, that's regulated. And in some places, schools don't have access to these kinds of things, right? They're expensive. You need cold chain, et cetera, et cetera. And so for me, the most important thing is not just that I do something. That's kind of boring. It's that I can enable others to do it, too, right? Because I realized that I might not be able to ever get to my stretch goal, right? To like be a flower designer. So why not train folks along the way so that we can kind of get there together? It's kind of distributing the labor pool in a way. And so I just made some progress like the last two weeks that I'm super excited about because it's a proof of concept that that first selection thing works, right? That you can do sugar selection. Yay. And now it's like kind of playing molecular biology in hard mode because I can't rely on the conventional tools. And so I have to like change the way I kind of move and the way I have my workflow and all that. And I'm documenting everything in real time, kind of live tweeting the whole process, and everything's entirely open source. I don't care if someone, quote unquote, scoops me, like whatever. As long as it exists, I don't care. And yeah, it's as boring as it may sound, my favorite project and my current project is like stretching the canvas, right? So that other people can paint on. That makes a ton of sense. Yeah. I really like the way that you, you know, explain how you want to paint the canvas or like physically like paint a flower. Because like it is both serve as an analogy to like what you want to do. And so like you're doing it physically, which is, you know, as a biologist, like we usually don't think about painting that much. Even though like there are like some bio art and other things around. That's fascinating. So you've already mentioned that you sort of do the majority of your research sort of in a room next to where you are currently taking this call at. And so could you tell us a little bit about sort of what your experience is like in your home research lab and like tell us about the lab and maybe also tell us about binomica labs, which is a nonprofit research organization that you've started as well. Yeah, sure. So my home lab started as a kind of like under the bedroom, under the bed with a microscope type of thing, like really early on. Before it was a lab, it was just like a place where my microscope lived. And a lot of my stuff was observational because again, at that time I had no idea I could poke and prod and do stuff, right? The concept of biotechnology was just so foreign and so decoupled from what I thought was even possible that it just, it wasn't in my mind. So for a very long time, it was very observational. And after I got my research bug bite, I'm just like, okay, I need a PCR machine. I need it like right now. And you know, I hit the immediate roadblocks of like the standard folks who are suppliers to university labs are just like, is that a residential address? Absolutely not, right? And so spending hours and hours and hours finding folks that do ship to residential places. And I have paper trails of like email communications going, hey, this is an apartment when I used to live in an apartment. Is this cool? And they're just like, yeah, that's totally fine. We won't ship the things that are bad. I'm like, cool, thank you for screening. And yeah, and the nice part about it is just like a lot of the plant work is fairly cheap, right? Like plant media is exceptionally cheap in terms of in comparison to like mammalian stuff, God forbid. And yeah, and slowly but surely started accruing enough of the stuff to be able to do like routine microbiome and molecular bio stuff. So like run a gel, run a PCR, visualize the gel. And all along the way, eBay was a godsend for me. I was able to purchase equipment that are like broken, taught myself a little bit of electrical engineering enough to like fix the power supplies because chances are whenever you buy something that says broken as is and it's science equipment, it's like a blown fuse or a dead capacitor, something pretty simple. And that eventually became a way for me to like pay forward to like be able to buy up certain kinds of equipment. I would like flip equipment for like about two years where I'd buy a PCR machine, fix it up and sell it and run a gel to prove that it works. So like added value. And that eventually I like kept the best ones for myself and kept on flipping. And eventually that flipping was taking up so much of my time. I'm like, all right, gotta slow down a little bit, right? Cause it's very easy for amateur bio folks to kind of fall into this equipment fetishism where you're like, you need the best stuff to do the best science. And I'm just like, do you have a research question? Right? So yeah, so currently my home lab now is enough to do basic molecular biology as it would be like a university teaching lab, right? A little bit fancier because now I pay the bills exclusively using my home lab, right? So I have a biolistics delivery, gene gun, whatever, laminar flow hood, an open trons that was very kindly donated by the open trons folks. Thanks guys. And a couple others, slightly more fancy pieces of equipment, but along the way I've also realized that so much