Spectrum

Michel Maharbiz & Daniel Cohen. Michel is an Assoc Prof with EECS-UCB. His research is building micro/nano interfaces to cells and organisms: bio-derived fabrication methods. Daniel received his PhD from UCB and UCSF Dept of Bioengineering in 2013.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k [00:00:30] a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Hello and good afternoon. My name is Chase Jakubowski and I'm the host of today's show. Today we present the final of our two interviews with Michelle Ma Harbas and Daniel Cohen. Michelle is an associate professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. His [00:01:00] current research interests include building micro nano interfaces to cells and organisms and exploring the bio derive fabrication methods. Daniel Cohen received his phd from the Joint UC Berkeley U CSF Department of Bioengineering Program in 2013 together they have been working on the fronts project funded by the National Science Foundation. Fronts is an acronym for flexible, resorbable, organic nanomaterial therapeutic systems. In this part [00:01:30] two of our interview, we discussed the current limits of instrumenting the human body, the ethics that swirl about bioengineering and the entrepreneurial urges of engineers. Here's part two. Yeah. 

Speaker 3:        What sort of limits do you think there might be with these kinds of interfaces? Do you foresee any limitations on the technology or is it off we go, we don't have Saturday that work well in the body right now we don't have a sense of what to do with a lot of the data. It's not clear what you'd put in and out [00:02:00] getting the thing in. You're not going to do that on your own for most implants to put designs and so I think the limitations are huge, especially for electrical stimulation. There are very few safe ways of stimulating with DC fields inside the body. You need very special materials, short time periods. From an engineering perspective there are enormous challenges. Then people aren't going to be running around doing this anytime soon, but I think the data deluge is probably the biggest one we'll wind up with cause we'll eventually solve the technology side and then it's what do you do with all of this stuff? 

Speaker 3:        [00:02:30] I think there are an enormous engineering challenges, but I think of course for us it's exciting because we are engineers. I think that people see something like this and immediately we're very good at linear extrapolation, right? So, oh that means in five years we'll all look like terminator or something. So I think there's a lot of work to be done, as Daniel said, in building things that robustly survive in the body for very long periods of time, if that's what's required. You know we were talking about resorbable stuff, but you're talking about adding therapeutics or things that have a therapeutic function that are electrical in nature at some level. A lot of the there is, you actually want 

Speaker 4:        [00:03:00] them to last a long time in there and do their business and that's a very, very big open challenge. I would also say if you wanted to put on the futurist hat, you know in the end you're also limited by the substrate, right? You have a certain genetic code in your cells are predisposed to do certain things. So you know you're working with those base materials and what those cells are doing. And so I think there's a lot of future for this type of instrumentation, but you know, we're not going to look like the Borg anytime soon. I don't think. Are there any challenges that we haven't really gotten [00:03:30] to in developing these electronics so that they interact with biological systems in specifically technical stuff, environmental stuff, even legal and ethical things. Are there questions you guys wrestle with? We've had a lot of these cars, agent Daniel smiling because we've had conversations by often, not just with Daniel, with Peter [inaudible], who's another student that just graduated from the group. 

Speaker 4:        It does neuro. It started back when we were doing some of the bug work. I think for this project, I'm pretty comfortable. You know, we're working on very fundamental things. [00:04:00] I don't know that I could address them in intelligently today, but I think that there are interesting ethical concerns, societal concerns as we instrument ourselves more and more and they've been discussed. I mean, this is something that if you're interested in this topic, you can find quite a bit of discussion on the web or in various talks. When I started instrumenting my body to some extent. Where's the line, for example, between traditional FDA approved devices and consumer gadgets that you buy with your iPhone, where should that data go? You know, what are you going to do with it? Who's gonna do what with it? Is [00:04:30] it all yours? You know, there's an interesting argument that came, a friend of mine, David Lieberman, who's doesn't do this kind of work, but he's very interested in sensors and he's recently been interested in genetic screening and he brings up the fact that a lot of this extra information sometimes isn't very actionable and so it just adds noise. 

Speaker 4:        But from our perspective, I think what we're doing is pretty exciting and I think it has a chance to help people and it's early days, 

Speaker 3:        there's a lot more transparency than there used to be too. So the maker movement and just people are much more interested in trying things on themselves, [00:05:00] not cutting their arms up in, but instrumenting, looking at heart rate, looking at salinity of the skin, just different things that various startup companies are playing with and that you can look up schematics for on the Internet and so there's more of a culture of what you can get out of it. The enhancement side I think is somewhat behind right now because it's not even clear what we're doing with any of these. So ethically we haven't run into that issue quite yet. 

Speaker 4:        And in terms of the group that fronts contains all the different disciplines [00:05:30] that are working on it, it's a rather interdisciplinary project. Do you feel that your training taught you how to do interdisciplinary work or did you learn it on the job? I think I've always been in interdisciplinary environment in my work. I think it's always been accepted. I think it's been encouraged. I think that's the name of the game. Interestingly enough, I was just having a conversation with Edward Lee from our department two days ago where I was joking. I said the days of monastic academia are largely ending or, but interestingly enough, a lot of us choose academia [00:06:00] because we want to go live in a monastery. So it's say it's a very interesting sort of thing these days. I think certainly in a place like Berkeley, you want to make sure you're deep in your competence to, you're making contributions in a meaningful and deep way, but the nature of everything is very interdisciplinary.

Speaker 4:        Do you ever feel like, Oh, if I'd had more of this or more of that, if I'd had more exposure than I would just be so much more comfortable in this invited more money. No, I'm kidding. Now we're well funded. You know, you've only have so much time to spend in your field and to get competency. It's hard to do everything [00:06:30] and know everything. You can't really, you can't, but you should know who to talk to. Right. Interdisciplinary stuff is not trained and it's not easy to train someone in per se. It's a mindset and the environment is important. And in undergraduate work, you tend to be a specialist in something. And in Grad school you're expected to completely specialize, but I think you really miss out on a lot. So what's Nice, at least in Berkeley is it's very easy to transition across. Labs, talk to different people, set up collaborations, but at the end of the day, you're not going to be an expert in those things, [00:07:00] but you're going to know who to talk to and that creates a very nice network that is very innovative at the end of the day. 

Speaker 4:        So sub specialty in a way, or you're familiar with it, you can do the work if you need to, but you know people who really know that and that's the most important part. You put a good team together and that's where most of the innovations today are coming from. Not from single disciplines. Yeah, I think Berkeley is great for this. You have the freedom to go and you have brilliant people around that can inform and willing to participate with visibility and guide and mentor. I mean it's the freedom to do this and the mentors [00:07:30] to do it. I think all the top American institutions do this. But in engineering that's the modern approach. 

Speaker 5:        Mm MM. 

Speaker 6:        Spectrum is a public affair show on k a l ex Berkeley. Our guests are Michelle Maha [inaudible] and Daniel Cohen of UC Berkeley. They went to build a smart badge for wounds. In the next segment they talk about multidisciplinary work and [00:08:00] science fiction. 

Speaker 4:        Well, you started a company, you took research out of the lab and started a company and then sold it. And what did you learn from that process? Is there something, it's fun. Do you have an Aha moment of like, is this how to do it kind of a thing? No, no. I have a great deal of respect for people who make it their business to make money in the private sector in, in technology. I mean, of course these days that's a trivial thing to [00:08:30] say, right? Cause in the bay area, that's what we live off of. But I was fortunate enough that I met a number of individuals that were already in the private sector and we're interested in commercializing and I wanted to go off and be an idealist professor. We developed out the this company and the day came where I decided to go be a professor and they said, you know, if you stay, we'll give you a bigger piece of the pie. 

Speaker 4:        And I said, no, I'm going to go. I literally said, no, I want to go off and you know, do all these other crazy things and if this company has more than 50% market [00:09:00] share on this little narrow part of a, that'll be good enough for me. Right. It's a very famous last words. And that would have is when it was sold, I was happy with what, but my wife will never forgive me. Right. And so she's like, yeah, what are you, how do you feel now? No, I find the whole process of thinking about how what you're working on in academia might be commercializable to be very sanguine about it. I find it fascinating. I think that that process, understanding that a lot of what you do is not relevant to that field of endeavor. Working with people, valuing academics, sometimes people tend to [00:09:30] under value the contributions of the non technical people, which is silly is ridiculous actually. 

Speaker 4:        And so valuing all of the components at a great time doing that. And I've done this a couple times and we have lots of little things bubbling. My cofounder of Cork, Tara Neurotech, I'm co founder of a company called tweedle tech, which builds hardware for games. I went often for a year, worked at a startup in San Francisco and energy startups. So I'm a big fan of this type of thing. I think it actually for engineers in certain fields, it's very useful because it calibrates you to reality to be honest with you on [inaudible], something you [00:10:00] can help mentor people with and you see that as a, a role for you. I mean, there's always a role, but I'm always very modest about it because I certainly haven't made $100 million out of any of these companies. Right. You have to be humble, humble, or I mean, and also there's an opinion of, for every person that thinks about this, there's a very um, neat quote I read, I think it was Eric Lander who said that we live our lives prospectively, but then we reconstruct our history is retrospectively, right? 

Speaker 4:        So effectively we pick and choose and create a narrative, right? And so [00:10:30] for all of this stuff, like let's mentor how to have a great startup, the people mentoring or giving you a story, they are doing a pattern fit to whatever they experienced to tell the story, how they feel comfortable telling it. Right? And there's a billion different versions of this narrative. How is it you should transition your company or your idea to a company. But it's a lot of fun. That's the main thing I would say. Anybody out there that's interested in, I think it can be a lot of fun. It's very humbling and it forces you to change directions constantly and reevaluate what you're doing. And it works. A set of mental muscles [00:11:00] that are very different, I think in some cases from the academic ones. So it's, it's overall, just very good. 

Speaker 4:        Michelle, you commented that science fiction was a source of inspiration. Sure. Dune. Is that the key one I was going to ask, are there any stories or themes that stick out? Oh, there's tons, but I mean, I, I have to say maybe this will be disappointed to people that like thinking about cyborgs and putting stuff, but honestly it's, I mean the, I think the single piece of science fiction that impacted me the most was doing, when I read it in [00:11:30] early high school or high school, what are doing his blown up and continues to blow my mind. Like I just, every 10 years I read and it just makes me happy. Yeah. I'm a big fan of all of the, I certainly love all the traditional stuff and more recently for me in the late eighties all this cyber punky kind of stuff. I'm trying to think of something more recent that I've read. Oh, and then Vernor Vinge would probably be the last big phase of my science fiction Aha moment. I 

Speaker 3:        love [inaudible] stuff. I consider science fiction to be particularly hard. Sai FYS, [00:12:00] they take the last three data points and they take a ruler and they extrapolate it out to infinity. Right? And so you read it and you particularly very good hard science fiction. It just feels like, oh, I'll definitely turn out this way. Right? It must turn out this way. If there's no doubt, how can I ever, right. We're all gonna upload ourselves or whatever. Right? And that's the beauty of the really good one that I'm a big fan, Daniel, for you, any allure of science fiction? You were waxing wonderfully about Frankenstein and I actually only just read Frankenstein for the first [00:12:30] time in the last year and it's amazing. Everyone should read it and it perfectly captures the mindset of being a scientist, especially a graduate student. But I grew up with drastic park. I also read Dune periodically and the golden compass and things that aren't even traditional Scifi things where any sort of alternate reality where people have to come up with a way of how something would be done. 

Speaker 3:        Authors tend to be very good at coming up with strange things. And that was more the fun part. So there wasn't any direct inspiration, [00:13:00] but there's this synthesis and putting together a different ideas. And so that's where you get a lot of the ethical discussion too. I mean ethical education and especially for bioengineering, most of it probably comes from the media and [inaudible] really mean we all know these concepts now, not because we were formally taught them, but because it's in a movie somewhere or we read about some world where people are engineered or something like that. So you get a pretty good perspective actually. And then you go to Grad school thinking you're going to build those things out that it [00:13:30] takes a little bit longer. So you figured out in Grad School. So that's my problem. I haven't figured it out. I, I'm aware of the problem I can't solve. 

Speaker 3:        I'm still subject to it. But uh, I also just enjoy reading all over the place. These ideas came from old science papers. I have to say. Daniel is amazing in that regard. Daniel shows up and he's like, ah, I was just reading a 13th century manual for rhinoplasty. Where do you even, how do you, what's, you know, like it's awesome. And then he's, and you're right, like was it 13th century, 16th century? [00:14:00] And there's all these digresses like, look, he figured out right away I'll do this. So I have to stay voracious. Appetite in reading is a big plus if you want to join my group. And as the Internet, what's unleashing your ability to find these old documents? It certainly helps with things like the databases. So Frankenstein was recently just fully released. In fact, facsimile with Mary Shelley's own handwriting and the preface and everything, but also just library libraries. 

Speaker 3:        So some of the earliest medical engineering books are from the, actually the late 17 hundreds it [00:14:30] was already starting in those you only find in the library in manuscript form and you can just go pick them up. The hard library is still actually quite useful for this, but the Internet certainly a great place to get lost. Also, just reading papers from different fields and looking through the bibliographies. That's really just a good way to backtrack and find where these things really started. And even with the history of bioelectricity, most people cite back to one particular person and it turns out that there's a second person before him and then there's this story. It's just fun to bounce all [00:15:00] over the place. And I think that's something that at least in bioengineering you do a ton of because there's no one discipline, no one knows what bioengineering means. 

Speaker 3:        You go all over the place. And so for any of this stuff and interdisciplinary stuff, that's really one way to find out is just started reading tons of things including science. And so the history of science comes to life absolutely with a lot of these pioneering efforts and it's exceptionally humbling too. So if you look at the materials they used in the first rhinoplasties to help seal people's noses off after they'd [00:15:30] been chopped off and duals that material on a microscopic level. But then electron microscope is very, very similar to cutting edge medical technology today that we use for similar treatment. And they had no idea what they were doing, they just knew what worked. It is pretty humbling when you come across things like that. And it also puts a lot of stuff in perspective and there's a lot of stuff that's been lost as well. So when you come across it from either a different field or it just hasn't been looked at in a while, that's always exciting. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. 

Speaker 7:        [00:16:00] You're listening to spectrum a science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Michelle [inaudible] and Daniel Cohen bear research in the electric field that is generated by wounds and mammals. In the next segment they talk more about ethics and their work 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 4:        Do you want to talk a little bit [00:16:30] more about your insect work that dated this? No bugs, but now we can talk about the, like the bugs is a, I say this is sort of my peewee Herman idea. You know, peewee Herman could never unfortunately ever not be peewee Herman. He tried very hard. I felt like the bugs is my peewee Herman curse. The brief version is we demonstrated that you can put very small electronics with neural in your muscular stimulators into insects and control their flight remotely via signal sent to the transmitter on the electronic package. And that would then control what signals [00:17:00] were sent to the insect. So what we do now is we have these incredibly small atronix weighs less than 200 milligrams such that these grasshoppers can carry it happily. We have these new systems that bias the way the insect receives certain information and we use that to affect how it's flying. 

Speaker 4:        So we're still very interested in that. I find it a very interesting area. To me it's one of these places where you can most acutely demonstrate how much electronics has actually miniaturized. People have very visceral reaction [00:17:30] to the work because it takes these insects and incredibly small electronics that most people really don't think about usually and builds this sort of compound construct, right? That does something, the thing that isn't doing what an insect normally wants to do but isn't really a robot in the traditional sense of being made out of plastic and metal. For me, that's really why I do it. And I think it's right at that bleeding of what you can show you can do. And one of the side things that interests me profoundly is sort of the ethics of this. And most people like their initial reaction is either, oh [00:18:00] that's horrible. 

Speaker 4:        How could you do that to an insect or at an insect? I swapped them against the wall all the time. Right. So there's usually, cause we like to be in quickly. So it's an interesting question. So let's say we get very good at putting these little packages on it such that almost anybody can do it as a hobby. Would you find it permissible to have, just like you have the San Francisco chapter of the RC helicopter flying hobby, would you find it permissible to have the San Francisco chapter of the Cyborg insect? Where do you go find yourself a grasshopper and you slap some stuff on its back or inside [00:18:30] it and use little pins to make holes to the right nerves and you let it go and then you start doing stuff. Our, what we normally consider to be animals, fair game, a spare part. Are they machines? 

Speaker 4:        Are they not machines? I think this is fascinating. I think that we don't have very good ethical tools. In my opinion. I'm not an ethicist. I'm certainly not a philosopher, but I don't think we have very good ethical tools for dealing with this issue in the way we usually think about stuff. What is the argument against doing that? You usually fall back to things having to do with minimizing suffering and so on, but if you really spend some time [00:19:00] thinking about it, it's a lot of those become very murky very quickly with things like insects, things that are to our interpretation from our frame of reference are very distant from our cognitive function. It's the old argument that bad to hurt a dog, fine. Is it bad to hurt a fly? Is it bad to hurt a bacteria where, where in the spectrum of things do you fall? I think that this insect work really tickles that, whatever that is really struggle. I've had very interesting conversations after my talks and is that part of any of the engineering training? 

Speaker 3:        Well, all [00:19:30] graduate students do ethical training and this sort of stuff is disgusting. It's more or less field dependent, but especially in bioengineering, you do a full seminar at the beginning where everything from this to genetics I adjustment and children and things like that, it's discussed. So that doesn't mean there are good tools for it, but everyone's very aware of it and I think maybe more effort should be made to derive those tools. But it's something people are working on at least. When you refer to a tools, are you talking of procedures and protocols, halls? 

Speaker 4:        [00:20:00] What are you imagining as a tool in the ethics realm? I was thinking methods, algorithms, heuristics to think about this and come to conclusions. So for example, what I think of a tool I think of philosophical, philosophical tools, right? Thinking about what should I use as a basis for making a judgment? Should I just work to minimize singer style work to minimize suffering? That should be it. Is there something more complex or show you something else? So that's what I meant by tools. But of course there's another interpretation which is simply teaching students. They are in fact functional tools you use to determine ethical kind of in a narrower sentence, [00:20:30] right? Of for example, don't drop data points, you know? Right. If you have 43 data points in 42 of them look like you want the 43rd one doesn't, you should not get rid of the 43rd one. That kind of stuff. Sure. I mean I think we're very good at teaching that to the extent that it's well understood. I think it's just trickier

Speaker 3:        when you do any animal work or bioengineering work where you have this utilitarian calculus, which is pretty much what most engineering revolves around. You're taught that you need to improve society. You have this idea that utility [00:21:00] is a valuable way of thinking about things, but it leaves too many questions open for bioengineering type stuff where utility comes at the cost of working on some living system that everyone is very aware of and very careful with and we have all sorts of protocols and procedures when we work with any living things, but it's still something that is very difficult to pin down when you talk to different people. And how they think about it. The consensus varies. Yes, sure, sure. Everyone has a good sense of like we're all sort of aligned, but where [00:21:30] you might draw the line or what types of experiments you personally might want to do is very different. 

