Radical Science

*Bonus Episode*

Gemma moderated a panel at SXSW on building an ecosystem for science startups with Ana Florescu of Science Practice, Harry Destecroix of UnitDx, and Dominic Falcao of Deep Science Ventures. 

This episode we spoke to Elsa Sotiriadis, the Chief Futurist and Program Director of Rebel Bio. Rebel Bio is the world's first life science accelerator, based initially out of Cork, they have worked with startups tackling synthetic meat, algae derived materials, and drug repurposing using AI. They have recently brought in their first cohort to their 2nd home in London, where they will work out of the new White City Incubator. We were keen to break down the different science startup ecosystems that Cork and London have become, and discuss the amazing things that these companies aim to achieve. We were also intrigued by Elsa's passion for science fiction, specifically the passage of inspiration between science fiction and research and back again.

We spoke to Hemai Parthasarathy, the Scientific Director of Breakout Labs, a fund for early stage deep tech startups to get their research out of the lab.

Hemai started out as a neuroscientist at MIT, and moved from academia to the field of publishing as the North American Editor of Nature and went on to be one of the founding editors of PLOS, building PLOS Biology and PLOS One. So as you can imagine we were keen to get Hemai's perspective on a whole host of subjects straddling academia and industry.

Hemai broke down what Breakout Labs looks for in their startups and founders, and the diverse group of startups that they have invested in so far. These include companies working in stem cell derived bone replacement, gecko inspired adhesive materials, and even renewable energy startups harnessing the power of the ocean. 

This episode we speak to Philip Hemme, the founder and CEO of Labiotech, the leading media organisation covering European biotech. We talk about their rapid growth as a startup, the current state of biotech media, their internationally diverse team, and the benefits of 'open science' to biotech startups.

This episode we chatted to Erin Kim the Communications Director at New Harvest, a non-profit research institute focussed on making cellular agriculture a reality. We talk about the the current state of lab grown meat, the importance of effective science communication in a field prone to hype or hysteria, and the community New Harvest are building through their events.

This episode features Julian Huppert, former Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge, and now Director of the Intellectual Forum at Jesus College Cambridge.

We chat about Julian's journey from academia to the House of Commons where he was recognised as the only scientist, a moniker that Julian was keen to not let define and confine his policy goals. We wanted to get his insight into the general state of scientific understanding in parliament, and how scientists can better engage politicians with topics that matter to them. It's an unfortunate stereotype that scientists often hold politics at arm's length, there may not be a need for all scientists to be politically activated but involvement in the political process can as Julian notes be pretty easy behaviours to foster.

We were also eager to dive into his new(ish) role as Director of the Intellectual Forum, an organisation that has critical thinking and open discussion at its core, covering an impressive breadth of topics which can essentially be boiled down to anything 'interesting and worthwhile'.

This episode we chatted to Bethan Wolfenden, the co-founder of Bento Bioworks, a biotech startup that has created a 'laptop size laboratory'. This kit allows the user to perform simple DNA analysis and dramatically reduces the cost of the components you'd need to analyse samples, thus lowering the barrier to entry for molecular biology.

This episode is a very candid discussion about founding the company, as we cover the difficult decision to move on from a PhD to develop the company and the challenges of crowdfunding the product (of which they had a successful KickStarter campaign). 

We also meander through the burgeoning DIY bio community, how the IGEM competition has informed her attitude towards science done within the confines of academia, and what citizen science can actually achieve (when it's not reduced to data collection).

In this episode we chatted to Christine Gould, founder and CEO of the Thought for Food Foundation. Their annual conference, startup challenge and active community centres around the science and tech working to ensure we have enough food to feed the world. 

With Christine, we talked about how to bring together diverse groups of people - startups, scientists, designers, policy makers, corporates and, in particular, young people, to work towards solutions. She explained how the TFF annual summit is centred around experience design and a strong culture of innovation (openness, collaboration, beginner's mindset, entrepreneurial methods, purpose before paycheck and larger-than-life energy), and that this can be replicated across sectors. 

Christine was particularly passionate about how young people can build and design the future, and how critical their involvement is. 

We were particularly interested in Christine's attitude towards agriculture in 2017 being a place ripe for tech and science innovation, and hence, one of the most exciting sectors to be focusing on right now!

In this episode we chatted to Kristin Ellis, the Scientific Development Lead at OpenTrons, about all things science. OpenTrons is a company that builds affordable open-source lab robots, that remove the need to perform tedious manual pipetting tasks, to free up valuable time for researchers. 

We touched on the importance of good science communication and the unfair stigma that often impacts researchers that are keen to involve and talk to the public, and the true value of encouraging that "...and then it just clicked" moment with people previously disengaged with science. 

We also spoke about the innovative ways tinkerers have adapted their open-source robots, the value of putting automation into the hands of the many, and the attitude shift required in science to promote prototyping and hacking. We were keen to see how OpenTrons has been received by academics looking to streamline their research and were fascinated by their passage through Haxclr8tr (a hardware startup accelerator, now called HAX). Their relationship to Shenzhen is also pretty amazing - described as the silicon valley for hardware, the labyrinthine market in Shenzhen allows hardware hackers to rapidly test out ideas, a concept essentially intractable even with the electronic hardware superstores elsewhere.

This episode Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media joins us in a far reaching conversation spanning the whole science ecosystem. From the communication of science, to liberating knowledge generated by research from the confines of the static PDF, to the mutual learning experience of colliding technologists and academics,

Tim has been regarded as a thought leader in Silicon Valley over the past few decades, popularising the terms open source and web 2.0. So we were interested to see how he believes the rapid technological advancement of late could impact science and academic culture.. 

O'Reilly Media also operates an awesome conference called SciFoo. The event is a partnership between O'Reilly, Google, Digital Science, and the Nature Publishing Group which brings together an interdisciplinary cohort of scientists, as well as technologists and policy makers, so it was great to hear how Tim feels collaboration can be done in the 21st century.