of the fancy equipment is fancy in price and not necessarily an execution. So I learned, I now use what I know and what I learned from electrical stuff to build my own tools and then validate them on the fancy equipment to show that they're of equivalent function and then be able to distribute that open source. Because I realized like eBay is not what eBay used to be. People have wisen up, the prices went through the roof, inflation, yada yada. So it's very difficult to find like very, very good machines unless you know what you're looking for, right? So I try when folks, I get a question almost at least once a week, people saying, where do I start? And I'm like, always start with a question. Please don't do the generalist track that I did because I thought I needed the equipment and then the question would come, right? That was a huge mistake on my part because then I ended up with a whole bunch of crap that I didn't really need and spent a ton of time and a ton of money on just acquiring, right? And so like I went through this like Dunning-Kruger effect of equipment procurement, right? Where you get like a gear procurement, gear acquisition syndrome is what musicians call it, where you just get a whole bunch of stuff. And I realized it's not the stuff, it's the question. And forming a project or like building a lab around a question is actually what I give like anybody who wants to try to do this. Like that's my main point of advice is like build your lab around a research question that you're passionate about. But yeah, now like my day to day, a lot of my contract work is milestone based. So the faster I do it, the faster I get to the next milestone. It's not necessarily hourly based. And so sometimes I run a gel in the middle of the night, set up a PCR, wake up in the middle of the night and then run the gel and go back to sleep because it's right there. But yeah, I mean, it's really interesting in just a quiet meditative experience at the helm of your ship. It's just the ship is full of no one but you. So it does get a little bit lonely sometimes in terms of not being able to have that academic bounce of ideas and just being in a place where thinking is at the forefront. And so I'm chronically online as a result, right? Like my water cooler conversations and my lab meetings are online with people I've never met essentially. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So you did mention that you've been contributing to the peer review publications and I believe like you are also like serving as both an author and also every mover for these processes. So like in your opinion as an independent researcher, what do you want your research outputs to be? Do you want it to be this kind of publication or do you want it to be something like some other forms? I got you. So this is where I'm going to wax poetic a little bit, but for me, biology, biological research, it's jazz, right? And it's a publication and like working on an article is like jamming with your friends or writing a song with your friends. Reading an article from a lab that you follow is like listening to your friend's band just drop the new album and you want to just listen to it. And so I want to work on things that I find genuinely interesting and cool because I'm also more often than not the academic collaborations are obviously unpaid, right? Like there's zero budget allotment for any type of salary or anything like that. So I'll say yes to projects that I think are cool, right? That just vibe well. It's still very aesthetic. And so for my personal research practice, I want to have as much impact as possible, not impact factor, not publication track record, because I'm not competing for grants here. Like I run on a shoestring budget and it's okay if this is my life, right? But from a perspective of what my output is, honestly, like preprints is what I'm gunning for. Like I'd love for my work to just exist as preprints and if possible, refereed preprints, big fan of like review commons and that type of practice. I have no interest in like large scale publication journal people. If I'm invited and to be co-author on a paper that happens to, I don't know, end up in nature or something, that's incredible. Sure. Like I'm absolutely honored to partake. Immediately, the imposter syndrome would kick in super hard. But yeah, but the core concept is I want my research to be as accessible as possible and to be able to reach as many people as possible. Not like force people to read an arbitrary thing that I find interesting, but more like utility. Like I'm a methods researcher really, because I didn't know how to do stuff. So I got good at learning how to do stuff. And like protocol development has become the core of my real research output. And so I'd love to do more like classical biological research, a lot of like theory craft. But honestly, I feel like the holes in my knowledge base are not filled enough for me to feel confident on that end. And so a lot of my work defaults to methods research. And if that's the case, I want my methods to be as accessible as possible, as human readable as possible, newly as machine parsable as possible, if that's a thing, right? Like I have my quirks with AI, but it also is kind of good to feed the