Speaker 3:        So some people fully support the idea of medical research but would never do it themselves for the reason that they don't want to work on the living system. And some people like myself say, if you are gonna work on a living system, you should do it. The courtesy of being in the room with it and at least seeing what you're doing. So there are different standards, but there's no formal approach to that. Yeah, there are lots of opinions. I mean, I think even in our larger super [00:22:00] set of people that work on this effort, there's lots of different comfort levels. The different researchers that run the whole gamut. Even calling it a living system, I think some people would say, well, it's out. Let me system. It's a, it's an animal. It's an organism. Your de de emphasizing its identity by calling it living, stuff like that. I mean, I think these things are all very interesting and we're all in the middle of it. It's an interesting area. Michelle [inaudible] and Daniel Cohen. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you very much. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 7:        [00:22:30] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link to get you there. The link is [00:23:00] tiny, url.com backslash and Kaa LX spectrum. We hope you can get out to a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Kornacki joins me 

Speaker 8:        presenting the calendar this Sunday. The ninth call, HUD ash is hosting a Darwin Day celebration Brunch at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin avenue from 11:00 AM until 1:00 PM [00:23:30] eat bagels and lox while hearing about looking for Darwin's footprints in the world of zombies, ucs f professor John Halfer. Nick is also the interim director of the Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies and trustee and president of the California Academy of Sciences as an entomologist professor, half or nick, studies of the Zombie fly and its relationship to bees. He will also discuss how Darwin's ideas were influenced by his knowledge of the insect [00:24:00] world. The event is $10 per person and more information is [email protected] 

Speaker 1:        as average temperatures continue to rise due to human changes to the composition of the atmosphere, cases of extreme weather are very likely to occur. On February 12th come join expert Michael F Wainer, a senior staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and learn about the science of climate change, current areas of research and some possible implications [00:24:30] for the future. Tickets are free for UC Berkeley Students, faculty and staff, and $10 to the public. Once again, this event will take place on February 12th from 1230 to 1:30 PM at the freight and salvage in Berkeley. The Bay area skeptics present Kernan Coleman for a personal recollection. He has titled Escaping. We've Vale a journey out of magical thinking, a telling of his 10 year journey out of magical thinking, alternative [00:25:00] medicine, new age, and fear-based denialism and learn how the woo woo bill still affects them even though he knows better. This takes place February 13th at La Penea Lounge 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley, seven 30 to 9:00 PM admission is free on February 15th the science of cow lecture will be given by Professor Marty Hearst and his entitled Natural Search User Interfaces. 

Speaker 1:        What does the future hold for search user [00:25:30] interfaces? Can there be a natural user interface social rather than solo usage of information technology? More integration of massive quantities of user behavior and large scale knowledge basis. Marty Hurst is a professor in the school of Information at UC Berkeley with an affiliate appointment and the computer science division. She wrote the first book on search user interfaces. The lecture will be presented Saturday, February 15th and Stanley Hall Room One oh five at 11:00 AM [00:26:00] Stanley Hall is on the east side of the UC Berkeley campus. A feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find interesting. Rick Curnutt ski and I present our news. 

Speaker 8:        Science now reviewed an article appearing in January 2nd proceeding of the National Academy of Science that suggests the black death left a mark on the human genome. Me. Hi, Natalia from Rad bough university and colleagues analyze the genomes from three populations. [00:26:30] The first population consisted of a hundred Romanians of European descent, 

Speaker 8:        the second of a hundred Roma or gypsies that had migrated to the same region from India a thousand years ago. The third population was 500 people from Northwestern India, where the Roma were originally found. Genetically. The Roma are still quite similar to the Northwestern Indians, but 20 jeans have differences that could be explained by the environmental pressures the Europeans [00:27:00] and aroma have shared over the last millennia. Some jeans controlled skin pigmentation and others control immunological responses. The team found one such set of differences on chromosome four they code for proteins that latch onto bacteria initiating a defensive response. They showed the genes, help respond to the bacteria that caused the black death and speculate that it was this evolutionary pressure shared by the people living in the same area at the [00:27:30] same time. To exhibit these genomic differences, 

Speaker 1:        researchers from the California State University Long Beach and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have launched Kelp, watched 2014 a scientific campaign designed to determine the extent of radioactive contamination of the state's Kelp forest from Japan's damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant initiated by long beach biology professor Steven Manley and the Berkeley labs head of applied nuclear physics, Kai vetter. The project were ally on [00:28:00] samples of giant Kelp and bulk help from along the California and Mexico coast lines. The project includes the participation of 19 academic and government institutions. These participants will sample kelp from the entire west coast as far north as del Norte, Tay County, and as far south as Baja California. Sampling will take place several times in 2014 and processed kelp samples will be sent to the Lawrence Berkeley national labs. Low background facility for detailed radionucleotide analysis. As data [00:28:30] becomes available, it will be posted for public access. Professor Manley says at the present time, this initiative is unfunded by any state or federal agency with time and costs being donated by participants. So those interested in taking part in the project can contact Manley at California State University. Long Beach 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible].

Speaker 6:        [00:29:00] The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us at eight nine days. 

Speaker 9:        Hey, email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same [00:29:30] time. [inaudible].

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Michel Maharbiz & Daniel Cohen. Michel is an Assoc Prof with EECS-UCB. His research is building micro/nano interfaces to cells and organisms: bio-derived fabrication methods. Daniel received his PhD from UCB and UCSF Dept of Bioengineering in 2013.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. 

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we are presenting part one of two interviews with Michelle and Harb is and Daniel Cohen. Michelle is an associate professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and the Co director of the Berkeley Sensor and actuator center. [00:01:00] His current research interests include building micro and nano interfaces to cells and organisms and exploring bio derived fabrication methods. Daniel Cohen received his phd from the Joint UC Berkeley and UCLA Department of bioengineering program in 2013 his phd advisor was Michelle Ma harvests. Together they have been working on the fronts project and NSF f Free Grant [00:01:30] F re stands for emerging frontiers and research and innovation fronts is the acronym for flexible, resorbable, organic and nanomaterial therapeutic systems. In part one of our interview, we discuss how they came to the challenge of measuring and understanding the so-called wound field. Here's part one, Michelle [inaudible] and Daniel cone. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thanks. How was it that [00:02:00] electrical fields generated by wounds was discovered? So I think Daniel should take this one cause he's the, he's the group historian on this topic. In fact, he gave us a little dissertation during this thesis talk 

Speaker 4:        in the day when electricity was sort of still a parlor trick. There was a lot of work being done to try to figure out where it was coming from. There was a lot of mysticism associated with it. And this is in the mid to late 17 hundreds and so Galvani is a name most people have heard. Galvanism was a term [00:02:30] coined for his work and what he found was all the work with frog legs. So he used to dissect frogs and could show that if you had dissimilar metals in contact with different parts of the muscle and the nerves, the legs with twitch and amputate the frog leg. So his conclusion was that electricity had something to do with life and their living things were made alive by having this spark of life. And this was a really super controversial idea because for a long time there had been a philosophical debate raging about vitalism versus mechanism, which is the idea that all living things are special because of some intrinsic vital force versus the idea [00:03:00] that physical principles explain life. 

Speaker 4:        So the vitalist really liked this idea that electricity is the spark that makes living things special. There's a lot of dispute about this, but eventually Volta who is right after him and who the vault is named after showed that it was really just the movement of ions and things in salt solutions, but it was a little too late and the mystical aspect of this had come along. So the problem then was that this idea prevailed into the early 18 hundreds and so Galvani his nephew Aldini started doing [00:03:30] these experiments in England where he was given permission to take executed criminals and basically play with the corpses and he was able to create a corpus that would go like this. And raise an arm or wink an eye at an audience. And this was the idea of the reanimated corpse. So people were having a lot of fun with this, but it wasn't clear that it wasn't mystical. 

Speaker 4:        And so this is the long answer to the question, but that's the backdrop where the science starts to come in. So the first thing is Frankenstein gets published out of this, and everybody's getting into the whole vitalism idea [00:04:00] at this point. And Frankenstein was written as a part of a horror story competition. It was almost a joke. But the funny thing is Frankenstein. Well, how would you say Frankenstein? The monster came to life to lightning? Like that's a line. It wasn't a Hollywood fabrication and everyone assumed that. But Mary Shelley never wrote anything about lightning or electricity. She in fact, wrote the technology was too dangerous to describe in texts for the average person. But in her preface, she explains that the whole origin of this idea, and this is where the answer to the question comes from, was that [00:04:30] she had writer's block when she was writing the story and she overheard her husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron having an argument about work done by Erasmus, Darwin and Erasmus. 

Speaker 4:        Darwin was a big natural philosopher or scientist at the time who was a big vitalist. So he's really into the idea of the spark of life and also this idea of spontaneous generation that where does life come from when you have a compost heap, fruit flies appear. There was an idea that be composing garbage produced life, and that was part of spontaneous generation. And he did a lot of experiments where he'd seal things like wet flour into a bell jar [00:05:00] and to show that organisms came out in a sealed environment and they just didn't know about microorganisms and things like that. So he did a famous experiment where he dehydrated some species called Vermicelli all. Sorry, I made the mistake. I'm about to talk about 40 cello, which is a little organism. And when he added water again, they came back to life. Now, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley didn't understand any of this, and the conversation that Mary Shelley eavesdropped on was one where they said that Erasmus Darwin had taken Vermicelli Pasta, put it inside the Bell Jar, sealed [00:05:30] it, and through some magic of his own allowed it to twitch. 

Speaker 4:        So he had essentially given life to pasta. Now Mary Shelley wrote that she didn't believe any of this was actually really what happened. But this idea of animating the inanimate gave her the idea for Frankenstein. Then she writes the one line that links it to electricity, which is, and if any technology would have done this, it would probably have been galvanism, which is this idea of applying electricity to something. And so that's where this whole idea of life and electricity came from. By that point, the scientists had finally [00:06:00] caught up with all the mysticism and started to do more serious experiments, and that's when Carlo met Tucci in 18 and 30 something found that when you cut yourself, there's some sort of electrical signal at the injury source. And that was his main contribution that was called the wound current or the wound field and then after him was the guy who really formalized the whole thing, which was do Bob Raymond, who was a German electrophysiologist who found that if you have any sort of injury, he could actually measure a current flowing at the side of the injury. 

Speaker 4:        He could show that that changed over time. He cut his own thumb and [00:06:30] measured the current flow and they didn't have an explanation for why it happened, but they knew that it had something to do with the electric chemistry there. This was the birth of electrophysiology and then he went off and did all these things with action potentials in neurons, which is why almost no one's heard about this injury side and the fact that electricity's everywhere in the body normally and it's not mystical, it's electrochemical. We're much more familiar with the neural stuff and this other stuff on the wound side sort of languished until maybe the late 19 hundreds because it was rare. It was weird. It wasn't clearly important [00:07:00] and a lot of the players involved were so caught up in all sorts of other things that we tend to forget about this. So that was the whole long winded history of where the wound field came from. But it's a good story. It is a good story. Yeah. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum KALX Berkeley. Our guests are Michael ml harvest and and Daniel Colon. They're both bioengineers in the next segment they talk about the genesis of the fronts [00:07:30] project. 

Speaker 6:        Michelle, when you approached the NSF yeah. For a grant for this idea, how long had you been thinking about it? The smart bandage idea, how far down stream were you with the idea? We had been toying with the idea for quite some time and there's a bit of background to this as well. So my group amongst other things builds flexible electrode systems. [00:08:00] You can call them for neuroscience in your engineering, and most of those systems are intended to record electrical signals across many different points across many electrodes usually honor in the brain. And so we had this basic technology lying around. This is sort of a competence that the group has had for quite awhile. The other thing that was beginning to intrigue us, and I have to credit Daniel for sort of beginning of the discussions and kind of pushing this along in the early years, so Daniel and I have like a tube man club of sitting around thinking of crazy things and [00:08:30] one of the things that Daniel had been interested in was the idea of resorbing or having so some of the materials disappear as they do their job in the body and this is a notion that's become very popular recently actually over the last couple of years in into community in the engineering community in general. 

Speaker 6:        Which brings us to another question I had, which is the difference between resorption

Speaker 4:        and absorption. Absorption might imply that you're taking the components up and they're becoming part of the body. Resorption is really just a very strange [00:09:00] semantic term. That means something like the body's breaking it down or it's breaking down in some form and it's not really the same as that material winding up elsewhere in your tissues. It may just get excreted or it may go somewhere else. So really we use it when we don't really know what's going on. Yeah, we had been looking at this general area and then I think the last piece of the puzzle, I think in our minds looking at the extant literature, the idea that we could take meaningful electrical data from a wound began to really interest us. And so the [00:09:30] two parts of this really are one, can you use portable, resorbable systems? Something like a bandage, you know, something that that isn't going to require you to walk around with a handcart. 

Speaker 4:        Can you use systems like this to measure electrical signals that are relevant to wounds? And then the other question is if you can do that, and if you have, you know, you learn about this, and by the way, we're not the first people to try to do this. There are a number of people that have been measuring electrical signals in the wounds as Daniel set for quite some time. If you can do this, is there a value to [00:10:00] trying to control or modulate that electrical information or those fields or those currents in the wound? Is there a therapeutic value? Perhaps there are scientific value. Is there something you can learn about the way the body works or tissue works? Both of those are open questions and you know we can delve into each of those, but those are really kind of how we think about them separately a little bit. 

Speaker 4:        The flip side is that when we do a lot of this kind of design for medical things, you will want to know what's already happening and how the body handles its own injuries. And this field doesn't just arise passively. So they had no way of knowing [00:10:30] this when it was first discovered. But when you get this electric field, there is a navigational effect for incoming cells to the injury. So it actually helps guide things in like a lighthouse to the wound site. And so a lot of my phd work was showing how you can steer ourselves with a controlled electric field so you can really hurt them like sheep based on how the electric field goes. And that means that that was a source of this bio inspired part of it, which is we're not adding something that's not already there. We're taking something that's already there and we're modulating it to maybe improve. 

Speaker 4:        [00:11:00] So evolutionary tools or things that the body has, it just happened to work well enough for us to survive as a species. It doesn't mean it's optimized and this field tends to go away very quickly. Nobody really knows whether extending the duration of the field would improve the healing or if we could shape it. Maybe you can control how scar tissue forms and things like that. So there's this idea of looking at how the body already heals itself and then figuring out where you might start to control it. And electricity is one of the areas that's really been under utilized in medical technology for the sort of thing. Yeah. I think for those of your audience [00:11:30] that are sort of tech junkies, if you will, the resurgence of this type of thing. Occurrent Lee I think arises because we've gotten very good at building very low power, very small electronics, and there's been a whole slew of new polymers and sort of new flexible substrates that are also conductive or can hold conductors. And so those two things together rekindled interest and trying to build gadgets that sit 

Speaker 6:        on the skin. Or in the NSF case, we're not only doing the skin, but we're trying to develop a tool longterm [00:12:00] for surgeons to do something inside the body. So it'd be nice to be able to leave something that will help you heal, but then it'll be resorts so you don't have to reopen. Right. 

Speaker 5:        Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guests are Michelle. My heart is in Daniel Cohen of UC Berkeley. They want to build a smart bandage for wounds. In the next segment, they talk about the focus of their research. 

Speaker 6:        [00:12:30] So in your approach to the NSF, was there some sort of focus, there's a technological focus and an application focus? The technological focus for the NSF was to point out that there was a lot of fundamental engineering science that had to be done to produce the type of systems that could do this. You know, we're looking at resorbable batteries are real parts wise, how you would build these systems, what polymers you'd use, what the rates of resorption. There's a lot of just fundamental stuff going on. If you posit that there'll be value to [00:13:00] these kinds of things. That's one focus as the other focus. I would say application wise we're looking at two things. The most ambitious is that you could develop systems that a surgeon could use for internal wounds. So the dream is a surgeon is, for example, let's say you have to resect the part of your intestine. 

Speaker 6:        You then have to fuse the two parts that are left behind. There are methods for doing this and there's still research going on into what we know. The clinical methodology for this. It would be very useful if you could leave behind something that [00:13:30] could tell you, if nothing else, the state of how that is healing but would then go away because you're certainly not going to go back and open somebody's abdomen to take out a little piece of sensor that was doing something to intestine. Right? That'd be a not a good idea, and so that idea, that dream that you could leave behind, very small, very thin things that could take data if nothing else. Take data is really what was one of the applications. The other one is surface wounds. There are lots of surface wounds caused by illness. For example, advanced diabetes produces a [00:14:00] lot of problems in the extremities and wounds that are chronic that don't heal very well. 

Speaker 6:        There's just a lot of ongoing interest in surface wounds and not just the technologies for understanding how they may be healing, but in things that maybe could help heal those surface wounds. Those are our full side view welders. I think of them as there are specific things we want to show we can do with our partners at UCLA, but there's also an entire wealth of engineering science that has to be done to build the fundamental. So the NSF was okay with that broad [00:14:30] a portfolio of research. Well, so that's sort of what their mandate is to go broad like that. Cause that seems like you're, you're doing stuff. 

Speaker 4:        I think their main concern here is that they specifically discourage healthcare applications as NIH can fund those. But the difference is that what engineers have found for a long time now is that we don't actually know how to engineer biology. So any technology brings quantification 

Speaker 6:        and an engineering mindset to solving this, like tissue engineering, growing organs. We don't have a lot of engineering for that. But if we start [00:15:00] to monitor everything we can, that chemical signals mechanical, electrical, we build up a set of stimulus and response type rules. We understand how to perturb these systems. So in the same way that you might build a bridge according to a manual of how you build a bridge and how you look at the loads in it and the ways of building a bridge, we might someday build organs. So if that's the pitch, that's much more fundamental science and that's really where it has a medical application. But we can't do it without science and engineering principles that just don't exist right now. There's two points I should mention. First of all, the key is this work [00:15:30] is really looking at the fundamentals of the engineering and the science. 

Speaker 6:        We certainly have our foot into clinical side because I think it informs some of this, right? So that what you're doing is relevant so that someday you could go down that path so you're not in isolation because if you're not assuming that you're headed in this great direction. Exactly. And then you find clinical guys saying less clinically. Right. So the other were very good. And the second thing is that, um, we're funded under a slightly broader grant mechanism than usual. So we have a, what's called an NSF. Every, I think this is emerging frontiers and research and innovation I think [00:16:00] is what it is and these are sort of headline or marquee type thing. So we're very lucky that we were awarded one of these and so I think the NSF has really looking for this broad, far reaching hard-hitting effort. I think there's a good point to mention that this project is really a big collaboration between a number of us and I'd like to mention who they are because some of the material work has done by very talented people in the department on a rds and the Vec Subramanian are two professors in the ECS department and they're very well known for flexible printed systems and [00:16:30] the materials that go into them and we work also with Shovel Roy at UCF and Mike Harrison and Mike is a sort of brilliant pediatric surgeon and shovel. 

Speaker 6:        Roy's well known for the technologies he builds at the interface with clinical need. It's really the fact that all these people come together that we're building all of these tools. 

Speaker 7:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        spectrum is a science and technology show on KALX Berkeley. We are talking with Michelle Mull Harvest Daniel Cohen. [00:17:00] They are researching the electrical field that is generated by wounds in mammals. Their hope is to collect meaningful data from sensors embedded in bandages placed on wounds. 

Speaker 6:        If you approached interpreting and analyzing the electrical field data that you're getting out of the wounds in an animal right now we're being very cautious. We started a first few experiments with rodents over the last six months. What we've [00:17:30] built is a, is a series of systems. You can think of them as insulators with lots of little electrodes all over them. An array of of little electrodes. They're on order of a centimeter or less in terms of you can think of a postage stamp, maybe a bit smaller. We have different varieties of them. Some are stiff, some are very flexible. You can think of it as contact lenses or transparency paper, that kind of thing. And these arrays are connected to electrical sensing equipment. There's a miniaturize a little board that runs everything [00:18:00] and sends data to a block and all this data is collected and what we're currently looking at as a variety of different signals on both open wounds. 

Speaker 6:        So if I, for example, cut the skin and on pressure wounds, pressure wounds or something that people that don't see clinics very often or hospitals aren't familiar with but in fact are huge, huge problem in hospitals right now. Then we lay these arrays over the tissue and we measure a variety of different things. One thing we measure what's known as electrical impedance between different [00:18:30] points on the array and you can think of electrical impedance as how much resistance to an electric current that tissue might produce. It's not a steady current, it's a time bearing current, so we sort of wiggle the current on and off, on and off negative, positive, negative, a sinusoidal and how quickly that current responds and how much of it there is. That allows us to calculate the impedance and there's a lot you can tell from that. You can tell whether things are very wet and conductive. 

Speaker 6:        You can tell whether the tissue is tight knit, so that doesn't let things through a oily. You can tell whether there [00:19:00] might be changes in from one tissue to another. You can infer things about what tissues are might be underneath. The other thing we measure is actually electric potential when the wounds are immediately after they're made. We try to look at what kind of potentials arise and how they're changing. So right now that's in terms of measurement. That's really what we're looking at it. And another thing I should point out as we do these measurements as a function of frequency across a wide range of frequency spectrum up to hundreds of kilohertz. And that's sort of the rapidity with which we wiggle the signal because different components in the tissue [00:19:30] will respond differently at different legal frequencies. Once we have that complete plot, we can look at the difference between them and by to see whether we can build models that tell us, oh well we've, you see this type of distribution. 

Speaker 6:        There's a in tech skin for example. So the dream, in this case, you put your bandaid on and your doctor checks his eye, his or her iPhone every 12 to 24 hours and just gets a different little map of how it's working without ever having to remove the dressing. How are you doing in understanding what those signals mean in terms of healing? [00:20:00] But we just had a meeting, they're doing great. They've basically collected a great deal of data on the latest set of wounds they did and now they're in fact proposing models and seeing how the data fits. They're fitting their models to the data to try to use those fits as ways of discriminating different types of tissues. So we're in the middle of it right now. I couldn't tell you much. We're still putting all that story together for publication. So, and are you able to leverage the work that other people are doing? Oh, absolutely. Sure. Well, I mean you always do that. Like I said, nothing is in a vacuum, right? So absolutely. We follow [00:20:30] the literature and, and we build off of what other people have found and try to add our own contributions. That's, that's how it works. Maybe these ideas came from discoveries from the 18 hundreds and then later on in the 1980s onwards, a bunch of really good developmental biologists have really pioneered a lot of this and gone down as, as showing that 

Speaker 4:        even in an embryo you can detect changes in electrical potential at the surface of the embryo where limbs will form and things like that. So there's a huge amount of stuff out there that gave us the idea for the original thing, but we're barely scratching the surface. [00:21:00] We were technologist, right? We're engineers. So part of one thing and figure it out. Yeah. So the idea of trying to analyze the wound field data, do you have to solve that problem first before you can take on anything else? Like trying to instigate the healing? Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. You would never put this in the body without knowing, knowing that a real lot works. But on the surface it's a different healing mechanism than say a fracture, but it's still the idea that we don't necessarily know what the cause and [00:21:30] effect is yet. So we have to show that getting a field out relates to some state that we can say the wound is in and that we can intelligently put a field back in that actually helps. So we need some metric of success. And without that metric, that number that says the wound is doing better or worse, we're not confident saying that our stimulation is helping. So that's why getting this data first is really important. 

Speaker 6:        The parameter space is fairly large, right? To number of things you could possibly change. Some of the effects are very subtle. And so just willy nilly going [00:22:00] in there and saying, oh, I applied some fields, you know, likely not gonna be very useful. And then there's another subtlety, which is that there are probably clinical contexts in which this is of limited utility, even if it works. And so that is, uh, something we spend a lot of time thinking about. So let me give you an example. Let's say I told you I can make that little cut on your knees heal 5% faster with a $15 bandaid. I'm pretty sure you're not going to buy a $15 [inaudible] except maybe once for the novelty of it. You know it tickles. But [00:22:30] there are contexts where, and Daniel alluded to this earlier, for example, scar formation is a big deal, right? 

Speaker 6:        How a scar forms and the trajectory of the wound healing for certain load-bearing wounds of really big deal, right? Think of your abdomen if you had to go in there and hurt those muscles or hernia. And there are many things like this and so if, and I want to be very careful to say if if it was founded, electrical interventions can affect that type of healing in a way that produces a useful outcome, right? Much better scar developments so that your load bearing properties are [00:23:00] maybe not as good as the original, but a lot better than just letting it sit around with a dressing. That'll be a very big deal. But that's a very big space, right? 

Speaker 4:        And that's why we split it into this in Vivo work on monitoring the surface and wound properties and in vitro work where we have cells and tissues and culture where we can directly stimulate them in culture in a very controlled environment and watch exactly how they respond to different shapes of fields and types of fields and come up with a way of describing how they behave. That doesn't require the Nvivo work. So we have two parallel tracks [00:23:30] right now and hopefully we can put them together. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible] be sure to catch part two of this interview with Michelle Maha Urbis and Daniel Cohen on the next spectrum in two weeks. In that interview, Michelle and Daniel talk about the limitations of sensors on or in humans, the ethics of sensing and inputs into living systems and moving research discoveries 

Speaker 8:        into startup companies. Spectrum shows are [00:24:00] archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link to get you there. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. We hope you can get out to a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Renee Rao and Rick Karnofsky present the calendar 

Speaker 9:        nerd night east space first show of 2014 will be happening January 27th the show features three great Speakers. [00:24:30] First nerd night, San Francisco alum, Bradley boy tech. We'll guide you through how scientists organize and present some of the vast amounts of data available today. Then the Chabot space centers, Benjamin [inaudible] will discuss the most likely places to find life off of planet earth. Of course, finally KQ Eighties Lisa Allah Ferris will tell you what you need to know about Obamacare. The show will be held this Monday, the 27th at the new Parkway Theater in Oakland. Doors open at seven to get tickets for the HR event. [00:25:00] Go to East Bay nerd night, spelled n I t e.com this February 2nd the California Academy of Sciences will host a lecture on the Ice Age Fonda of the bay area. There's a good chance that wherever you happen to be sitting or standing is a spot where Colombian mamis giants laws direwolves, saber tooth cats and other megafauna. Also Rome during the ice age. Learn about the real giants of San Francisco and how you can embark upon [00:25:30] a local journey to see evidence of these extraordinary extinct animals. The lecture will be held@theacademyonfebruarysecondfromninefortyfiveamtotwelvepmticketsareavailableonlineatcalacademy.org

Speaker 8:        February's East Bay Science cafe. We'll be on Wednesday the fifth from seven to 9:00 PM at Cafe Val Paris, CEO 1403 Solano in Albany, Dr. Harry Green. We'll discuss his book [00:26:00] tracks and shadows field biology as art green, a herpetologist at Cornell blends personal memoir with natural history. He'll discuss the nuts and bolts of field research and teaching how he sees science aiding and in conservation and appreciation of nature, as well as give many tales about his favorite subject. Snakes. For more information about this free event, visit the cafes page on the website of the Berkeley Natural History Museum at BN [00:26:30] h m. Dot berkeley.edu/about/science cafe dot PHP. A feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and Rene Rao present our news in a letter published in January 15th nature. James us or would a locomotor biomechanist at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London and colleagues explain why Birds Migrate In v-shaped [00:27:00] formations. The team fitted several northern bald ibis is with gps trackers and accelerometers to measure wing movement. They found that the birds positioned themselves in optimum positions that agree with their aerodynamic models. Further the birds flap in phase with one another when in such permissions instead of the antifreeze flapping, they performed when following immediately behind each other. This in phase flapping maximizes lifted the plot [00:27:30] and is surprising as a team noted. The aerodynamic accomplishments were previously not thought possible for birds because of the complex flight dynamics and sensory feedback that would be required to perform such a feat. 

Speaker 9:        The tenuous place in the human family tree of artifice guest room, it is a 4.4 million year old African primate has recently been solidified. Fossil remains Ardipithecus Ramidus or rd as a species is known first discovered by UC Berkeley [00:28:00] Professor Tim White and his team in Ethiopia in the 1990s and have proven a consternation to classify ever sense rd displays an unusual mixture of human and ape traits. Fossils reveals small human like teeth and upper pelvis adapted to bipedal motion, but a disproportionately small brain and grasping large toes, best suited for climbing trees. Scientists split over whether rd was our distant relative, essentially an ape that retained a few human features from along a common ancestor [00:28:30] or our close cousin, possibly even an ancestor. Recently Tim white among many others coauthored a paper with Arizona State Universities, William Kimball in which they successfully linked the rd to Australopithecus and thereby to humans. The team examine the basis of rd skulls and found surprising similarities to human and Australopithecines skulls indicating that those had already been may have been small. It was far more similar to a hominids than an apes 

Speaker 7:        in in 

Speaker 9:        [00:29:00] the music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. 

Speaker 1:        Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l ex hate yahoo.com. [00:29:30] Join us in two weeks at this same 

Speaker 10:      hi [inaudible].

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Richard Norgaard Prof Emeritus of Energy and Resources at UC Berkeley. Among the founders of ecological economics, his research addresses how environmental problems challenge scientific understanding and the policy process. Part two of two.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. 

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly [00:00:30] 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Hi there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show today. We present part two of our interview with Richard Norgaard, professor emeritus of the energy resources group at UC Berkeley. He's among the founders of the field of ecological economics. His recent research addresses how environmental problems challenged scientific understanding [00:01:00] and the policy process, how ecologists and economists understand systems differently and how globalization affects environmental governance. In part two of the interview Norgaard talks about interdisciplinary problem solving. He also shares his thoughts on sustainability co-evolution and confronting a change in climate. 

Speaker 4:        You've been very interested in them multi-disciplinary collaborative research model. Yeah, this is true. I've had very interesting experiences working in groups with people who think very differently [00:01:30] and I don't know when it starts. I guess probably the first project was a Ford Foundation funded project where eight or nine of us from different disciplines were set up as an Alaska pipeline team in 1970 the summer of 70 and we spent the summer talking to pipeline engineers to state officials, federal officials, scientists in the area, wildlife management people, native Americans, the Eskimo [00:02:00] about what's going on and as a team we tried to assess what's really the potential of [inaudible] Bay oil field for the state of Alaska and what are the myths, how do we break those myths and try to come up with a better understanding. Shortly after I came to Berkeley, Robert Vandenbosch from biological control entomology came into my office and said, we need an economist to work on pesticide use, and I didn't know anything about pesticide use other than what I'd read in silence swing by Rachel Carson and I [00:02:30] had an incredible experience working with Vandenbosch, Carl Huffaker, many, many anthropologists, but rather quickly. 

Speaker 4:        Also just because there weren't other economists doing it. Found myself on a presidential advisory committee working with the council on environmental quality on pesticide policy, a working on on 19 University National Science Foundation Integrated Pest Management Project. And you get out in the field, you talked to farmers, [00:03:00] end up talking to the pesticide industry people and you learn a lot and you try to assemble it and try to change how things are working. So early in my career I got very involved with these interdisciplinary activities, but the, the strongest experience was just joining the knowledges, being on national academy committees with the former president of Stanford University whose names Donald Kennedy, a tremendous scientist that was able to work across [00:03:30] scientific fields with other people. But I was seen scientists involved in collective understanding or using their judgment together to try to say, this is what science can say and this is what society probably should do given what we know. 

Speaker 4:        But it was a judgment process. It wasn't that there was a great big computer model that put all of our understanding together. And have you seen that process improving over time? I think there's more people participating in processes [00:04:00] like that. And the intergovernmental panel on climate change is certainly a massive experiment along those lines. And the Millennium Ecosystem assessment was one of these, we're doing it more. What we're not doing is actually teaching undergraduate students and graduate students that this is how science works when it really comes to understanding complex systems. It's a matter of getting in a room together and talking a lot and bringing your knowledges together. [00:04:30] And then that raises new questions that we can go back and study and do deeper research in small teams of maybe interdisciplinary or maybe it's strictly disciplinary, but it's that does my knowledge fit together with this other person's knowledge? 

Speaker 4:        And if not, what does it mean? And if it does, great, you know, science does not come together. And if it did, who would know, who would be smart enough to know and how would we know that person knew? And so there's a great problem, you got to do it together [00:05:00] and we're not teaching that yet. I think the energy and resources group does, but it's not quite as explicit or as open as it should be. And is that what makes that program so distinctive? Well, I tried to leave that mark on it and had the advantage of serving on the admissions committee. And certainly one of my criteria was to bring people to the program who had enough experience to have a sense of identity [00:05:30] and a sense of voice, experiential knowledge that they could bring to the group, but also to not just take the most brilliant students we could find on the list that best matched the interest of the professors, but to actually try to select 15 to 22 students who could learn together, who had different understanding, who had different disciplinary backgrounds or experiential knowledge. 

Speaker 4:        And so I literally tried to set it up as a shared learning to the extent I could. There's many people involved [00:06:00] in the, in the decision process, and of course the applicants this themselves have to say, yes, your best intentions are never carried out. But that was certainly an influence I tried to have. And to some extent did. And the book that you're working on now or I've just completed? Well, I just try authored a book, David Schlossberg and John Drysek. I have to say that they basically did most of the writing. We had try edited a handbook in Oxford Handbook on climate change in society [00:06:30] and so we decided we ought to build a write up a shorter book, a 200 page book that would be for lay people are educated obviously, but uh, a broader audience, a much broader audience. And the title of that is climate challenge society, right. And I [inaudible] wordpress. Yes. So I, I can say I contributed to the title climate challenge society and climate challenge in both ways that were having difficulty coming to grips with the concept of climate change. But we're also challenged [00:07:00] by the consequences of climate change and that books currently out. That book came out a couple of months ago. I have no idea how it's selling yet. I'm, I'm hopeful. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] spectrums. Brad Swift is interviewing Richard Norgaard and ecological economists. Next segment. He talks about the book that he's currently writing. 

Speaker 4:        [00:07:30] The book I'm writing now as the unusual title economism and the economy scene. And so elaborate on the first term economism. Uh, there's several ways to get into this, but you probably understand the difference between environmentalism and environmental science and that environmentalism is the movement. It draws on environmental science, but not as rigorously as it probably should. It doesn't mind using old [00:08:00] environmental science if that suits its purposes better. But environmentalism also feeds back on environmental science that environmental scientists needed speak to environmental ism environmentalist's and so they will choose words to speak to their public. We don't use the word economism. And the quickest way to say this, the difference between environmentalism and economism is that we don't use the word economism because there isn't any difference between economics and economists. [00:08:30] And they're kind of so tightly bound that we don't see the difference that, but economism is the beliefs we hold as a people. 

Speaker 4:        And those beliefs help keep the economy going there. The ideas that are invoked in political discourse. You can think of it as just like we think of environmentalism as only kind of a religious movement or a movement that brings people their social identity. Economism is similar in that way that our economic beliefs help rationalize where we are in the economy [00:09:00] or economic beliefs. Help rationalize allowing our corporations to use cheap labor abroad or economic beliefs. Sort of explain how the system we're in exists and why it's there. Almost everything in our lives on a daily basis and to understand that we have economism that intertwines with economic sciences. Economists themselves are engaged in this belief system in partly perpetrating it and [00:09:30] partly changing it. So that's the nature of the next book, the second term as econo scene and he wrote a familiar, many of them audience would be familiar with the idea of the Anthropocene, the idea that we're now in a new geological era, an era in which people are the primary drivers of environmental change, and that's controversial among the scientific community, but it's begun to be used quite a bit. 

Speaker 4:        And anthropocene to me is very vague. It doesn't [00:10:00] identify what it is. It's doing the driving. If you use the word econo scene, you should say, Nah, it's the economic system that we're in that's doing the driving and it's the economic system that we need to change. I mean we're not going to transform people. We're going to transform our social organization to solve this problem. And so econo scene to my mind is at least since post World War II is the appropriate term. As you look at the current economic system [00:10:30] you and mentioned earlier that the growth paradigm isn't really sustainable. Sustainability is a buzz word of the moment in so many areas. How can we define that and how do we pursue sustainability? I think we're so far from sustainability that it's very difficult to find and we're in this very difficult to understand very complex big system that has all these different feedbacks. 

Speaker 4:        You know, the idea that we can comprehend sustainability is [00:11:00] like, can we comprehend the full environmental system? I don't think so. I think we have a strong sense that we're in a danger zone and we need to move out of it. And we know what directions we need to go. And that means slowing down the rates of material flows, slowing down the rates of energy use, slowing down the amount of toxic materials we're putting into the environment or pulling out of with the environment and transforming and releasing back into the environment. And [00:11:30] we have certain equity concepts that sort of says that those who are doing more of it should cut back more than those who are doing less of it. And I think as we move in those directions, we will see the system responding and we'll eventually get a better sense of sustainability, but we'll never really understand sustainability. 

Speaker 4:        It's a really important word, but the idea that we can define it and get it all tied down scientifically and do it is now become part of our problem. But the idea that [00:12:00] we need to change and we know which direction to go, I think that's actually very clear within that change. Yeah. Does that relate to your idea of co-evolution? Is that sort of the basis of co-evolutionary thought or [inaudible] okay, so yeah, we haven't really laid that out. This was a thought experiment that I was in my own mind working in Brazil in the late seventies and I was very involved in sort of what's going on in the Amazon, gone onto [00:12:30] an Amazon planning team for Brazilian government and they were trying to optimally plan how things work, how could we develop the Amazon using science? And I was sitting there admits this process saying that's not the way development occurred in Europe. 

Speaker 4:        That's not the way development occurred in the United States. There was a lot of experimentation and a lot of things didn't work and some things did work. Oh, that sounds like evolution at the time I was reading a lot of ecology and evolutionary theory and [00:13:00] was a friend of Paul aeroflex who was one of the cofounders of the idea of co-evolution species are primarily evolving in the context of each other, not to a fixed environment and what does that mean for how we think evolutionarily? And so yes, I began to try to understand or think about change in the human nature interaction in co-evolutionary terms. It's a pattern of thinking that sheds light on our predicament. But it's only [00:13:30] one pattern of thinking. So I don't say this is the answer, but it's very insightful. It's a pattern of thinking that says things are happening by experiment and that we should be experimenting more and be less certain about what we're doing. And what we've really done is set up a global system of everybody doing the same thing and we're not learning very much from it. And it's a very risky experiment. So I think if you understand change as an evolutionary process, you don't do what [00:14:00] we've done in globalizing the economy and trying to push that further and further and further. 