machine god sometimes. And so figuring out that balance in a manner that is like, hey, I saw your protocol on Twitter. How do I cite you? Like that's a question. So I'm exploring like Zenodo or Figshare ways to kind of make it citable. So it mingles in with the current academic publishing system so that it's less about getting credit, but more about like, here is something you can access that's archived by our government until the heat death of the universe, right? Like I think archiving an amateur biologist's work is super important because or else your blog dies with you and that work just kind of poofs, right? So like indexable deliverable research is something that I'm really passionate about. And that's why I try to tell as many amateur biologists as possible is to like write it down, but also like archive it, right? Like put it on Zenodo, get a research note, get something really small by archive. It doesn't matter what it is, just put it out there, right? CB Yeah. A lot of those things resonate with me sitting in a standard academic institution too. I feel like we should be archiving and writing down a bit more of what we're doing regardless. You mentioned it a bit earlier too, but I wanted to touch a little more on social media and how much of a role that plays in your research. So we heard about you because you're very active on Twitter and it's very fun to see you putting your work out there and also commenting on other things going on. So can you talk a bit about how Twitter and other things have impacted your work? Yeah. I mean, it's not the platform, it's the people. And the people on that tiny bubble we call Science Twitter are some of the warmest and most welcoming people I've ever met. I would think that somebody who is such an outsider, who has no means of having three letters after his name to kind of immediately validate one's expertise and stuff like that, the fact that they treat me with even like a student mentor type of dynamic was really unexpected. But to be offered to be a collaborator of people asking advice for me, that was really unexpected. And I still struggle with that because I'm just like, okay, did I tell them the right thing? It makes me second guess my own understanding because these people are fancy formally trained academics and they're like, hey, how'd you do your competent self thing? That looked really good. I was like, okay. Okay, fancy tenured professor. But really, I mean, Science Twitter shaped my own career in ways that I can't really describe. The overwhelming bulk, if not the vast majority of all the collaborations I had were through engagement through Twitter. So I'm kind of a universal fanboy. I love Science so much and seeing people post things out. I love amplifying that. I especially love that since I built a fairly okay amount of following, I can then amplify early career researchers papers who don't have that network. And you have somebody with like three followers that all of a sudden get inundated with questions and stuff like that because that happened to be a retweet from a larger account. And so like working that algorithm so that the community kind of sees these papers is also just as important. And I find that from how much I benefited from social media, I feel it like kind of my duty to kind of pay it forward and be able to amplify those voices. And I mean, I've personally seen a couple of folks land jobs because I helped make a connection with somebody that I collaborated with or something like that. And that's incredible. Like that's such a rewarding feeling to feel that I've had an impact on someone's life even though I'm just some clown in New York hanging out in his bedroom lab. But yeah, the social media is literally the engine that drives a lot of my collaborative research and how I immediately – I like live tweeting my work and I try to make it a point to never ever think about getting scooped because so many people have told me to like, oh, you should really keep a lot of those ideas to your chest and only talk about it once it's published. I'm like, I'd rather jam in a garage band with the garage doors open. Right? And there's something incredibly liberating to just work in the open. And not from like this weird like narcissistic, I want all eyes on me type of thing, but like the questions that you get and the things that people take away from. Like I've gotten messages, DMs from people going, hey, I love your feed. I actually learned a ton, right? Or like, hey, I actually utilized one of your protocols in this paper. I'd love to give you a special thanks or something like that, right? So like immediate impact, immediate peer review. I post something and someone's like, hey, you should try this instead. And it actually fixes my experimental woes, right? So it's that instantaneous peer review from peers with no rhyme or reason to be able to – have to interact with my work. They just want to, right? So it's like this purely kind of casual science, casual community facing science. And I love that. And that's how I utilize social media most is through that kind of – it's the portal in which I scream into the void of what I'm doing. And sometimes people scream back and it's kind of cool. Yeah. I really love that. It's so fun to hear that you can use it to sort of get some of those interactions that you would maybe otherwise have in person. And yeah, that all sounds great. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, like we are, we are like, you know, a fan of your tweeters and like, you know, the conversation that you started, that's so great. And like on that, there was one tweet about you using a salad spinner as a micro centrifuge, something like that, which we love a lot. And like, you know, there are a lot of like other custom made lab equipments that you shared. So we just wonder what, what are some of your, you know, like most favorite or maybe like most useful pieces of the DIY equipments in your, you know, bedroom lab? Like, you know, can you mention a few? Yeah, of course. I'm really partial to the more electronic equipment that I make. And I mean, at first I realized like tube racks are very expensive and sometimes you need to tube at a very particular angle and you're like Googling for an hour going like 33 degree PCR tube holder possible, right? And you realize it's not there. And so one of the most empowering technologies for me as an independent researcher is having a high quality 3D printer. Like that has changed the game for me from everything from just like having a design to product to a tangible tool in just like less than a day to all the way up to actually having something that I can have as like a robotic side hustle where I can sell some of the tools myself. And that's not only like economically empowering, but also it just, it motivates me to make more of these tools because I realize if I find it useful, someone else might as well, right? Cause we're all facing kind of the same interface, right? Tiny drops of liquid in tubes that we pray is what we think it is, right? And so one of the tools that I love most, it's the mini specs, right? So I made these little bacterial turbidometers that you put these little glass tubes inside and 15 mil of media and you pop it in an incubator shaker and it reads the optical density as it grows every second for as long as you want, right? And so you get these like really beautiful high resolution growth curves and that actually came out of just exhaustion really, because I was doing traditional growth curves where you take a mil out of a culture every hour and you plot those points and I stayed up for like 36 hours and like, this is awful. I don't want to science anymore. I did that a couple times and I said, okay, there must be a better way. There has to be, right? And so like I'm looking at the device. I don't know enough about spectrophotometers, but I do notice that we have to read at 600 nanometers. And I'm like, why do we have to read at 600 nanometers? And that ended up being that a lot of the media is optically transparent at 600 because that's orange light going through orange media, right? Cool. Makes sense. And I'm like, can you find other lights? Or more importantly, does it have to be fancy spectrophotometer grading physics level stuff? And the answer is no. You can have LEDs that have a dominant wavelength exactly at 600 nanometers and then like a light sensor. And through the wonders of like open source things like Arduino, you can cobble together a device that does the same thing. And then as long as you can calibrate the thing, it really doesn't matter, right? And so that I made my first growth curve, a high resolution growth curve using that first device. And the first thing I saw in LB media was this tiny blip as it goes into exponential phase. And I'm just like, what's that? And I thought like my dog bumped into the shaker or something happened. I messed up somehow, right? It's just sensor noise. And so I repeated it with my research partner over and over and over and over again. And after like 70 growth curves with slight variations, we're like, okay, this is real. And it turns out it's just like this tiny little anomaly at the beginning of LB exponential growth in specific cell lines. And we want to write a paper up on it, right? Just because it's just like this little thing that we just happen to notice if you just look for more than one sample per hour. And that opened up this entire thing about diving into Jacques Monod's PhD thesis on dioxic curves. And like now we're doing a long-term media study where we're reproducing his entire PhD thesis, but with modern tools. And so like that one little tool that I've been iterating on for the last five years has been like the most intellectually rewarding thing that I've ever made, like in terms of like a constant generator of new insight for myself. And it's just it's such a motivator to just make a growth curve every night, like mix a couple different sugars and get a new growth curve and slowly start to like not think about the doing of the science, but the thinking, right? So slowly transitioning into like theory craft, right? The scary territory where my uneducated self isn't really prepared for. But I feel like classical microbiology is such a unique high for me because it's like next day you get results. And more often than not, that combination has never been seen before. So you have to properly show it and all that. And it's the short, quick dopamine to keep me going on the much longer