Speaker 1:        Spectrum is a public affairs show on k Alex Burke. Our guest today is professor Richard Norgaard of UC Berkeley. In the next segment, he talks about the need for increasing diversity and experimentation in the world's economies. 

Speaker 4:        [00:14:30] So the idea that industries and enterprises should try to become sustainable becomes an experiment. We're always experimenting. We have sincere corporations that are trying to go green. We have corporations that are greenwashing. Everybody's experimenting. But is the system as a whole set ups and those experiments are giving us the diversity we need from a systems [00:15:00] perspective and we're not doing that. And is that much easier to identify in the biological realm rather than in the technology economic world of manufacturing. And um, if economists were actually going out looking at how the world works more than we do, we, one of the beautiful things about biologists, they go out in the field and say, oh look, that's interesting. Yeah. I kind of spend very little time going out and say, wow, this industry is co-evolving [00:15:30] with that industry. Isn't this interesting? We tend to sit in our offices and smash data rather than actually try to observe. 

Speaker 4:        I'm obviously, it's very difficult to observe economic phenomena today, uh, cause there's just so much of it happening and it's not as visible as it was say in the 19th century when industries were just emerging. Certainly there are applied and practical economists that are born at this. How are firms we configuring, how are they relating [00:16:00] to each other in different ways than the economics profession is the academic economics profession. Yeah. I think if we were to be more field oriented we would see co-evolution and maybe you'd be able to draw on it and learn from that. In terms of trying to alter the economic system and the path that we're currently on, given the ideological polarization, do you see a way that that could happen with the current polarization? I have great difficulties seeing it. [00:16:30] The common element unfortunately is we all need our share of material stuff rather than a discussion about what's the good life and how are we going to go forward. 

Speaker 4:        The forward for both of them is more, it's more at the tension over who gets what. Until we get to a situation where we get beyond the stuff and use of energy to what makes a good life. I don't see that transformation happening, but I'm hopeful that it's creeping up somewhere [00:17:00] that those discussions are going on and that'll emerge somewhere. Certainly there are people talking about those things. I don't see it at the center we have now the two centers we have now two, can we create a world in which nations become less in tangled and we can get more experiments between them and then have some sort of a learning way between those different nations so that we retain our flexibility [00:17:30] and don't put all of our eggs in one basket. I guess that's the experiment I'm looking for and does the approach to climate change and global warming, is that an opportunity for the same kind of experimentation? 

Speaker 4:        It may be the disaster that forces us into action. I don't know if you call that an or not, but a opportunity or disaster. It's certainly testing how well we understand complex systems and change with those systems [00:18:00] and I'm hoping we'll find a way to to make this adjustment, but we're not doing it very well now. It certainly seems that they're trying to stay within the growth paradigm so far in your mind until they abandoned that on some level or completely it's not really gonna pay off by my mind. Then again, growth is kind of tricky. What we don't want is a growth of impacts. We want a decline. We want to simplify the ways in which we're interactive with nature. Minimize the footprint. That's one way [00:18:30] to put it. Minimize the footprint so that's not a matter of growth or no growth, right? You could still have growth in the arts. 

Speaker 4:        We could all cut each other's hair every other day and charge each other and the GDP would look fantastic. GDP is a very deceptive numbers just to measure market activity. If somebody wants to call that growth, that's okay with me, but what we really need to do is simplify and be less intrusive in the natural system. Similarly, looking [00:19:00] longterm and coming up with an experimental framework. The delta program that you were talking about and the delta in general being a mysterious black box that no one quite understands. Do you feel that there's a growing acknowledgement within the policy community that it's going to take years and years and years and a very dynamic approach to solve it? I think that's true. The Delta Reform Act of 2009 [00:19:30] is very supportive of science. It mandates that we use adaptive management. You know, it's acknowledging that we have to change our management as the times change. 

Speaker 4:        It's legislation that says climate change exists and we need to bring climate change into our understanding of how we think of the Delta as right in the legislation. I mean that's unusual, you know, at least in the state of California already in a world in which we are acknowledging the system is changing [00:20:00] and we need to change with it. There's real complications as to how you get responsible public action and responsible private action in a changing world and a predictable world. You can say, if you do this, then this will happen. If you don't do it, you're responsible and changing world responsibility is really hard to assign and we still want responsible government. [00:20:30] We still want responsible managers, we want responsible enterprises, but how do you set up rules which you know need to change. If you know they need to change, then our agencies or private parties allowed to adjust before the rules are changed. You give it to see the problem. Structurally responsibility and a rapidly changing world are in conflict. This means we need a dramatic [00:21:00] increase in trust and that trust has to be based on actual actions that are based in scientific understanding of a changing world. How do we build that trust? It gets back to how do we collectively understand and learn together and live as a community together in a changing world, it's pretty dramatic transformation. 

Speaker 4:        How do you see academic work addressing some of these [00:21:30] societal problems going forward? Is there a role? Of course, and of course academia is constantly changing and where the learning is taking place is constantly changing within academe. I guess I'd like to go back to this. You know, we're not a university where multiversity and Clark Kerr wrote a book on that almost 50 years ago. Yeah. How to become a university again. How to become a model for the experiment. We're actually in of trying to collectively understand [00:22:00] a very complex system. I think universities could play a very strong role in making an effort to actually change the system and the system of learning among students, and we're not even talking about that yet. We're still very much in the fractured disciplinary mode and if anything, maybe with the greater need for corporate funding for rich individuals help even more show going into the [00:22:30] disciplinary mode rather than the collective understanding mode. Richard Norgaard, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's great pleasure 

Speaker 2:        spectrum shows are on iTunes here. This kid is simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. 

Speaker 5:        Now a few of the science of technology events [00:23:00] happening locally over the next two weeks. Vic, could I ski and I present the calendar on Tuesday, January 14th former NASA astronauts and Co founder of the B6 12 foundation. Ed Lou, well discuss protecting earth from asteroids. Why we may not see them coming at the Commonwealth Club of California, five nine five market street in San Francisco. Lou is pointed out that more than a million near Earth Asteroids are larger than the asteroid. That struck Siberia in 1908 [00:23:30] that one was about a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and it was only about 40 meters across, yet it destroyed an area roughly the size of the San Francisco Bay area. Lou will discuss his mission to detect and track the million with the potential to destroy any major city on earth and how his B6 12 foundation plans to build, launch, and operate a deep space telescope with an infrared lens. The first private sector deep space mission [00:24:00] in history and mission will be $20 or $7 for students. For more information, visit Commonwealth club.org 

Speaker 3:        on January 16th Dr Tom Volk will present a talk on the hidden romantic lives of fun guy. Dr [inaudible] is a professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin Lacrosse where he teaches courses on medical mycology, plant microbe interactions, food and industrial in Mycology, organismal biology and Latin and Greek for scientist. [00:24:30] Dr. Buck has also conducted fungal bio diversity studies in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Alaska, and Israel. His free public talk will be held on Thursday, January 16th from seven 30 to 9:30 PM and three 38 Koshland Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. 

Speaker 5:        Basics, the bay area art and science interdisciplinary collaborative sessions is hosting talks center reception with exhibits on our watershed. Over 7 million of us live near the bays, [00:25:00] rivers and creeks that comprise the San Francisco Bay watershed. Professor Jay Lund will highlight and explore the ramifications of the urban bay areas, dependence on water from distant sources, environmental artists, Daniel McCormick and Mary O'Brien. We'll discuss what they term remedial art, surveying some of their watershed sculpture projects and professor Sarah Cohen will introduce us to sea vomit and other species as she spotlights aquatic diversity [00:25:30] in the bay accompanied by a string quartet. The show will be on Saturday, January 18th seven to 9:00 PM with doors at six 30 it's at the ODC theater, 31 five three 17th street in San Francisco. Admission is on a sliding scale so you can attend for free. You should visit Oh d C dance.org to make your reservation 

Speaker 3:        the years first iteration of the monthly lecture series signs that cow will be held on January 18th [00:26:00] Christian Reichardt or researcher at UC Berkeley will speak about his research on cosmic microwave background radiation. Much of it connected in the South Pole. Cosmic background radiation is our most ancient form of detectable lights and carries the imprint of the big bang. It has been a crucial tool and exploring the beginning of our universe. For the past 20 years, scientists had been mapping this radiation using telescopes located in the South Pole. Dr Reichardt will discuss what is already known about the Big Bang, what the latest results from the South Pole could mean and what it's like to work at the bottom of the world. The free public talk will be held [00:26:30] on January 18th in room one 59 of Mulford Hall on the southwest edge of the UC Berkeley campus. The talk will begin promptly at 11:00 AM a feature spectrum is to present new stories we particularly interesting. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the news. 

Speaker 5:        Oxford anthropologist, Robin Dunbar is famous for formulating the so called Dunbar's number. That's the maximum number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships with and it's about 150 [00:27:00] people he's published in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences. This week. His article coauthored by Jerry Sarah Maki from Alto University in Finland and others reports on a study in which 24 students we're giving it an 18 month sell contract. Throughout the study, participants were given a survey to rank the emotional closeness of friends and family members. Perhaps unsurprisingly, greater emotional closeness rankings correlated with the frequency and duration of [00:27:30] cell phone calls. More surprisingly though was the number of people a person called and how much time they spent on the phone with them remained relatively constant. Even if the particular people they talk to May change. For example, the top three contacts typically get 40 to 50% of the time spent on calls. As new network members are added, some old network members either are replaced or receive your calls. The author's note. This is likely to reflect the consequences of finite resources [00:28:00] such as the time available for communication. That emotional effort required to sustain close relationships and the ability to make emotional investments. 

Speaker 3:        A team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have used the inorganic material, vanadium dioxide, to create a micro sized robotic torsional muscle motor. The artificial muscle is a thousand times more powerful than a human muscle of the same size. The device can also hurt all objects 50 times as heavy as itself up to a distance five [00:28:30] times as long as its own link faster than the blink of a human eye within 60 milliseconds. A paper describing the innovative machine and its use of material phase transitions appeared in a recent issue of the journal. Advanced materials, the material and the robotic muscle. Vanadium dioxide is highly prized itself because its properties change with temperature. At low temperatures. It acts as an insulator, but suddenly I 67 degrees Celsius. It becomes a conductor. Additionally, upon warming the crystal instructure, the material will contract in one direction while expanding [00:29:00] in the other two. The multi-functionality of the material makes it a prime candidate for use as an artificial muscle, as well as helping to improve the efficiency in other electronic devices. Okay. 

Speaker 1:        And the music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, [00:29:30] please send them to us. Our email address is [inaudible] spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this time. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Norgaard Prof Emeritus of Energy and Resources at UC Berkeley. Among the founders of ecological economics, his research addresses how environmental problems challenge scientific understanding and the policy process. Part one of two.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum [00:00:30] the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 4:        Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we are presenting part one of two interviews with Richard Norgaard, professor emeritus of the energy resources group at UC Berkeley. Richard Norgaard received [00:01:00] his phd in economics from the University of Chicago in 1971 he was among the founders of the field of ecological economics. His research addresses how environmental problems challenged scientific understanding and the public policy process, how ecologists and economists understand systems differently and how globalization affects environmental governance. In today's interview, Norgaard talks about the origins of economic science defines [00:01:30] ecological economics and discusses certainty and uncertainty in science. Here's that interview Richard Norgaard. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Would you describe how economic theory and the science of economics has been forged over time? 

Speaker 5:        I hesitate to use that word science with economics, but like other patterns of thinking in in scholarly endeavors. It's a mix. There were the physiocrats [00:02:00] who basically were in admiration of physics and said, well, we ought to be able to think of the economy as a bunch of flows and they were on 1750 or so, didn't work out very well in the 19th century. As we knew more about energy, we had people more again from the physical side thinking about value, think about the economy as energy flows and we're still trying to do that well. What we really think of as sort of conventionally economics comes out [00:02:30] of moral philosophy and Adam Smith is sort of asking what makes a good society? How do people behave? And the markets have been around for Millennia. He took another look at markets and said, Gee, this is interesting to people acting in their own interests, make both of them better off. 

Speaker 5:        And this was just a thought experiment. If that's true, then then what? Then what and any expanded that thought experiment, what does it mean [00:03:00] with Spec to the role of markets and the role of government? And that's been the dominant pattern. But what I would say thought experiments, if we look at what's going out out there and say she has it like this, if this this was happening, and then expand that to a more systemic understanding of the economy as a whole is not been by hard data collection and patterns emerging from the data though there is that element to it though, right? Reinforce the [00:03:30] thought. Oh to be sure. Malthus's thought experiment was one of the most important ever and he just thought, well, you know, it looks like agricultural production increases linearly and population increases geometrically and what does that mean? And that meant that you're going to come to the limits and clashes and war and bad behavior and and therefore abstinence would be good. 

Speaker 5:        Late marriage would be good. And he definitely tried to back [00:04:00] that up with data. The data were very poor at the time. But yes, we've always tried to back up our thought experiments with data and sometimes that exchange changes how we think and makes our thinking more elaborate. But when I say we're different from other sciences in that we're less data-driven and more just pattern of thinking driven and then within the profession there are these various schools of thought to be sure we can [00:04:30] do get pressure to align yourself in some way. Where the school of thought, well I wouldn't say so much pressure, I would say it's, it's a desire or human desire for a sense of community and shared thinking and it's much more comfortable working with people who think like you do. And so there's pretty strong lines between people who think markets are most important and people who think power is most important sort of followers of Adam Smith or followers of Carl Marx. 

Speaker 5:        But [00:05:00] yeah, there are times when, I guess you could say you feel the pressure, but it's more just the pressure of a community that and communities are good communities help us think together and dig deeper along a pattern of thinking. But of course they also keep you in the same Rut. And then we, if you become deviant, oh yeah. How are you treated at that point? Well and are you encouraged to be deviant? So anyway, so there are rankings of what's strong economics and what's weak economics. [00:05:30] And on the neoclassical side, the mathematicians have always had bigger Thrones than those who actually go out and study how the markets work. And then those who actually study the, the laws and regulations that determine how markets work. Those are referred to as institutional economists and for many years institutional economists, which are the lowest ranking, they studied the facts, they just studied history. 

Speaker 5:        They weren't [00:06:00] high theorist, but of course it's, it's how, how laws get written that determine how markets work and not the mathematics. Early on in your career you've stepped out of the mainstream. I never was in the mainstream. I, I was out before I was in and I've always been out. I had a very strong experience as an 18 year old, 19 year old as a river guide in the Glen Canyon of the Colorado. And that's now under Lake Powell. And [00:06:30] I was one of a very small number of people who saw this area, but also saw it go under and I became a fairly committed environmentalist and then started thinking, well, I'm you know, 19 years old, I'm a sophomore, junior in college. What do I want to study, what I want to do in life? And I loved biology. I love geology, but nature is not the problem. We are. If we are, then what's the biggest thing? And it was not too difficult to say, well, it's, [00:07:00] it's our economy. It's how we think about our relationship with nature as determined by our economics and economic beliefs. And so I went into economics from the outside knowing that I was always on the outside. I don't recommend it. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. [00:07:30] Richard Norgaard is our guest. He is an ecological economists. In the next segment, he defines it, logical, economic [inaudible]. 

Speaker 5:        And what role do you think ecological economics has to play in shaping and informing policy? Well, we should probably describe ecologically economics a little bit first. And [00:08:00] I like to put it in a little bit in juxtaposition with environmental economics. Environmental Economics is basically a pattern of thinking that says things are left out of the economy or we don't get the opportunity to buy clean air. We don't get the opportunity to buy healthy environments and, and we just need to put everything in the market. And when everything's in the market, the market will be perfect. And so environmental economics is about [00:08:30] making the economy evermore inclusive by bringing more and more things into it. Ecological economics is not just an extension of economics. Ecological economics is a real effort to understand ecological systems and economic systems and try to understand where they may come into clash ecologies, basic premises, everything's connected to everything else. 

Speaker 5:        And a basic premise of at least mainstream economics is that things can be divided [00:09:00] up and made into property and exchanged the one hand. The economic worldview is everything's divisible and ecological worldview. Everything is connected and that's a fundamental tension and human understanding of systems. And so at least to me is that tension that signifies sort of our ultimate limits of how we understand systems that's embedded in ecological economics. So how do you reveal that tension and then try [00:09:30] to have an impact on policy that would affect that tension. In Our world today is not set up that way. Our world today is set up that science brings answers and a better informed society can make better choices. But we also have sort of the idea that that we can have scientists inside of government that can say this is how things are, and then democracy is just about choosing between options. 

Speaker 5:        [00:10:00] If you really see that fundamental tension all the way down and then science can't give answers and science can say, well look at the world as a divisible world. I see this. If I look at the world, isn't there connected world? I see this and it's up to all of us to then sort of get involved in the judgment process and the way policy is set up now it's very much in the context of a legislature that has certain roles and then the agencies that have certain roles and courts [00:10:30] that have certain roles and then policymakers are sort of in this process trying to set up options and pathways that if you follow ecological economics to its logical limits, we all need to be involved in this. And so I push ecological economics to discourse of democracy that we really need to think of democracy as a shared learning system, not as a vote counting system. 

Speaker 5:        It's a process by which we all come to [00:11:00] better understanding and make compromises and that's very different than the way we think of policy and democracy and and science. Now the long step to their, and by no means do all ecological economists think this way. We do get involved in policy, but then it frequently comes into contradiction with sort of the fundamental problems of, of our understanding. Whenever you're in a system that's not where you think the system ought [00:11:30] to be, you're still stuck with these dilemmas of how do you intervene and, and transform the system. And so I myself get involved in and policy sort of positions and you know, you don't understand the nature of the world you're in unless you're engaged with it. You can't just sit back and say, well, I'm not gonna, I'm not going to engage until it's all set up. Right? So to be sure they're economists who don't see the tension and just say ecological economics ought to fit in the [00:12:00] policy process as it is, or ecologically economists who do see the tension and need to work or choose to work with the system to help transform it. 

Speaker 4:        So in a sense, trying to build a consensus across the political world and just the general population as to the ongoing learning experiment that democracy could be. 

Speaker 5:        Yeah, and we're so far from that now. We presumed that the enlightenment, everybody would become more educated. Everybody would be in a better position [00:12:30] to make rational decisions. But we actually created a world in which we have experts in various fields. We have a market system that divides us into very specialized tasks. And so our understanding is very fractured. And so partly the fact that economics is built on a divisible world has been used to create policy as further divided the world. And it's divided the world with through globalization to the point [00:13:00] where very distance from the production process of the materials, the clothes we wear, the food we eat. And so it's very hard to come to common understanding and make decisions collectively so that the system we devised as created serious problems for common understanding.

Speaker 4:        There seemed to be some people who are recognizing that more often and pushing back or asking for an alternative to that globalization [00:13:30] and division with this to hope, 

Speaker 5:        this gives me hope, this, this division, this specialization, this fracturing of our sense of common understanding. Yeah, I see it in the drive for interdisciplinarity and the drive or you know, trying to understand the full effects of what we do, the and the bringing all the scientists together to understand climate change. As an example, I'm very involved in a process [00:14:00] in the California delta where we're trying to understand a complex system and we have procedures to try to bring in public input, but we still very much stakeholder staked down. We've got our positions and they're sort of a tension between the common understanding and let's just go to court. Let's sue each other. Let's battle it out. Let's you know I'm right, you're wrong. And that gets back to the community. I am mentioned with economists that you want to be in a shared [00:14:30] community, but if you've already got a shared community of laborers or shared community of capitalists or shared community of neoclassical economists, that's where you go back to and environmentalist are in a similar situation. 