projects that's going to take my whole lifetime, right? And with countless failures in between. So I know I can always do a little microbiology when I'm really, really struggling with the flower design stuff. Yeah. So that tiny little tool is, it's one of my favorites, for sure. Perfect. Really like it. Yeah. Honestly, like, you know, we know it's a pain of, you know, having to stay up to do like some kinetic experiment or like some simple time-cause experiment. Yeah. CB So I want to zoom out a little bit and just talk more generically about doing science as an independent researcher and maybe, yeah, like what really drives you into that? And like, maybe try and, how would you convince someone who doesn't do research to do research, you know, in their garage at home on the side for fun? RG Sure. Yeah. So my research partner and I have conversations back and forth because he's in a similar situation as me. We're both degreeless heathens and we have a lot of conversations about why we do research, right? Like what's our personal motivations? And the reason why I do research is very personal as I've described. Like it's a part of who I am, right? Like exploring the natural world is also an act of self-expression for me, right? But that could be unique to my specific view and someone else might not see it the same way. But I think that it's just that it's a part of being a person. Like you read, you write, you know, you draw if you do. But like reading and writing is a part of being a person. Even though you're not a writer, like you're not a novelist, you still write, you still engage with the medium. And I think that like asking questions about the natural world or our place in it and just like being curious is such a pillar of personhood that I feel that research is kind of structured curiosity. And so telling someone that they can generate knowledge from scratch essentially, that can contribute to our conversation, that they too can contribute and find something new and that sense of discovery is such a unique experience. Like it's an experience that really orthogonal to just like chasing bliss, like going on vacation, doing extreme sports, whatever it may be that drives you. There is something so specific about doing research for yourself, right? But having a question and then slowly starting to formulate a narrative. It's like a novel that's writing itself, but you're also writing it and you don't know what to expect. There's so much of it that is just so fantastically different from all the other things I've tried in my life that I struggle to fully explain just how cool it is, right? Especially because when you talk with academics, they've been in that process, right? They've been in the process of being an academic, right? Some people have gone straight from undergraduate to graduate to PhD to landing a postdoc, eventually becoming a professor. And they didn't get a chance to decouple from that and ask their own questions, right? Because you have to do grantable research, right? It's really hard to ask questions that no one's going to pay for, right? But doing like small thoughtful science is something that is so unique. It's so unique. And so if somebody would say like, why should I do this? The first thing I would ask is like, what about the world around you are you curious about, right? And if they talk about the squishy wet stuff, right? Like the animals, the trees, the plants, the fungi, then I'm going to be like, okay, biology is definitely something you should try. As a way to both that autodidactic kind of self-paced discovery aspect is really interesting. But then also you feel more connected. Not to be super cheesy, but I feel way more connected to nature the more I learn about how nature works. Even if the all models are wrong, but some are useful kind of concept, even if that exists, even getting like this abstracted layer of how photosynthesis works, right? How light from our sun, a star is being devoured by these weird little green things and then things devour that. I feel so much more human after learning about biology and being able to contribute to that conversation feels so human. It feels almost ancient, right? It feels like the way I see research is that we're all around a campfire kind of telling stories about what we think those little pinpricks in the sky are. We've been doing that forever, right? So this is a more structured, a very different kind of storytelling. But I love storytelling and people more often than not love stories. That's why we read books, why we watch movies. And so this can be like biological research as escapism for me has been very, very useful, right? Like the world's on fire, but I can just kind of hide in my lab and do some stuff a little bit just to kind of cope. But also just to tell stories. There's so much narrative that you can explain that's not just like cold hard facts. And I feel like adding a little bit of a dash of human to the process of doing research, of having a story around it and telling it in a casual way is such a unique way to participate in that conversation. And so to wrap up the rambling, it's essentially it's storytelling through a manner in which we can kind of check what we're saying along the way, and that's super unique and