Speaker 6:        Spectrum is a public affairs show on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is [00:15:00] professor Richard Norgaard of UC Berkeley. In the next segment he talks about certainty and uncertainty in science. 

Speaker 5:        Would the tension and increasing tension where systems potentially start to fail and common interest then gets galvanized by the failure of really large natural systems. Does the expression of risk management [00:15:30] start to bring people together? I think that's, that's a fair assessment of the situation where in that we have quested for certainty. John Dewey wrote a book on the quest for certainty and in the push for certainty we pretend we're actually reaching that certainty. And yet the very same time we're seeing that the uncertainty rules and sort of the story of climate science, it was always, well we don't know [00:16:00] this, we know none of this. We need to go back and build better and better models. And as we build better and better models, we, we learned how complex the system in is, is. And we can't really build in all the feedbacks of forest fires and uncertain events that are really contingent on particular things coming together particular time. 

Speaker 5:        If we shift to what we don't know, that very powerful drive to be precautious and to come together and to slow the economy down. But that's also [00:16:30] like asking every scientist is say let's stress what we don't know instead of what we do know. And that's hasn't been, well the public hasn't asked that of scientists. Scientists aren't inclined to put all the emphasis in what we don't know. The whole system is sort of set up that science tells us this and then we can make a rational decision. And you know, you can imagine the climate deniers jumping on the scientific community. Well they do every time the scientific [00:17:00] community on climate becomes more specific and modifies what it knew before it gets jumped on. And so the tension is, is difficult. But yes, in the California Delta we're also in a situation where we really have to confess what we don't know and set up management systems to adapt to climate change, to invasive species to sea level rise and how the future's going to be unfolding is really unclear. 

Speaker 5:        [00:17:30] But at the same time we have laws and legislation that say we have to write environmental impact statements and these environmental impact statements have to predict what's going to happen. And so we have a 20,000 plus page environmental impact statement for this Delta project. Is that information or is that just, you know, it's, it's, it's crazy. And so then is it kind of a general misunderstanding of science? Because really the flip side of science is the mystery and the unknown and that's really what drives a [00:18:00] lot of science is the unknown. And so it makes it so exciting. And so is it just that policymakers, general population only look to science for answers and don't want to deal with that whole mysterious side of science. I think, you know the mysterious side gets a little quasi religious sometimes and we tend to shy away from that. 

Speaker 5:        But I think it's also just the way we've been set up in societies. This science has generated [00:18:30] a lot of technology. It's been technology generated out of just parts of what we know that then has consequences when we actually implement the technology. It changes us socially in the environment, but science has delivered lots of hard stuff. And then can we just extend that ability to understand the whole system and the answer does not look good and too says probably not. And that should then drive us to humility. [00:19:00] But when I went in and you get prestige for being a scientist, for coming up with answers, on the other hand, an honest scientist has to say, we're not holding it all together. We're not able to see the whole system and how do we understand the whole system? Who's going to understand the whole system and the level of understanding we have to have now is much greater as we have 7 billion going on, eight to 10 billion people, and [00:19:30] with the technologies we have today, we are intertwined with this system much more deeply and many, many, many, many more ways than humankind has historically. 

Speaker 5:        And this has dramatically increased just the last 60 years. There's been a tenfold increase in economic activity. That's incredible. To have that kind of change and to think that it can continue, which is the paradigm that's, that will continue. It has to [00:20:00] have by the paradigm, but it, of course, that paradigm is has to be false and it's partly perpetrated by false economics or just reading a portion of what economists know, but that's inconceivable. But as we pushed this system harder, we have to understand it better and better and better and we're clearly not understanding it well enough. Now in your work, which tools and methods do you believe are the most important? I think I'm going to go back to those thought experiments. That's where the breakthroughs [00:20:30] come. Ways of reconceiving. What we're doing that gives us new insights that then help us change. 

Speaker 5:        So Adam Smith's thought experiment gave us a much clearer understanding of what markets can do and we formulated a lot of our social organization along Adam Smith's ideas. We need new thought experiments that become equally popular somehow. [00:21:00] That's an issue because with markets we have stakeholders and with stakeholders then you get political power and then that reinforces existing system and how do we get a thought experiment within economics or ecological economics or from anywhere it comes that we'll reconfigure how we think about our relationship with nature to get us out of the system we're in now. Yeah. That's really the tool is I see it. That's what's been powerful in social theory. [00:21:30] The data collection, you know, fancy econometric analyses. Not so much model building and data driven stuff. Model building is good for understanding sort of the limits of how much you can understand and model building can be really good for bringing people from different disciplines together to have a shared project. That's fantastic, but as soon as you actually believe in your model, you're in trouble and that's [00:22:00] yeah, frequently happens. 

Speaker 3:        Be sure to catch her 

Speaker 4:        to have this interview with Richard Norgaard in two weeks. In that interview he talks about interdisciplinary problem solving. 

Speaker 6:        Co-Evolution diversity and sustainability 

Speaker 4:        [00:22:30] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you to make it easy to find. The link is tiny url.com/k a l X. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible]. Now 

Speaker 4:        the science and technology events happening locally [00:23:00] over the next two weeks. [inaudible] and I presented 

Speaker 7:        the theme of January seconds after dark explore [inaudible] adult happy hour is sharing. Sharing isn't just about kids and toys. It's at the heart of some of the biggest problems facing all of us. Highlights of the evening include exploratorium social psychologist, Dr Hugh Macdonald, discussing the science of sharing the finer points of interviewing [00:23:30] with StoryCorps and a chance to share feedback on new exhibits about cooperation, competition, and collaborative problem solving. Admission do anyone 18 and over is $15 and is reduced for members visit exploratorium.edu for more information. 

Speaker 4:        The life sciences division of the Berkeley Lab will hold a seminar on the effects that the deep water horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico [00:24:00] had on the resident fish populations. Dr Fernando Galvez from Louisiana State University will speak about his research on the Gulf. Upon hearing about the spill in 2010 Dr Galvez and his team were actually able to take water and tissue samples from seven marsh habitats around the Gulf before and after the oil hit in order to assess the long and short term ecological consequences. He has more recently been investigating the [00:24:30] ability of the native fish to compensate for crude oil linking effects from the molecular level to physiological performance. The free public event will be held January 7th from four to 5:00 PM in room one 41 of the Berkeley lab building at seven one seven potter street in Berkeley. 

Speaker 7:        The programs and policies director of the Oakland based National Center for Science Education. Joshua Rose now [00:25:00] well discuss the predecessor of the NC s e the Salsalito based Science League of America at the free Skype talk hosted by the bay area skeptics at Luphinia Cultural Center three one zero five Shattuck in Berkeley on January 9th at 7:30 PM the Science League was formed by Maynard Shipley, a science communicator and former shoe salesman to educate the public about evolution. More information [00:25:30] is that BA skeptics.org 

Speaker 4:        the Henry Wheeler Center for emerging and neglected diseases. Annual symposium aims to strengthen connections between San Francisco Bay area scientists working on infectious diseases of global health importance and the broader global health research, product development and advocacy communities. The theme for the 2014 symposium is academia and the global health pipeline, [00:26:00] basic science, innovation and translation. The symposium features a dynamic list of invited Speakers from around the world, including scientists from developing countries. Participants include academic researchers from UC Berkeley, UCF, Stanford, UC Davis, as well as representatives from local biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and global health nonprofits. The event will be held January 10th [00:26:30] from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM in the lead cost Xing Center Auditorium. The event is free to attend, but you must register online at the center for emerging and neglected diseases website by January 6th to attend the symposium. A feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the news. 

Speaker 4:        The December 23rd issue of nature news reviewed a preprint submitted to archive [00:27:00] by Notre Dame, astrophysicist David Bennett and a large team of collaborators that offers the first suggested report have an extra solar moon, extra solar planets have been found routinely. We now know of over a thousand that are detected by analyzing how it stars. Light, brightens and dims with time, but detecting the moon is exceedingly difficult. The team saw a smeared out brightness as if two objects had magnified the light. [00:27:30] The study is conservative and notes that their observations best fit a model of the moon with a mass smaller than Earth's orbiting the primary planet of a gas giant, but that other models may also fit while they don't fit as well. They have been observed in more systems. These include a lower mass star or brown Dorf orbit by a fast and small planet about the size of Neptune. 

Speaker 4:        The team stresses that their study shows the power of micro Lenzing to survey such systems and helps [00:28:00] for a higher precision measurements from huddle. The UC Berkeley News Center reports that a team of UC Berkeley vision scientists has found that small fragments of Keratin protein in the I play a key role in warding off pathogens. Professor Susan Fleisig, an optometrist at the University of California, Berkeley says, what we know is people virtually never get corneal infections unless they're a contact lens wearer or unless they have very severe injury to the cornea. Professor [00:28:30] Fleisig, along with other UC Berkeley researchers recently discovered the proteins in the eye called Keratins. We're able to ward off bacteria to test this. Researchers introduced normal cells to bacteria, which predictably attacked and killed the defenseless healthy cells. But when small parts of Keratin proteins were added, the normal cells lived. Scientists have made an artificial version of a small part of the Keratin protein and tested it against different diseases. The proteins [00:29:00] destroyed bacteria that can cause struck throat, diarrhea, and staff. Further research is needed before isolated. Keratins can be used to fight bacteria, but it could be a low cost discovery that might change the way we treat and prevent infections. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thanks to Renee Rao for help with the calendar. Thank you [00:29:30] for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email. Address is spectrum. Duck [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Touch Me was the first BSR “live event”, moderated by Dr. Kiki Sanford UC Davis in collaboration with the Bay Area Science Festival. Guests were Lydia Thé, UC Berkeley. Benajmin Tee, Stanford. Daniel Cordaro UC Berkeley.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x [00:00:30] Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 4:        Good afternoon. I'm Rick Kaneski, the host of today's show. We have a different kind of program today. This past October, the Berkeley Science Review hosted the live event. Touch me as part of the bay area science festival. We've previously featured both the BSR and [00:01:00] the bay area science fest here. Visit tiny url.com/calyx spectrum to hear these past interviews at the event, Dr Kiki Sanford from this week in science interviewed three bay area scientists about the ways animals and robots navigate the tactile world. Lydia Tay from the Battista lab here at Tao discusses the molecular basis of touch in a star nosed mole. Benjamin t from Stanford talks about [00:01:30] touch sensation for robotics and prosthetics and Daniel Codero from UC Berkeley's Keltner lab reviews, how we communicate emotion through touch. Here's the active scientist, Georgia and sac from the BSR to introduce Dr Kiki 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible].

Speaker 6:        Hello and welcome to touch me. We are the Berkeley Science Review, say graduate student run [00:02:00] magazine and blog, and we have the mission of presenting science to the public in an exciting and accessible way. So without further ado, I would like to introduce our late show hosts, the amazing Dr Kiki Kiersten Sanford 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible].

Speaker 6:        I would like to introduce our first guest for the evening. Her name is Lydia Tay and she is a graduate student in Diane about does lab. [00:02:30] She studies the interaction between skin cells and the sensory neurons that are involved in crow chronic itch. So let's talk about some of the basics of touch and how, how it works. Yeah, so all of these, the different sensations we have are mediated by neurons. So these are nerve cells. In the case of [inaudible] sensation or the sensation of touch. 

Speaker 1:        These 

Speaker 6:        neurons, the cell bodies are right outside of our spinal, but then they send 

Speaker 7:        [00:03:00] these long projections out to our skin and also inside in the viscera. And so these incredibly long projections at the tips in our skin have molecular receptors that are responsive to different types of stimulus. And we have lots of different types of touch stimulants, so you have light touch and painful touch. So light touch, like when a feather brushes against your arm, painful touch. When a book falls on your foot, there's also itch and there's also hot and cold. All these different [00:03:30] sensations. And we, it's actually a very complicated system. We actually have lots of different types of neurons that are tuned to respond to these different modalities of touch. And that's actually one of the things that makes it really tricky. So it's not just that there's one kind of neuron, there are lots of kinds and they're all over there. Their projections are all over the body dispersed. 

Speaker 7:        So say in a square inch of the skin on my hand for example, I'm going to have every kind of touch receptor there. Yeah. So you'll have, you know, you'll [00:04:00] have the, if you have, I guess depending on the part of your body you'll have hairs, right? There are neurons that we'll innovate those hairs and then you'll also have those that [inaudible] respond to pain and to cold and hot. And there the innovation, the density depends on the part of your body, so the back is the least intubated spots your if they're, you have like two points of stimulus next to each other on your back. It will be harder to distinguish than it would be say on your fingers. Your fingers are incredibly well tuned. That's [00:04:30] how come people can read Braille. We're very sensitive to texture on our fingertips. Yeah. I've also heard that like that the lips and the face are one of the more represented areas of our Sameta stance. 

Speaker 7:        Matt? A sensory cortex. Yeah, so in this amass sensory cortex, people draw these things called the homonculus where you have [inaudible] the shape of your body is representative of the innervation of these neuron fibers and your lips are gigantic [00:05:00] and your hands are gigantic and then your back is tiny [inaudible] for instance. It's really a funky thing to look at, but that's kind of how our some ass sensation is. That's that's how we feel. The world is mostly through our fingertips on our lips. I guess we find out a little bit about what you do in your laboratory and I know there is an animal that you work with that is just fascinating. So there's a long history in biology of using extreme systems or organisms [00:05:30] to study the question you're interested in. And so since the question we're interested in it is touch, we use an organism that is really good at touch and that's called the star nose mole and it's this really cute mole that lives in Pennsylvania and it has this Oregon. 

Speaker 7:        It is really cute. I think it's just funny to think of it just living in Pennsylvania and winters in Pennsylvania and it lives in these underground tunnels where there's a lot of light. The main way that it farges for food [00:06:00] is using this incredibly sensitive touch. Oregon called the star and it's, it's the star that's located kind of in the middle of its face and it has a bunch of appendages. Each of the appendages has these tiny bumps. Well I remember his Oregon's that are highly innervated with some mass sensory neurons that enables it to do incredible texture discrimination. So tell me a little bit more about the competitive aspect of the star nosed mole. Yeah. So there are these tunnels underground. The star nose mill is not [00:06:30] the only mole that lives there. There are lots of organisms that are using these underground tunnels and they're all competing for the same food. 

Speaker 7:        The little worms I guess. And the fact that the star news mole can identify a worm that quicker and maybe those that are a little bit more difficult to discriminate means that there'll be able to take advantage of food that other moles might overlook. Right. Are they using a, came out of sensation also? Is there or is it only touching the worm that makes the difference? Yeah, so actually [00:07:00] they start by touch. They, they're, they can move their, uh, the appendages on their nose. So they moved there yet it's [inaudible] that's right. And then they touch it and then they actually move the food closer to the mouth. They taste it until like, I know, like do a secondary test to make sure it's actually food and then they eat it. But it's an incredibly quick process. It's amazing. We actually, when, when you look at video, you have to watch it in slow mo to actually see all of that happen. 

Speaker 7:        [00:07:30] You can't see it with the naked eyes. How do you study this in the laboratory? How do you actually investigate that touch and then uh, how they find the food. So there's the behavioral aspect, but there's also the molecular aspect. How are you studying this? Yeah, so that's the aspect that we, I spend most of our efforts on. The great thing about the mole is that it has this incredibly innovated touch Oregon. And so we can look at what molecules are expressed there and if they're using a similar system as [00:08:00] other mammals, we'd expect that. The only difference is that the proteins are involved in touch. Art's simply upregulated. And so we can see what are the highly expressing proteins in these sensory neurons in the mall. They're easier to identify because the mole is like super touch sensitive and then we can take those molecules and test, are they actually important in another organism that is a little bit easier to work with. 

Speaker 8:        [inaudible].

Speaker 9:        [00:08:30] You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. This week we have recordings from the Berkeley science reviews. Touch me. Dr Kiki Sanford just talked with Lydia about Tetra reception in the Star News tomorrow. Now she'll discuss [00:09:00] the touch sensation for robots with Stanford's Benjamin T. 

Speaker 6:        I would like to introduce our next guest, Benjamin [inaudible] t who's recently completing his phd in the lab of Gen and bow and he has a master's degree in electrical engineering. He enjoys hiking, artistic Mumbo jumbo, randomly cliche poems amongst other things. 

Speaker 10:      He likes building things and his motto [00:09:30] is make awesome. If we could all give him a warm welcome. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 10:      how did you get into engineering? Uh, it's a difficult question, but I remember it was a pretty naughty kid. I was, yeah. So I used to make a lot of things that was gone. Really big. Spanking for that. Yeah. And, and that got me wondering, well, since I love [00:10:00] to break things, we, I should then how to make things work. And that kind of perhaps subconsciously led me to, to Korea in engineering and science. Awesome. To make things work. 

Speaker 6:        To make things work as opposed to do you still break things to see how they work, how they work? Yeah, I can fix them back now because I have the engineering training. So. So tell me a bit about what you need to be thinking about in creating a material that can act [00:10:30] as a synthetic skin. What kind of factors are you trying to work with and incorporate into that material? Right. It's a great question. So everybody knows the skin is stretchable and the reason stretcher was because he uses organic materials that have fallen state or not so strongly. For example, metallic bonds are very strong. So instead of using metal, we use spiritual materials like rubber, try to tune them to make them really sensitive to pressure. And it's, there's one of my first projects in [inaudible] [00:11:00] that I worked there for five years. So the first project was thinking, well how can we make a piece of rubber, which is, you know, I mentioned the rub is actually pretty strike tough. 

Speaker 6:        Can you make it really sensitive to vibration, for example. Right. How do you take something that could be used as a car tire and how do you make it something that's actually going to react to like I think in one of your projects, a butterfly wing, right? This one of my earliest project. Yeah. Yeah. And then how do you do that? [00:11:30] Right. So, so the week we do that is we create very tiny structures out of this rubber in Vegas. So I can see it. They are about 10 microns or less. So on a simple sending me the square, millions of them. Okay. And the reasoning is when you make really tiny structures on rubber, they become really sensitive. But at the same time they also retain it, the city, which is quite interesting. Yeah. So there's kind of property of scaling with the material that changes its properties. Okay. And then what happens [00:12:00] with the skin that you have created in the lab so far from that point? What does it do? 

Speaker 10:      Well, right now we've usually to saints butterflies for example. Yeah. The real test is, well, can we build a system that can sense pressure and you're trying to see if we can integrate, for example, these kinds of sensors into touch means cell phones for example. I mean it will be impossible to find somebody who doesn't have a touch mean cell formatting. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the steam is powerful because the reason is so ubiquitous is that [00:12:30] humans use touch all the time. Right? And imagine now because electronic devices can understand us through touch, that changes how we interact with digital wall. Right? But right now you touched me into today, don't sense pressure very well. In fact, they learn [inaudible] more statue store. So we hope to integrate this material into touchscreens to allow purchase sensitivity. 