I strongly recommend it. Yeah, sure. I believe that some of the listeners of the audience who are listening to your suggestion right now may start thinking about whether they can try setting up a small lab and try some small thoughtful science that you mentioned. So just to go into details a little bit into how to practically get started, that might be some safety or like ethical considerations when you're doing these kind of like DIY biology that you're doing right now. So what do you think and what is the concern and how do you deal with it to make sure that you ensure that the work that you are doing is safe and still ethical while still fostering the innovative thinking that is the goal here? Yeah, and obviously that's one of the most important aspects of doing this is to do it safely. All hobbies have their inherent risk and if there's ecological risk, that's also an extra layer, right? And that's actually one of the prime motivations for the Flowers for Everyone thing is just to try to reduce the amount of like AMR genes, even though if it's ever so minuscule, it's just one less thing to contribute to that issue. And from like an ethical standpoint, like I have a hard no on anything that involves animals, right? Especially if it's not susceptible, absolutely not, right? Like not to be crass, but like plants don't scream when you cut them, right? There's less of a violence to specific kinds of biology. And I try to frame it as can you do this with the least amount of violence possible, right? With the least amount of risk of harm. And so I think one of the most important things for amateur biologists is to kind of get a good grasp of environmental stewardship, right? Of just you become more ecologically aware when you realize just how that one little thing could potentially escalate, right? Like people worried about unintentional release, right? And then you see a lot of plant labs with wild type Arabidopsis growing right outside, right? Because those seeds are really tiny and they attach to your clothes. And so like these considerations are something that the amateur biologist would have to consider in a different lens, not just in this traditional lens. Like don't work with plants that produce dust-like seeds, right? Like biocontainment is really important. And so what are you conferring to this organism? How will it impact? Is it an invasive? Like thou shalt not work on weeds is kind of a big thing, right? Don't work on things that can spread in a manner that's unchecked, right? And so like a lot of these things are taken for granted by university researchers because they sign off the thing and as long as they do and they work in that box, it's okay. And I've seen reckless researchers with fully, you know, perfectly trained PhDs with lots of experience kind of being a little rough shot with how they handle their waste processing, for example. The amateur biologist might not be able to have access to incinerator or stericycle things, right? So knowing how to properly decontaminate, right? Knowing how to validate an autoclave, even if it's an Instapot pressure cooker, right? So that's one of my main things. And I do a spore test every six months, like a clinical grade spore test. It's like 60 bucks and you can buy it on Amazon. And you send it to a lab and they tell you whether or not it passed. And so these type of checks allow you to process your waste and process these things in a conscientious manner that you are fully aware of what you're doing and what that impact is. And so what I'm doing as part of like the core of my research is making a sandbox of sorts where you can explore within these confines and these confines will help you learn such that when you do something that's outside of that sandbox, you're a little bit more prepared. Like for example, one of the things that I'm gunning for long-term project is making a cloning vector for halo bacterium salinarum because when it touches distilled water, it literally explodes, right? So it like self-detonates and it's an extreme halophile. So it has to grow at like 250 gram per liter or more of sodium chloride where like most things would die. And so working with these kind of extremophiles in an otherwise mesophilic environment which is like a domestic space is also helpful because you create these biological containment barriers, these secondary containment systems. And so thinking a lot about like what does risk look like and what is real risk, right? Because like there is the blanket risk of saying just like, okay, working with biology is dangerous. And like we have a thing that can cause a massive fuel air explosion in every house and it's called a stove, right? And we work with it and we know that it's extremely dangerous, right? But yet we still work with stoves because we teach the discipline of being safe with that item, right? And I think there are ways in which we can mitigate risk and understand what the risk is and then weigh whether or not it's worth doing. But to flat out just say no because it's biological, I'm deeply against that. Yeah. Well, that makes a lot of sense to me. So moving on to another topic, I think something I was really curious about is what you think that academic researchers could learn from independent scientists. Openness, for sure. Cooking with the kitchen door open, right? I mean, the fear of scooping is real and I don't want to kind of downplay it because it's like there is this publish and perish grant cycle process where ideas are kind of commodified and you want to kind of hold things to your chest because you're a professional researcher and you're working within those confines. At the same time, pushing for preprints and making a stance of saying my preprint is my publication. There's no pre, this is print, right? What the folks at Bioarchive are doing and pushing, I value wholeheartedly and I'm all for that open movement. And I'm not asking for somebody to be, I want them to just always consider being as open as possible. If they can learn something from amateur biology is that we thrive and also depend on the openness, right? This kind of distributed knowledge base because we're all untrained in one thing or another, right? And it's like no amateur biologist is an island. And that can translate a lot to other labs as well, to more formal labs. It's just like being in the spirit of collaboration that doesn't have this expectation or this fear of someone's going to steal my idea. There's so many ideas, there are more questions than there are stars in the universe, right? Like that balance. I'm not asking somebody to just completely abandon and make all of their ideas public because I know the what's at stake, right? Because it's not just their grant, it's also the grad students that they pay for, their salaries, the academic future of all the trainees that they have. So there's a lot at stake. I get that. But yeah, openness, absolutely the number one thing that I try to push as much as possible. I like it. That's very true. Like the archive and the archive movements really change the academics a lot then. It's great to hear that you support the movement and agree to this openness movement. Yeah. So if you get into, in terms of the whole side of community, not just the independent researchers, but the academic lab as well, do you think how can they better support the community lab or the independent lab such as the team that you're involved with? What do you think this specific support could be or what kind of support are you looking for? Well, what I've been missing my entire life is mentorship, right? That's the number one thing. Going back to get an undergrad would be kind of financial suicide for me right now because I have so much obligations and the finances just won't work. But the main thing that I would love to go to grad school for would be mentorship, right? Getting guidance. And so having that type of maybe community lab office hours where people can kind of bounce ideas off of formally trained academics and kind of maybe volunteering some time on an internal review board for proposed projects that are much larger than the independent researcher alone just tinkering with GFP. If there's a community lab that wants to do a larger research project, hop on board as an advisor. There's so much good that can happen through community engagement. And the current state of what we call citizen science is more of just like be the data monkey, right? Tell me if that picture is of a crater or a mountain on the moon or take a picture of this thing or just tell me what this picture says. And there's not a lot of thinking. There's not a lot of engagement in the actual scientific process. So if there are projects with people who are really passionate about doing basic research, academics should take advantage of that and be able to say like, hey, I would love to help. I want to see this exist and not just like slap my name on it or own the project, but actually help, right? Like contribute intellectually to the guidance. Because more than anything, it's not necessarily the resources. If you had good guidance and good mentorship, you can go so far on such a shoestring budget, right? And I'm speaking like ultimately I want to be the mentor I always wanted, right? But to someone else. And I'm super, super jealous. I'm not going to lie. I'm super jealous at some of the students that I work with because I get to like fast track them, right? Because like I hit my head against the wall for 10 years trying to figure out how to do all of this, right? And I just like, obviously every generation is supposed to be better than the last, right? That's human progress. Because I'm human, I can't help but going like, man, I really wish I had that. Like I wish I had that type of guidance. And so more than anything, if any academic has some spare time, I know that's impossible, right? Because of the inbox zero myth, right? You're more of an administrator than a researcher sometimes. But if there's just a little bit of time and you see a project that's really interesting, definitely, definitely try to contribute. And on the DIY side, I would say is just like, don't stop talking about your projects. They won't know what to contribute to if you don't talk about it. And be collegiate and engage with the research. Ask questions. Don't be afraid to ask dumb questions. You're on Twitter. So where's that going to happen? They're going to ignore you. But honestly, just like cold messaging some folks that I fanboy hard, especially