Speaker 6:        Right? Cause right now you have to have your fingertips. It's a, it has to do with properties of your skin touching the screen to allow it to conduct. Yeah. Conduct [00:13:00] electricity. But if you're wearing a pair of gloves, your phone doesn't work to take off your glove and then you have to use to use it. So if your screen would just be touch sensitive, pressure sensitive, yeah. Would be useful. Yeah. So what about industrial robots? Medical robots? 

Speaker 10:      Oh yeah, absolutely. For example, the robot, they fixed new Skywalker's hand and that's actually reality. Now we've certain surgical robots that make pinhole surgeries. Yeah, they're having a hard time now because [00:13:30] it turns out they're doing this penal surgeries actually isn't that easy for a robot because the robot doesn't actually feel inside the body very well. It doesn't know how hot it's pricing. And there has been several cases where these robots actually the imaging who humans, even though the surgery wound is very small. And so for example, you can imagine having this material to be put onto robotic surgeons that can then feel how well or how high the pressing so they don't [00:14:00] post other example accidentally by the doctor, you know, so, so actually twist the animal on Phd. I was, it's making dinner, actually making Lasagna, sizing up some cheese. I actually cut myself, you know, and I realized that, you know, we have focused so much on how we can make the skin or electronic skin so sensitive, but nobody has actually looked at how we can make them heal themselves, as you know, you know? Yeah. When you, when you have a cut, the skin bleeds and it has schools who are complicated process to heal, but in rubber, [00:14:30] how do you do that? It's not that trivial. We actually made a material, there's not only self healing but also conducted. 

Speaker 6:        What's your favorite thing about the work that you currently do? 

Speaker 10:      So I get to break things and make things so, so yeah, besides that, I think the cool part about the work I do is that I have a lot of time to think about what I hope to use these things for what I hope to be. And, and so doing a phd actually gave me a lot of things to a lot of time to think about my next [00:15:00] steps and basically I hope to, to create medical technologies or basically to create great impact. So now I can satisfy my own curiosity, right? So am I able to make impactful people besides just satisfy myself? I think that's, that's why I like what I do. 

Speaker 8:        Okay. 

Speaker 9:        Trim is a public affairs show about science [00:15:30] on k a l x Berkeley. After Dr. King, he talked with Benjamin t, she interviewed Daniel Cordaro about touch as a modality of emotion 

Speaker 8:        [inaudible].

Speaker 6:        So I'd like to introduce our third and final guest Speaker for the evening. His name is [00:16:00] Daniel Cordaro and he is pursuing a phd with docker Keltner on the subject of identifying emotion in the face, voice and touch. Thank you for coming in and being able to talk this evening. Yeah, 

Speaker 11:      thank you for having me. 

Speaker 6:        You've been traveling around the world for the last five years, going to different countries, different continents, studying emotion and touch and okay, the yawn question across [00:16:30] cultures across the world, around the world, yawns are endemic everywhere, 

Speaker 11:      not only across cultures and across the world, but also across the species. So all of our Malian friends yawn too. So anybody have a dog here? Have you ever yawned with your dog? Yeah, it happens all the time. So a yawn is a universal, not only with humans but also with other species. But that's, that's exactly what I'm looking at is kind of cross cultural differences. How did you get interested in that? [00:17:00] It's a great question. So I came from chemistry, that was my past life and I kinda got hungry for social feedback. It's chemistry. I'm fairly social discipline. You two guesses. No, it's great. I love chemistry. It's a wonderful way to see the world. When you understand the molecular makeup of something a is not just a table, it's something a little bit more nuanced. I don't know if you can tell. I'm kind of an outgoing guy. 

Speaker 11:      Uh, and one day when I was in a [00:17:30] classroom it was watching the professor and instead of watching professor I turned my seat and I watched the class and I had never done that before. And this idea popped into my head is a, as a scientist it was like maybe I can make predictions about the people in this class. Maybe I can tell who's going to pass and who's going to fail the first exam based what I'm seeing in their non-verbals. I'd never done this before and so I just kind of took notes on 20 random people. Random, they weren't random cause I picked them but I didn't know anything about [00:18:00] psychology so I was just kind of winging it and lo and behold, based on behaviors like kind of engagement, leaning forward and nodding. I see some people nodding, thank you. You're encouraging me to continue. And then other people who are like kind of slouch back and drooling with a half empty can of red bull next to their chair. I kind of guessed which students were going to pass and fail the first exam with about 70% accuracy and I was like, wow, that's better than chance. There's something to this. Yeah, there's something to this. And I took the results to people in [00:18:30] the chemistry department. They were like, get back to work. 

Speaker 11:      You're wasting your time here. And then through kind of a series of serendipitous events, I ended up studying this full time a nonverbal communication, worked with a guy in San Francisco, I named Paul Ekman, who really founded this field of nonverbal expression. And I had the privilege to work with him for about two years before transferring over as a full Grad [00:19:00] student at cal right now, study with Dacher Keltner and the Keltner lab studying cross cultural expressions of emotion of which touches one modality. 

Speaker 6:        Yeah. So what does the bro Hug mean? 

Speaker 11:      What does the bro Hug mean? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there have been studies done in sports for example, like like the Bro touches like head bombs and butt grabs and like high fives and all of this stuff can actually predict a winning season for a basketball team. Yeah, [00:19:30] that's fascinating. It's really cool stuff. Yeah. 

Speaker 6:        Coming back from earlier conversation with Benjamin and also with Lydia, how would you speak to the other disciplines to try and get them thinking about your research? 

Speaker 11:      Right. Yeah. I think it's an amazing question because what we saw is a nice series of scientists starting from the biological and molecular level, then going into kind of the materials level. And then lastly, how do we make this an emotional process, a more human process. So combining the three [00:20:00] could really take us into the next phase of human evolution, which is to create kind of another copy of ourselves. So I'm hoping that you guys can save me a nice space in a human zoo when the the AI takes over. I'll be part responsible for that because they will be emotionally wise. 

Speaker 6:        So emotion, is it self-reported like taking surveys and saying, when this happened, I felt this way, when this happened, I felt that way. Or are you doing MRI work where you're actually looking at the emotion [00:20:30] areas of the brain? Are you, what are you doing? Are you interested in emotion? 

Speaker 11:      Scientists do all of the above. Me Personally, I like the, uh, the nonverbal expression part. So one experiment asks the question, can two people communicate discrete emotions by using only the forearm? So if somebody sticks their forearm through a dark heart and you have no idea who they are, you can't hear them, you can't see them, but you have an arm in front of you and we give you a list of emotions. Can you convey those [00:21:00] emotions by just using their forearms? How does it, how does it turn out in the laboratory? Use your legs like requesting your, what are your results? So the results are pretty amazing. There are some emotions that are incredibly accurate through touch. So emotions like gratitude and sympathy and sadness, these emotions that require closeness with another. Also emotions like anger and aggressive emotion. Disgust and contempt do fairly well in these studies too, but [00:21:30] not without differences in gendered pairs. So there, there are some gender differences to how touch is conveyed to a, even though you can't see who's on the other side of that curtain, 80% of participants can tell just by the feeling on their arm what the gender of their, their paired partner is. So the differences are pretty interesting. When we have two female partners, happiness scores go through the roof. The ability to convey happiness between two female partners is staggering. It's like 60 or 70% [00:22:00] male partners. No Way. 

Speaker 11:      However, men are really good at expressing anger. We see, we see across all of our participants, people can identify anger from a male encoder. And then the last one is when they're trying to encode sympathy. Women do really well with sympathy and men can't do it. When we have, we have two male partners, they can't convey sympathy. So there are some gender differences here too. But by and large, [00:22:30] there's no, there's no benefit to being male or female. Overall, we all convey these emotions very well on average, but there are just certain emotions that, uh, are different by gender pairs. So studying this and going around the world, what have you internalized and what have you, what have you taken out of your research? Personally, personally? Um, I love what I do. I don't feel like I work a day in my life because I get to travel around and decode the human language [00:23:00] of expression. 

Speaker 11:      Uh, everybody in this room, I don't know who you are, but I know that you speak two languages, your native language and the universal human language of emotion through the face, the voice and through touch and understanding that has given me a profound sense of connection with everyone around me. No matter where I go, I'm never alone because I can always speak to the person next to me at least in some way, shape or form. So that's the biggest thing I think I've gotten out of this experience. Friends, you so much for coming this evening. 

Speaker 5:        You enjoyed it [00:23:30] here in the show. You 

Speaker 4:        can hear more from Dr Kiki on this week in science@isdotorgandtheberkeleysciencereviewisonlineatsciencereviewdotberkeley.edu

Speaker 8:        [inaudible]

Speaker 9:        specking shows are archived [00:24:00] on iTunes. You we've cued a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible] spectrum. A regular feature of spectrum is a calendar of some of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. Here's chase Yakka. Boesky 

Speaker 12:      new star is NASA's newest I on the X-ray sky focusing on x-rays at higher energies than the Shaundra X-ray Observatory. Since launch in June, 2012 [00:24:30] new star has been uncovering black holes hidden deep within gaseous galaxies, including studies of the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way. On December 18th Dr. Lynn Kremen ski of Sonoma State University will be giving a talk about the technological advances that made the new star mission possible and will present several of its latest scientific discoveries. This event will be held at the Randall Museum in San Francisco as 7:30 PM on December 18th visit the San Francisco amateur astronomers [00:25:00] website. For more information on upcoming events. Saturday, December 21st join the Shippo Saturday nights space talk featuring Fareed color with the proliferation of privately designed and built spacecrafts. The possibility of commercial space travel is becoming increasingly viable. In this presentation. You'll gain some insight into the future of space travel and understand how our traditional means of exploration are now history. So join the Shippo space team Saturday, December 21st from seven [00:25:30] 30 to eight 15 at the Chabot space and science center in Oakland or Morris Science 

Speaker 4:        and technology related events. Be sure to check out the year round bay area science festival calendar online at Bay Area Science dot o r g I now here's chase and Rene Rao with science news headlines. 

Speaker 13:      A new study published December 1st and the general nature, you've used it, an estimated half million cubic kilometers of low salinity water are buried beneath the seabed on [00:26:00] continental shelves around the world. The water which could perhaps be used to eke out supplies to the world's virgin and coastal cities has been located off Australia, China, North America, and South Africa. Lead author Dr. Vincent post of the National Center for groundwater research and training and the school of the environment at Flinders university says that groundwater scientists knew a freshwater under the sea floor, but thought it only occurred under rare and special circumstances. Our research shows that fresh and brackish [00:26:30] aquifers below the seabed are actually quite a common phenomenon. Says Dr. Post. He warns, however, that the water resources are nonrenewable, we should use them carefully once gone. They won't be replenished again until the sea drops, which will likely not happen for a very long time. 

Speaker 12:      Science daily reports professor Ken at night and his associates of West Seda universities, Faculty of Science and engineering have discovered a revolutionary new energy conservation principle, [00:27:00] able to yield standalone engines with double or higher the thermal efficiency potential of conventional engines. If the effectiveness of this principle can be confirmed through combustion tests, it will not only open up the doors to new lightweight, high-performance aerospace vehicles, but would also lead to prospects of next generation high-performance engines for automobiles. Currently naive group is working to develop a prototype combustion engine that will harness the benefits of his new energy conservation principles. [00:27:30] Most conventional combustion engines today operate with thermal efficiencies around 30% dropping to as low as 15% when idling or during slow city driving. If the group can develop this new engine with the thermal efficiency of close to 60% for a wide variety of driving conditions, they could unleash a new era of automotive transportation. And even surpass the efficiencies of our most advanced hybrid systems. 

Speaker 13:      A recent study by UC Berkeley researcher John Michael Mongo [00:28:00] has shed light on one of the cockroaches, many disturbing abilities. The insects are famously hard to kill due in part to their astonishingly high escape speeds. The bugs move so quickly that they can no longer use their nervous system to regulate their speed. They instead rely on a mechanical enhancement provided by their antenna. Mongo tested the behavior of the critters and Tana on different surfaces and discovered that the tiny bristles on the antenna are able to stick to rough surfaces and bend in such a way as to rent the roaches from slamming into the walls at high speeds. He confirmed [00:28:30] this hypothesis by lasering off the small hairs on some of the pest and running the trials. Again. This time the antenna no longer bents. Well, a peek into the mechanics of the world's most tenacious pest is certainly interesting in and of itself. Mongo is actually applying what he's learned to help design robots that are better able to function at high speeds. 

Speaker 12:      Okay. 

Speaker 3:        The music [00:29:00] heard during the show was written and produced by Alex diamond. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Email address is Doug K. Alex hit young.com 

Speaker 5:        the same time. [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        [00:29:30] Huh?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Bea worked with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and Royal Dutch Shell around the world. His research and teaching have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is co-founder of Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UCB.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Mm [inaudible]. 

Speaker 1:        [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon and welcome to spectrum. My name is Chase Jakubowski and I'll be the host of today's show. Today we present part two of our two interviews with Robert B professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. [00:01:00] Dr B served as an engineer for the U S Army Corps of Engineers, Shell oil, shell development and Royal Dutch Shell. His work has taken them to more than 60 locations around the world. Has Engineering work, has focused on marine environments, is research and teaching, have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is cofounder of the Center for catastrophic risk management at UC Berkeley in part two. Brett swift asks professor B about the California Delta balancing development and environmental conservation and shoreline retreat. [00:01:30] Is civil engineering misunderstood 

Speaker 4:        or do people simply have a love hate relationship with the built environment? I think a mixture of civil engineering has been changing, so people's preconceived views in many cases are out of date and it's also low of, hey, when the built in art man bite you, it hurts and [00:02:00] hurt, encourages. Hey, there is a big reliance on it though at the same time as well. Yes. Airports, bridges, tunnels, water supply system, sewage supply, large ill NGS. That's our game. We're out of Egypt and Rome. That's where we got our start. And now the new term is infrastructure. Yes. To sort of put all that together into one idea. Yes. [00:02:30] Are there landscapes scale projects out there that people should be aware of and cognizant of? Yeah, that are underway or have recently completed? Yes. One we've been watching carefully is location than the other lunch and it's what's called the water works and the reason we zoom in closely is it's an excellent laboratory test bed for a comparable [00:03:00] problem we face here in California with aren't California Delta infrastructure systems. 

Speaker 4:        Now the Lens, much more comeback, but it deals with an unforgiving test that's the North Sea. And so they've been learning actually over a period of 3000 years. How would it work in a constructive collaborative way with water? We face the same problem here at home. [00:03:30] Often the attention associated with civil engineering projects is due to the tension between environmental degradation and economic gain. Is it possible to have balance when you're doing something on this kind of scale? Answer is yes and it's a term bounce. Nature itself can be extremely destructive to itself. Watch an intense [00:04:00] storm attack, a sensitive reef area in the ocean. The tension and it can be constructive if it's properly managed, is we need to develop these systems, some of which need to make money and at the same time we need to ensure that what is being achieved there is not being degraded, destroyed by unintended consequences [00:04:30] to the environment. 

Speaker 4:        One of the very good things that happened to civil engineering here at Berkeley is we changed our name. We're known as civil and environmental and that's to bring explicit this tension between built works, the natural works, and for God's sakes, remember we have a planet that we've got to live on for a long time. As engineers, we are still [00:05:00] learning how to deal with that tension and particularly when something's on a really large scale, best of intentions going forward, body of knowledge at the time you do the project, how do you know what the environmental impacts are going to be? Those unintended impacts reveal themselves. How do you walk these things back? How do you backtrack from having installed something on a landscape level? That clunky question. [00:05:30] That's one of the reasons for my fascination with the Netherlands, but the way I've worked there for a year, complements of previous employer [inaudible] is Royal Dutch Shell, so I was there learning all the dodge had confronted flooding from the North Sea and essentially the approach was built a big dam wall between you and at [00:06:00] water, you're on the dry site and it's on wet side. They promptly learned that was not good. The in fact heavily polluted areas that they were attempting to occupy and suddenly a new thing started to show in their thinking called give water room so that today they have actually sacrificed areas back to the open ocean [00:06:30] to get water. The room needs to do what it needs today and in the end the entire system has been improved. We've been trying to take some of those hard won lessons back to our California Delta 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible].

Speaker 6:        You were [00:07:00] listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Brad swift is interviewing Bob Bobby, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talk about the California Delta 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible].

Speaker 7:        We've talked about the delta a bit. Do you want to expand on the challenges of the Delta and [00:07:30] the downside? 

Speaker 4:        Well, I'll start with the downside. One of the things I used to say in class when I was still teaching here is terror is a fine instructor. Okay. So the downside would be if we had what we call the ultimate catastrophe and it's foreseeable and in fact predictable [00:08:00] in our delta, we would be without an extremely important infrastructure system. For a period of more than five years. That includes fresh supply for small cities like Los Angeles and San Diego and small enterprises like the Central Valley Agricultural Enterprise. So the picture makes Katrina New Orleans look like a place [00:08:30] story. This is big time serious. You'd say hooky bomb. That's a pretty dismal picture. Why? And the answer is back to this risk crepe. The delta infrastructure systems started back in the gold rush days and we want to add some agricultural plans that we built, piles of dirt that I've called disrespectfully [inaudible]. And then we put in transportation [00:09:00] roadways, power supply, electrical power, and then we come up with a bright idea of transporting water from the north side of the delta to the South side of the Gel so we can export orders. 

Speaker 4:        Southern California. Those people need water too. Well, it's all defend it by those same piles or hurt built back in the 1850s it's got art, gas storage under some of those islands and our telecommunications goes through there. [00:09:30] Our railroads go through air, so if you lose critical parts, those piles there, you got big problems. We can foresee it, we can in fact analyze, predict it. We've in fact quantified the risk. They are clearly unacceptable. We've talked to the people who have political insight and power. They are interested to the point of understanding [00:10:00] it and then they turn and ask, well, how do you solve the problem? Well, at this point we say we don't know yet, but we do know it's gonna take a long time to solve perhaps much like the Netherlands, 50 a hundred years. And you can see a Lee blank because there's a two to four year time window. What's this? 50 to a hundred years. Oh, can you tell me about tomorrow's problem? And tomorrow solutions [00:10:30] answer, no, this one's not that. So we've run into her stone wall. 

Speaker 7:        So does it then become something that gets tacked on to all the other things that they want to do with the water? Because there's always a new peripheral canal being proposed. Right? Right. And the north south issue on water's not going away. So for some 50 years solution to happen in California politics, you'd have to have a pretty serious [00:11:00] consensus north and south to the shared interests there. Correct. And there's no dialogue about that really? No. Within the state, no. How about within the civil engineering community? Within the state? No. So everyone wants to ignore the obvious threat to the, so the California economy because basically you're talking about have you applied a cost to the a catastrophic event of the Delta failing? 

Speaker 4:        Oh yeah, we thought that. Or Action Katrina, who Orleans [00:11:30] ultimately has caused the United States in excess of a hundred bill young as ours. Paul that by five or 10 because just the time extent. The population influence though we're talking about hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. So the economic consequences of doing nothing or horrible and then you'd say, [00:12:00] well, is it possible to fix it? Answer is yes. Well, do you know exactly how? No, we don't. That's going to take time to work through. It also takes key word. You mentioned collaboration. Different interests are involved and we need to learn how to constructively and knowledgeably liberate the signings to say, here's a solution that makes sense to the environmental conscience [00:12:30] in the environment. Here's a sense or a solution makes sense to the social commercial, industrial complex. Hey, we might have a solution here. Let's start experimenting it. We don't have the basis for that lot and consequently it slips back into our busy backgrounds. Much like the San Pedro LPG tanks that are still sitting air. It's in the background and the clock is ticking 

Speaker 7:        and the Dutch model [00:13:00] doesn't help them see how it could evolve. 

Speaker 4:        It doesn't seem to, they sort of have distanced the experience from the Netherlands and saying, well, we could never come to an agreement like that. Of course, as soon as you say that, that's the death coming to an agreement like that. 

Speaker 7:        Well maybe they don't see the impending danger as existential as the Dutch do. 

Speaker 4:        I think that's very true. The Dutch can just walk [00:13:30] outside of their homes. Many of them walk up one of those levees and on the other side they see what's happening. The North Sea is big and mean and ever present and they've got one common enemy, so to speak, and that set ocean and they got to stop the flooding, but yet they can't damage the environment. So they've had to come to grips one with themselves. One more the environment and the long term view. We could do it. We haven't. 

Speaker 8:        Okay. 

Speaker 6:        [00:14:00] Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l Ex Brooklyn. Brett swift is with our guests, Professor Robert B of UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talked about Shortline retreat and regulation of oil and gas extraction 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 7:        [00:14:30] with the sea level rise and with storms becoming more volatile and surges from the oceans becoming real factors on shorelines. How should communities and nations approach the idea retreating from the ocean? 

Speaker 4:        Well, again, thankful to our brothers and sisters and Europe. [00:15:00] They're several decades ahead of us in asking and answering exactly that question. They've developed three strategies. They look at existing locations. They then examine each of the three strategies to see which makes longterm sense. The first strategy is fight. A good example would be United Kingdom, the tims flood [00:15:30] barrier. Yeah, you might like to move London, but to not gonna move it very quick easily. And so the answer comes back we need to defend, but you only defend what you can defend, which means you don't try and defend the entire coast of England. You defend small parts of it that can be adequately defended. That's the fight strategy. The next one is flight. I call it get [00:16:00] out of dodge city. And so they say we need to stay age, a strategic withdrawal so that we withdrawal slowly surrendering back to the environment which needs to be surrendered back to the environment and eventually we're gone. The next one is freeze. What the mean is we'll occupy it until it's destroyed and then we're gone. As we looked at the coast, New York, [00:16:30] New Jersey after Sandy, I wish we had done some of that thinking. I hope we do some of that thinking for our California Delta. 

Speaker 7:        I was thinking about civil engineering as it's applied in different parts of the world where a nation state is in a different stage of development. And how do you see civil engineering interacting in those environments differently and taking in risk management and how it's applied? 

Speaker 4:        Well, I guess each society [00:17:00] has to go through its own learning experiences. You can always look at other society and say, oh they weren't very smart or they certainly could have done it this way, rather they did it. So we all into the after the game quarterbacking sort of Mo seems like each of these countries societies has to go through its own learning experience. [00:17:30] As I said earlier, those risk assessment and management businesses one damn thing after another and this learning transfer of insight forward seems to be as frustrating and difficult. 

Speaker 7:        So offshore. Let's 

Speaker 4:        talk about the challenges inherent in that. What do you think about the debate about the risk? How should that debate be framed? [00:18:00] The risks are higher, which means that likelihoods failure that you engineer into the system, it would be much lower, have to have backups in defense and depth and people who actually know they're doing the question is, will we in fact do it before we have a disaster? Don't tell me you think it's safe. Show me and demonstrate to me is that demand has not happened here in the u s yet. [00:18:30] I'm very concerned. For us, I think the government changed some of the permitting process. Is that window dressing? What does it have some real impact on how people behave in the field? It depends on geographically where you're ant Alaska has been very demanding at the Alaskan state level relative to oil and gas operations and when you see a signature [00:19:00] go home or permit, you can pretty well bet that there's sufficient documentation demonstration to justify that signature. 

Speaker 4:        Other parts of the u s are less diligent and so it depends geographically where you're at and what you're dealing. Well, it's not actually reasonable to expect to be able to appropriately regulate, govern and industry [00:19:30] as powerful as the oil and gas industry was spotting governance. Governance needs to be consistent and when the signature goes on to a form that says, yes, I have the ability to immediately abate the source of a blow out. You have the ability the fire engine is built, it's in this station with trained people. Let's ring the bell and see if that fire engine can run. That hasn't happened yet. I [00:20:00] remain personally very concerned for these Oltra high risk operations we're considering in the United States wars. Does the same spottiness occur with fracking in terms of the application of best practices, everything up and able to learn is, yes. 

Speaker 4:        By the way, franking has been underway for many decades. Industry actually hit this kind of work underway intensely in the 1970s [00:20:30] it says spottiness we're back to. That becomes crucial if the regulation governance and that's both internal governance within the industry and external governance on behalf of the public. If it is demanding, insightful and capable, we're okay, but if it's not, we're not. Okay. The systems that you have to have an interesting ability to slip to the lowest common denominator. [00:21:00] By this point, my career, I've worked in 73 different countries. I've lived in 11 different countries, I've seen a company I have a lot of respect for at Shell, operate internationally, some areas, gold standard, Norwegian sector, North Sea, and then I go to work with them in Angola. It's not a very good standard at all and [00:21:30] that's because the regulatory environment with local and national Franco relative to oil and gas is very poor, so the system seems to adopt the lowest sort of common denominator. Can. Strong industry requires strong governance to this man at the end of that experience. Bobby, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Very much pleasure for that integration. 

Speaker 2:        [00:22:00] Mm Mm 

Speaker 9:        [inaudible].

Speaker 3:        If you are interested in a center for catastrophic risk management, visit their website at cc r m. Dot. berkeley.edu 

Speaker 10:      [00:22:30] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. 

Speaker 7:        Brad swift joints me to present the calendar. Have you ever been interested in learning Mat lab? If so, [00:23:00] this event is for you. Next Wednesday, December 4th math works is sponsoring a technical seminar. Some of the highlights include exploring the fundamentals of the language writing programs to automate your workflow and leveraging tools for efficient program development. This event will take place Wednesday December 4th from nine to 11:00 AM in 100 Lewis Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Make sure to register [email protected] click on [00:23:30] events. 

Speaker 3:        Research on mobile micro robots has been ongoing for the last 20 years, but no micro robots have ever matched the 40 body lengths per second speed of the common ants on our picnic tables and front lawns. Next University of Maryland 

Speaker 7:        Mechanical Engineering Professor Sarah Berg Brighter will discuss the challenges behind micro robotic mobility as well as mechanisms and motors they have designed to enable robot mobility at the insect sized scale. The colloquium is [00:24:00] open to all audiences and will take place on December 4th at 4:00 PM in three Oh six soda hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Every Thursday night, a new adventure unfolds at the California Academy of Sciences. December 5th Cal Academy of Sciences presents its holiday themed. Tis the season nightlife featuring class acts such as slide girls and DJ set by Nathan Blazer of geographer. Whether you're dancing underneath snow flurries in the piazza, or [00:24:30] enjoying the screening of back to the moon for good in the planetarium, this nightlife will be one to remember. Tis the season will take place. Thursday, December 5th from six to 10:00 PM at the California Academy of Sciences located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Remember for this event, you must be 21 years or older, so make sure to bring your ids for alcohol enriched fun. 

Speaker 7:        For more information, go to cal academy.org is the future deterministic [00:25:00] and unalterable or can we shape our future? Marina Corbis suggests the latter. Wednesday, December 12th citrus at UC Berkeley is hosting a talk by executive director of the Institute of the future Marina Corbis. Marina Corpus's research focuses on how social production is changing the face of major industries. In this talk, she will discuss her research along with her insight to our society's future. The talk will take place Wednesday, December 11th [00:25:30] from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM is the target Dye Hall Beneteau Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus and now Brad swift joints. Me for the news. UC Berkeley News Center reports the funding of a new institute to help scholars harness big data, the Berkeley Institute for data science to be housed in the campuses. Central Library building is made possible by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, which together pledged 37.8 [00:26:00] million over five years to three universities, UC Berkeley, the University of Washington and New York University to foster collaboration in the area of data science. 

Speaker 7:        The goal is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery with implications for our understanding of the universe, climate and biodiversity research, seismology, neuroscience, human behavior, and many other areas. Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley professor of physics [00:26:30] and Nobel laureate will be the director of the campuses. New Institute. David Culler, chair of UC Berkeley is the Department of Electrical Engineering and computer science and one of the co-principal investigators. The data science grant said computing is not just a tool. It has become an integral part of the scientific process. Josh Greenberg, who directs the Sloan Foundation's digital information technology program said this joint project will work to create examples [00:27:00] at the three universities that demonstrate how an institution wide commitment to data scientists can deliver dramatic gains in scientific productivity. 

Speaker 3:        NASA's newest Mars bound mission maven blasted off while faculty, students and staff assembled at the space sciences laboratory to watch their handiwork head to the red planet. More than half of the instruments of board the spacecraft were built at UC Berkeley. After a 10 month trip, it will settle into Mars orbit in September, 2014 where it will study the remains [00:27:30] of the Martian atmosphere. Maven was designed to find out why Mars lost its atmosphere and water. Scientists believe that Mars once had an atmosphere, oceans and rivers, very similar to Earth. From its Martian orbit. The spacecraft will collect evidence to support or refute the reigning theory that the loss of its magnetic field allowed solar, wind, and solar storms to scour the atmosphere way of operating any water not frozen under the surface. The answer to this question will give planetary scientists a hint of [00:28:00] what the future may bring for other planets, including earth. 

Speaker 8:        Okay. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible] [inaudible] 

Speaker 8:        [00:28:30] the music heard during the show was written by Alex Simon. 

Speaker 1:        [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at the same time. 

Speaker 9:        [00:29:30] [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Bea worked with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and Royal Dutch Shell around the world. His research and teaching have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is co-founder of Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UCB.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay [00:00:30] area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Today. We present part one of two interviews with Robert B. Professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. Dr B served as an engineer with the U S Army Corps of Engineers, Shell oil, shell development, and Royal Dutch Shell. His work has taken him to more than 60 locations around the [00:01:00] world. His engineering work has focused on marine environments. While his research and teaching have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems, he's a cofounder of the center for catastrophic risk management at UC Berkeley. In part one, safety and risk management are discussed. 

Speaker 1:        Bobby, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Pleasure. You're part of the center for catastrophic risk management. How did that get started and what's the mission? What's the goal? Well, [00:01:30] it started on an airplane coming to California from New Orleans, Louisiana. In November, 2005 on the plate with me was professor Raymond c department, Civil Environmental Engineer. In the early days after Katrina, New Orleans flooding, there were still dragging bodies out, e Eric [00:02:00] and coming, our thinking was, well, why couldn't we help found a group here at Berkeley that would bring together interdisciplinary professionals both in the academic, in Ironman and outside to address catastrophic potential failures, disasters in two frameworks, one after they happen and two before they happen, after [00:02:30] the intent is not blame, shame or hurt, but rather to learn deeply how they happen so that then you can bring it back to prevention mitigation. So we got off the plane, I met with our Dean, Dean Sastry and said, could you tell us how to become a senator here at Berkeley?

Speaker 1:        I'll never forget it. He got up from his test, walked around to the other side, touch me on the left and right shoulders and said, your center. [00:03:00] That telephone center happened and today the center continues to exist under the leadership of Professor Carlene Roberts and continuing to address a wide variety of accidents that have happened. And once we are working to help not happen. Thank you. Berkeley and the funding is, there is an interesting question. Initially [00:03:30] we thought, well we'll turn to the university for funding. That was not as easy as some of us thought because university was already seriously stretched for funding, just funding itself. So at that point we turned two directions. First Direction principally because of my background was to industry and said, hey and a strength, would you fund research here [00:04:00] and return for your research funding. We'll give you great students with great research backgrounds and research results. 

Speaker 1:        They became excellent funders. We turned to government homeland security for example, or the National Science Foundation. Similar responses. So the funding has come from both industry, commerce and government. Essentially all we had to ask university four [00:04:30] and it's been a precious resource to even ask for it. It has been space and support staff. Are there any of the centers projects that you'd want to talk about? There's I think two. One was a center for catastrophic risk management project at its inception sent bro, PG and e a disaster certainly to the people that were close to land one 32 [00:05:00] that exploded. We followed that disaster from the day it started and carried it all the way through the federal investigations at state investigations and drew from that very, very important lessons, preventative lessons. The other project that has been playing out sort of in sequence with it is in San Pedro, California, the San Pedro, low pressure gas [00:05:30] storage facilities. 

Speaker 1:        It's in a neighborhood and you can see these large gas storage tanks. You can see roads nearby. You can see Walmart in shopping centers and schools and hospitals and homes and you'd say this sounds pretty dangerous. Founded back in the 1950s period. It's pretty old, kind of like Bobby in pre oh and worn out and [00:06:00] it's severed w we call risk creep, which means when they built the tanks and the facilities there, there weren't any people, there was a port to import the gas so forth. But suddenly we've got now densely packed, I'm going to call it political social community infrastructure system, which if you blow out those tanks, we've got big trouble. Houston, well we took on San Pedro in an attempt to help the homeowners that people [00:06:30] actually live there draw or call appropriate attention to the hazard so that they could get appropriate evaluation. 

Speaker 1:        Mid Asian, we haven't been very successful. I think many people say, well, hasn't blown up. It's not gonna blow up. Other people who say, I think I smelled gas and an explosion is not far behind. And then you turn to the state regulation system and say, [00:07:00] well, who's responsible? Answer everybody. Nobody. And at that point it sinks back into the everyday activity of that community and our society. So one horrible experience. We learned a lot of lessons and I'm watching PG and e n r California Public Utilities Commission go through the learning experiences and they're obviously painful. But on the preventative side, art record is looking [00:07:30] pretty dismal. Yeah, that's tough. That's similar to the Chevron fire that was in Richmond and cause you're right, these things get built when they're far away and then developers build right up to them. Same with airports and all sorts of faculty. 

Speaker 1:        Chevron refinery is what our latest investigation and it's got a story behind it because one of the stalwart sponsors at work that's been done by the center for catastrophic [00:08:00] risk management has been Chevron. In fact, they were a member of um, 10 years study that we conducted here concerning how organizations manage very high risk systems successfully. Chevron was one of the successful organizations. So when we saw Richmond go poof, boon, we said something's changed. [00:08:30] They had a sterling record for their operations here. What happened? Well, the story comes that this business of risk assessment management of these complex systems is one damn thing after another. And if you get your attention diverted like, oh, we need to make more money, you start diverting precious human resources working to achieve, say that he them [00:09:00] safety starts to degrade and at that point roasty Pintful only stay rusty so long at that point, poof, boom. 

Speaker 3:        You're listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Brad swift is interviewing Bob, be a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talk about collaboration. 

Speaker 4:        [00:09:30] Talk about some of the people you've collaborated with and the benefits that flow from 

Speaker 1:        that kind of work. That's been one of the real blessings of my life has been collaboration. One of the things that dealing with complex problems and systems and most afraid of is myself. I'm afraid of myself because I know I'll think about something [00:10:00] in a single boy and I'll think about it from the knowledge I have and then all develop a solution or insight to how something happens. Given that set of intellectual tools and so learned to be afraid of myself and I get very comfortable is when I have people who don't think like me, who will in fact listen to me and then respectfully when I finished they say, [00:10:30] Oh, you're wrong. Here's why. And then of course out rock back and I say, okay, he explains more or less, let's get there. And what I have found in evitable Lee is I end up at a different point than where I started, which tells me the power of collaboration can be extremely strong as long as collaboration is knowledgeable and respectful. If it gets to be ignorance at work and it's disrespectful, you can expect Bob [00:11:00] to become pretty nasty. [inaudible]. 

Speaker 4:        In reflection on your activities in civil engineering and in academia, does civil engineering need to change in some way or is there a subtle change happening that you recognize? 

Speaker 1:        I think there's subtle change having and proud. I think I see it starting to sprout here at Berkeley. The change that's happening is that you struck on with your earlier question concerning collaboration. [00:11:30] So it turns out to be the power of civil engineering collaboration. We've actually got people in engineering working with people in political science, public health business. That is an extremely encouraging sign. As long as we can keep that collaboration going in the right directions. If you do that, do it well. Then this symphony of disasters and accidents, we'll hear that [00:12:00] music go down a lot. You sort of made famous, the civil engineering course one 80 and you're not teaching that anymore, right? That's correct. Did you pass it on to someone you know and give them the blessing? I tried to, yeah. C e one e engineering systems is what it was called, I think was teachable for me because of the experiences. 

Speaker 1:        [00:12:30] I came here after 35 years, 36 years of industry work, and I've been working as laborers since I was 14 went to work as a roofer roofing crew in Florida. I'm not too smart, and so I was able to bring that background experience into the classroom and virtually turned the students loose, said we don't want you to do is first formed into teams. Well a year [00:13:00] at Berkeley, we tend to be what I call a star system student is independent. They gotta be the best in the class working together as something not encouraged. Well, I would say to hell with the star system, we're going to work as a team. So teamwork came in and that's because that hit very strong training through the Harvard Executive Master of Business Administration Program on teamwork and organization and that kind of stuff. So I brought that in and then said, well you have all this [00:13:30] technical stuff. 

Speaker 1:        Get out of Berkeley, go out there and meet the real people, meet some real experts outside of the Berkeley experts and go solve problems. So essentially I turned them loose, but I kept him from hurting themselves. It worked beautifully. Well notice you can't then turn back to normal Berkeley faculty and say, teach it. It's not reasonable because he's not had that [00:14:00] experience. You could think about team teaching, but then you'd say, well ob, we have trouble with enough funding to teach with one person in a class, much less teen teaching. So I sort of agreed with myself to hope somebody remembers and when the university has more resources they could in fact return to these times of real life experience classes. The students that came [00:14:30] through that sort of experiences have made some remarkable contributions already. Good kids. Has anyone approached you about doing any of this online teaching? 

Speaker 1:        Yes, and I steadily said no. The reason is a saying that I was given by a very dear friend and a collaborator, University of Washington, Seattle said a bomb. [00:15:00] Engineers want to believe the planet is not inhabited. We don't like people were antisocial. Go to a party and you can tell it immediately you were in a corner, you know, talking boring shop. Well let, don't want to contribute to e offline internet generation of engineers who do let her work with each other. I have all the liberating intellectual things in the classroom outside of the classroom. So [00:15:30] [inaudible] been very supportive. We need more human contact. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        spectrum is a public affairs show on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is professor Bob B of UC Berkeley. In the next segment they speak about safety. 

Speaker 2:        Aw. 