about their work, was so eye-opening because they're humans and they're friendly. And they're sometimes really excited to talk about research that's not the very current thing they're doing. That's so mired in all of the complexities and all the stress that comes with it. Just be like, hey, I have this silly idea. And we're like, wow, that's such a cool take. And then I see their eyes light up a little bit. Like that sparks back because they get a chance to just kind of daydream. And so personally, I love that. I love engaging with formal academics because I can see them daydreaming when I talk to them about some of my projects. And it's such a mutual therapy. I would say amateur biologists, please write everything down, archive it, and talk to as many people. Never stop talking about your work. And academics, if you see a cool project that happens to be run by somebody in a garage lab, chip in a couple words. Any type of advice or whatever. I'm sure it'll be met really well. One of the last things we like to ask as we wrap up is just about advice. You've given a lot already, starting with a question, not lab equipment, maybe being your primary one and some others that you just listed. But is there anything else that comes to mind that you would give as advice to anyone doing research, but also independent researchers in particular? BD Yeah, for the independent ones, especially if it's out of pocket, only do the things you want to do. You have to be interested in it because what are you getting out of it? People always gauge it as like, what is the financial benefit of my action? Things are getting really transactional these days and it's really unfortunate because you have to justify things. Hobbies are expensive. People pay more on golf clubs than they do on some PCR machines. There's a weird decoupling from like, oh, if it's science, you have to justify all these things. But if it's a hobby, it's a hobby. And so being able to just kind of being at the helm of your ship is important, but also embodying the role of captain of your ship is also really important. Don't do fashionable research as Max Delbruck said. Chase the stuff that you find interesting and chase it as far down as you can. If you familiarize yourself, if you find a field that you love, a niche that you love, familiarize yourself with the state of the art, that's the common sentiment, but also dive into the history. Oh my God, the most intellectually nourishing thing that I experience in science is diving back into older science. The further back you go, the more accessible the science is because it's not simpler because that's in their time, but the way they communicate is almost personal and I wish that style was possible in modern publications. And so if you love a field, learn its history is a strong advice that I would give. Perfect. Thanks a lot for all these advice. Maybe like one final thing I would like to ask you is like, is there anything that you would like to promote? It could be like anything related to you or like maybe like people you know. Sure. So I started a YouTube channel and I got some fancy meta Ray-Ban AI things from a kind donation from Twitter and I'm going to start doing like lab tutorials and research vlogs and things like that. And definitely follow me on whatever channel you'd like. I don't shut up about my work. I'm a tiny green cell on any platform. And yeah, the plan is to make like video tutorials that are POV, right? So you actually see what the person is doing with their hands. And I know like journals like Jove exist, but they're so expensive and they're so paywalled and it's really frustrating. And sometimes I just, I can't describe the method in words. Sometimes I don't word good. And because of that, I can just show this is how I put the tip in so that it pours very on the wall and not in the very bottom because of X, Y, and Z, right? And so like I can dwell on that for a little bit because there's a visual stimulus instead of just text on a page. And I know that takes a lot of resources and I'm not expecting a lot of labs to do it, but hopefully I can kind of influence a couple more people to try to do more video methods because like data throughputs getting larger storage is getting more affordable. There's more and more reason to justify video methods for even just for like internal onboarding, right? So some contribution I'd like to do for the community is just to make videos. So I'm promoting my YouTube channel. Oh, great. Yeah. I'll definitely have to check it out. So this has been another episode of EBRC and Translation, a production of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium Student and Postdoc Association. For more information about EBRC, visit our website at ebrc.org. If you're a student or a postdoc and you're interested in getting involved with the Student and Postdoc Association, you can find our membership application linked in the episode description. A big thank you to the entire EBRC SPA podcast team, Andrew Hunt, Ross Jones, David Mai, Heidi Klumpa, Reina Saeed, Will Gruby, Matt Williams, and Ice Chonpasit Kiatasui. Thanks to EBRC for their support and of course to you, our listeners, for tuning in. We look forward to sharing our next episode with you soon.