Speaker 1:        Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you want to talk about? One of the things [00:16:00] that as I leave my career period in my career at Berkeley that makes me sad for Berkeley really got my attention during the Macondo disaster. Many good friends that I still have at DPE that were in fact involved in the causation of the accident kept saying, well, what we did we thought was safe. The thing that makes me say [00:16:30] is we still have a course to teach engineers what the word means and how to quantify it so that then people can look at it and say, this is acceptable. Those people could be from the school football or public hill. This kind of risk management not happening here. That's I had, and I can look forward. I think all of us can two continuing problems in this area because of a lack of appropriate [00:17:00] education. The engineering thinking in many cases is w explicit thinking about uncertainties, variability and is devoid of thinking intensely about the potential effects. Uh, human malfunctions. The engineer goes through a career of saying the weld will be done according to specifications. There's where it pumps up. [00:17:30] The engineers. Education is one a deals with an imaginary world. There is no significant uncertainty. You sorta by code specification or however inspection do away with that and things will be perfectly [inaudible]. Guess what? It's not the human factor, the human factor. 

Speaker 4:        Given that there's always going to be that human factor [00:18:00] at risk management seems to be a quandary of the open-endedness of it. When do you feel you've done enough of it? When do you feel confident that you're ready to say, yes, I'm prepared for all circumstances? No one can know all things yet at the same time, you do as much as you can or what can you afford? Right. It comes down to the money side of it again. Yeah. I 

Speaker 1:        love your question. I got on this while I was here, so I didn't come in here knowing this [00:18:30] one, when I came in to this risk assessment, management got into the depths of it. I had to do a lot of reading and reading. I was doing coming from many different industries and parts of the world said, oh well risk assessment and even a proactive think before predict cause like you were saying. But the falling that is, you can't predict everything, but they never said it. Okay. And the next thing you said was it's reactive [00:19:00] so that when something bad happens, you reflect on it, learn from it, and you manage the consequences. Well, I'm sitting here and by the way, I came here without a phd, but I got one, all of them white. I introduced interactive management and I'm sitting at home trying to think how to do something for a PhD dissertation that's new. 

Speaker 1:        And I said, oh, there's proactive and there's reactive that gotta be interactive. How in the hell can I learn about this? And I end up working [00:19:30] with two pediatric emergency room management teams, a BB team, I call them [inaudible] into hospital Los Angeles, the other San Francisco general mortality rate, same number of beds in air emergency room wards was a factor of 10 higher in San Francisco. So we went and observed them, students with me, and we started interactive management. The baby can't tell you what's wrong with it [00:20:00] and yet the medical team has to be able to diagnose it, invoke corrective action to save the life and the success shows up in mortality. So we got deep into that and that entered interacted management. Hey, story goes on. We're working with commercial aviation, U S air, United Airlines and southwest airlines. U Us air comes to a confidential meeting and says, [00:20:30] well, we found out where we had five fatal accidents five years in a row. 

Speaker 1:        We had given our flight crews instructions. They were to leave the gate on time without exception. Well, the five that had crashes did the checkout on the taxi out. Two of them found that they didn't have enough fuel to make the next airport unless they have tail. Winston. Of course they had headwinds. Well then experience in his interactive [00:21:00] management. The guy shows up at our doorstep here in Maine, sully Sullenberger and he's learning about what we have been learning. He's heard through u s air about this interactive management. Boy Did we carry him through it and boy did. He carry us through perfect example of how you can prepare a very complex hazardous system to succeed [00:21:30] in the face of failure. What they did that morning and he sent me an email that morning before they took off from the Guardian when they took all laws, both engines totally not predictable, did the scan or the alternative airports and what would happen if they didn't have enough flight path to make it turn toward the Hudson and pulled off. That was totally prepared for including design of back water back flow valves through the air intakes into [00:22:00] the Airbus. He knew what he was doing. Look at the flight inclination of the plane coming into the river. Looks like barefoot skiers toes up. 

Speaker 1:        There's the power of the thinking so you do end up measuring safety just to, you said you never sure you got the spit on it or right. Something could happen out of the blue. Somebody walks across the street that's not supposed to. You then have to have the ability to get through [00:22:30] the system quickly and have the correct response. That's part of risk assessment management. Unfortunately, BP never learned it before the conduct so that when it really hit hard, it hit hard. That night they couldn't respond. They froze and they killed 11 people at White. Yeah, I read the report that you did on that and I was like potboiler. [00:23:00] It's really riveting stuff. Yup. 

Speaker 1:        That's an amazing tale. Yeah, it makes me so overwhelming. Go sailing. You say all in the bay, Yo God, you know? Yeah. I'd taken the boat to Mexico taking the channel islands twice. I'm single handed sailor. Oh really? I've lost my ass once. Those exciting tale about [00:23:30] disaster preparation, I guess sailing alone is a good sort of a risk management hands on practice reason. You'd say, come on Bob, you got it. He's somewhat here, man. I've learned. When I say go, I can only sale, which means I can't think about Katrina or beat pea or San Bruno. I've got to focus totally on that boat and sailing. If not, I ask here quick. So it's a relief and that's why you do the [00:24:00] solo rather than have other people on board. Then you get sloppy, sloppy, and et cetera. Yeah, and so most of my sailing is done solo. 

Speaker 6:        No [inaudible]. 

Speaker 3:        If you're interested in the center for catastrophic risk management and it's riveting reports, visit the website, c c r n. Dot berkeley.edu [00:24:30] to listen to any and every past episode of spectrum for free. Visit our archive on iTunes university. The link is tiny url.com/calyx spectrum. Now two of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Cheese, Yucca boss and I presented a calendar 

Speaker 7:        this Tuesday, November 19th the SF ask a scientist's lecture series. [00:25:00] We'll present a talk by a neuroscientist, Adam Gazzaley and magician Robert Strong from ancient conjures to big ticket Las Vegas. Illusionists. Magicians have been expertly manipulating human attention and perception to dazzle and delight us. The team will demonstrate how magicians use our brains as their accomplices in effecting the impossible and explain what scientists can learn about the brain by studying the methods and techniques of magic. The event will take place on Tuesday, November 19th at 7:00 PM in Stanford's geology corner. Auditorium Room [00:25:30] Number One oh five and building number three 20 of Stanford's main quad. 

Speaker 3:        This Wednesday, November 20th the UC Berkeley Archeological Research Facility will host a seminar on indigenous food ways and landscape management. Since 2007 a multidisciplinary research team has been working to implement an Eto archeological approach to explore indigenous landscape management on the central coast of California. This presentation includes results of a study associated with UC Berkeley Graduate Student Rob Casseroles, [00:26:00] dissertation research, which takes a historical ecological approach to integrating major sources of data, including fiery ecology of contemporary landscapes and results of macro botanical analysis of indigenous settlements. The event is open to all audiences and will be held on November 20th from 12 to 1:00 PM in room one oh one of the archaeological research facility on the UC Berkeley campus and now Chase Jakubowski with our new story. 

Speaker 7:        This story is from the UC Berkeley new center. [00:26:30] CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats for nearly two decades after Japanese researchers first discovered CRISPR in bacteria in 1987 scientists dismissed it as junk DNA, far from being junk. CRISPR was actually a way of storing the genetic information of an invading virus in the form of Palindromic DNA sequence. The bacteria used this genetic information to target the viral invader by chopping [00:27:00] it up with powerful CRISPR associated enzymes capable of cleaving its DNA molecule, just like a pair of molecular scissors. The mystery of CRISPR was resolved by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California Berkeley, a specialist in RNA about seven years ago. Downer was asked by a university colleague to look into this genetic particularity of bacteria and quickly became fascinated. The more we looked into it, the more it seemed extremely interesting. Professor Doudna [00:27:30] said then in 2011 she met Emmanuelle Carpentier of Ooma University in Sweden at a scientific conference. 

Speaker 7:        Professor Carpentier told professor down a of another kind of CRISPR system that seemed to rely on a single gene called c a s nine both professors collaborated on the project and an August last year published what is now considered the seminal paper showing that cas nine was an enzyme capable of cutting both [00:28:00] strands of DNA double helix at precisely the point dictated by a programmable RNA sequence. In other words, an RNA molecule that could be made to order. It has worked beautifully on plants and animals. Professors Doudna and sharpen ta had found the holy grail of genetic engineering, a method of cutting and stitching DNA accurately and simply anywhere in a complex genome. I'm tremendously excited about the possibility of this discovery having a real impact on people's [00:28:30] lives. Maybe we'll offer the opportunity to do therapeutics that we've not been able to do in the past. Professor Doudna said her team is already working on possible ways of using the cas nine system to disrupt the damaging chromosomes responsible for down syndrome or the extra repetitive sequences of DNA that lead to Huntington's disease. What's exciting is that you can see the potential and it's certainly going to drive a lot of research to try to explore it as a potential human therapeutic tool. 

Speaker 3:        [00:29:00] Mm. Don't forget to tune in next week to your part two professor B's interview. He and Brad Swift will discuss the California Delta and shoreline retreat. Okay. The music heard during this show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. [00:29:30] Our email address is spectrum KALX. Hey, yahoo.com join us in two weeks. [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chuck Frost, and Erin Fenley of the UCB Energy Office talk about their efforts to drive down electricity use on the Berkeley campus. This program will shift the onus for electricity use on each of the 28 Operating Units on Campus. Mypower.berkeley.edu

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, [00:00:30] a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 4:        Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Did you know UC Berkeley has an energy office and an energy incentive program? Our guest on spectrum this week are Chuck Frost, the first ever energy manager of the UC Berkeley campus and Aaron family, the energy office communication specialist. [00:01:00] They talked with Brad swift about the programs the energy office has launched to drive down electricity use on the Berkeley campus. Here's the interview, 

Speaker 1:        Chuck Frost and Aaron Fenley. Welcome to spectrum. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. You work at the University of California Berkeley Energy Office. How did that come into being? 

Speaker 5:        Well, the university hired a consultant to look at ways to save money on the campus. One of the things they came up with was to reestablish the energy [00:01:30] office. 

Speaker 1:        Yeah. And that was about three or four years ago when bane consulting came in to check out what areas we could save money, um, on campus. And that was everything from payroll to energy management. So we dove in from there and it's part of operational excellence program. Actually through the energy management initiative we have created the energy office. We have also created an extensive outreach program which has its own goals and energy incentive program, which [00:02:00] has financial goals and then an energy policy which provides a framework. 

Speaker 5:        Might there be, while the energy office actually tracks and monitors and assist the campus in reducing energy and we try to improve the building performance also. Is there anything that's really different the way your energy office is doing it that distinguishes you from other places? I think it's the number of dashboards we're using. We've got [00:02:30] almost a hundred installed on the smart meters and then also the incentive program or you could put the bill out into the campus. So the 28 operating units, if they beat their baseline or you will give them money. And this year we're giving them about $170,000 back to the campus, but it can go the other way starting next year and they could owe us two so it can go either way. It's a carrot in a stick. But out of the 28 opportunities this year, 20 received [00:03:00] money and two what Ellis and our goal is really to have no one, no HOAs and put the money back into the campus. 

Speaker 6:        And how is it that you tie into the dashboard? Would the data, where do you collect the data? How do you tie it in? 

Speaker 5:        Each building has a meter that monitors the incoming power to the building and that goes to an obvious is the name of the system. And then the pulse energy pulls off the obvious server to populate the dashboards [00:03:30] and kind of throws the bells and whistles on it. 

Speaker 6:        Now are you able to use the data to reflect on the buildings efficiency its system? 

Speaker 5:        It's actually can be used as a tool to identify when you have problems in the building. It's a, it'll throw up a flag. If you're doing too much energy after it learns you're building, it really knows how you'll drop. However, on a certain day and the weather and things like that, that's the model that is actually forms. It takes a few months to learn the building and actually it really a full seat, you know, a year. [00:04:00] And then once it identifies and learns and models who are building, then you can actually have threshold or limits that will flag your attention. If you have drawing too much or not enough, it can go either way. But that's a good indication. It's a lot better to have sub-metering in a building, but it's, it's very powerful just to have, you know, a smart meter in a building. And is there a move afoot to go to this sub-metering? Absolutely unfortunate. It just comes with a price and so it's very expensive. [00:04:30] But with the technology changing and wireless and things like that are being used a little bit more and I think it's coming down. So probably doable in the future. If you look at all the utilities on campus, we average between 30 and 35 million. That's for water, steam, gas and electricity. 

Speaker 1:        And the electricity itself is about 17 yeah, 

Speaker 5:        that's what he paid last year. 

Speaker 6:        And so year to year as units start to save, you're able to give what back to them 

Speaker 5:        when the, [00:05:00] the main meter at the campus drops down. That that's how we really determine and then we break it down into buildings, how much each of the buildings. But we actually look at the main meter also and then we are showing for the first time in a number of years where we actually did reduce and that an average of 2% creep was what we saw since the 90s 

Speaker 1:        so so we can really avoid that creep by keeping the engineers in buildings. They've been divided into zones to work [00:05:30] in specific areas on the campus in order to understand the buildings, know what's going on there, work with the building managers in order to keep them tuned up so that the creep doesn't happen. 

Speaker 6:        And that's the front line? Yes, it's the building engineers and building managers. 

Speaker 1:        Well through the energy office there are stationary engineers, electrical engineers that are working in the zones with building managers in order to make that work happen. 

Speaker 5:        So even though the skilled trades, 

Speaker 1:        our goal goals a little bit different [00:06:00] than a traditional stationary engineer example where we're looking at kilowatts and BTUs, we want to help in any way we can and improve the building. But our focus is really energy. So we work with the shops but we have a different spin on it. So this past year a lot of the work that was very significant in reducing energy use was through variable fan drives. Yeah. 

Speaker 5:        Both frequency drive. So anytime you can vary the flow on a large motor, whether it's pumping water pumping here you can [00:06:30] actually, once you reduce that substantial savings. So we saw a lot of opportunities and repairing dries, putting in new drives and things like that. 

Speaker 1:        You kind of have more of a consultant role 

Speaker 5:        in a sense. We like to say we're looking and um, some people will call it low hanging fruit. They don't cost a lot of money to invest in, but it could be scheduled changes. You could be heating and cooling at the same time. There's a lot, actually a lot of savings in those two areas and really don't have to spend a lot. You [00:07:00] just have to identify what I'm an example in this building we're in right now, it was a while ago, they actually had a painting project, so they wanted the fans to run 24 seven and it was one of the professors at notice will look at the dashboard and how come the energy use went up and it didn't go back down. So by him asking that question, we investigated and we found out that they had put all the fans in hand. There was no schedule to shut down at night so that that was about a $45,000 [00:07:30] avoidance would have been allowed to run the rest of the year. So those kinds of things, that's what the dashboard really helps a lot of people a lot of highest looking. So you can see what's going on and start asking the questions, why do I have this little blip of power? Why does it jump up like this? And the energy officer will go out and investigate it and sometimes it's just interviewing people. Sometimes it's walking through mechanical rooms and every building has a story. So you have to kind of dig into it. 

Speaker 7:        [inaudible] mm, 

Speaker 4:        [00:08:00] you're all sitting just spectrum on k a Alex Berkley. Our guests today are chuck frost and Aaron finally from the UC Berkeley Energy Office. In the next segment they talk about changing behavior to save energy 

Speaker 1:        and what sort of outreach programs are you operating to try to just drum up support and awareness. We do have a energy management resource center right here in Barrows Hall Room One 92 [00:08:30] and people can stop by and pick up posters and flyers and light switch stickers can get information about saving energy, specifically in labs, residence halls and office spaces. You can also come there or email [email protected] and set up a time to have our student team and we have an amazing student team who conduct surveys in offices, labs. We come in and take a nice observational survey [00:09:00] of what's going on in the spaces, um, leave stickers and materials to help that area find out more about what they can do. People here on campus are already doing so much to save energy, but there hasn't been a single place that we've gone to that we haven't found a few recommendations, uh, to give. So we provide personalized recommendations to that area. Then we post those on our website so they can be downloaded by the whole office or whole lab. And 

Speaker 5:        would someone get involved if they're interested in becoming part of [00:09:30] the student team? 

Speaker 1:        We just hired our student team for the semester, so all of our positions are filled currently. However you can stay in touch with us through our website and through Facebook where I post different internships that are available and they come up each semester. Yeah. 

Speaker 5:        On the maintenance and new building side of things, there's obviously an ongoing maintenance that's required by all the buildings and are you folks involved in specifying improvements that could be [00:10:00] integrated into that maintenance process? We actually try to help with the maintenance too, but again we are looking at, everything we do has to be related to energy savings, so things like just clean filters. We'll save energy because there's less draw on the fans. It's an ongoing challenge, you know with the funding and things like that for an adequate maintenance, but it's improving and it's starting to turn, which is really good. It really needs to campus because of the age does [00:10:30] require a lot of maintenance on the different systems and things like that. And with new construction, do you get involved in decisions that are being made about what to put in the various buildings? That would be the policy that Aaron was mentioning earlier. We actually, with the new energy policy, we tried to insert ourselves pretty early into the design phases of the project. Actually in the very early design conception is where we want to be inserted. So we can talk about that. And are there [00:11:00] other sort of stakeholders, groups like yours that get drawn into that process 

Speaker 1:        about energy efficiency or other things? Oh, other things? Well, I mean you could relate it to accessibility issues in a building. It's a very similar type of thing. You're going to build that in in the beginning too. Campus buildings these days, it's not going to be an afterthought and we want energy efficiency to be seen the same way. 

Speaker 5:        And Are you, you're pretty much limited to off the shelf kind of technology at this point. There's no way for you to really work with anyone on campus [00:11:30] on creating some new technology that might, aren't working with certain groups. The Center for built environment, they're doing a research project right now on personal comfort units, which the focus is right at your desk and not a zone, the whole room. And they actually having some pretty amazing results. They have also a heating and cooling chair. So you actually heat the whole building just there as you need. And so the goal is to try to get people to trade in their heaters [00:12:00] that they've got underneath the desk that they bring in from home and they don't want anybody to know about that draw 1500 watts of power with one of these more efficient, uh, personal comfort units, which draw about 40 watts. So they're actually, I had one in my office and I, I hated to give it up, but they had to use it for the research, but it really works good. It's very interesting some of the work they're doing. 

Speaker 1:        I also worked with some students in computer science in order to help us develop a mobile available [00:12:30] site for our dashboards because right now in pulse dashboards or flash and they don't display on mobile devices or tablets. So some of our computer science students help to develop an html version where we're showcasing about half the buildings that are available on pulse. However, you can access those through your mobile device now. And is it just a matter of time before you get them all hauled? The building's done that way. I certainly hope so. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, it is. An ongoing project. 

Speaker 5:        [00:13:00] There is opportunity for innovation that you're finding within absolutely. The campus people are coming to you with ideas which you encourage them. Yes, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. That's exciting. That's the best part of my job actually is meeting some of the people I'd never get to meet otherwise are doing some really neat research and it's cutting edge and to look at the campus as a lab. It really is because of the diversity in buildings and we've got some buildings that are a hundred years old and [00:13:30] on the behavioral side, what sort of push do you make there and how successful is that? 

Speaker 1:        We have been developing a lot of elements for our behavior change campaign, the my power campaign, reaching out to all of campus saying that everyone has a role to play in reducing energy use. We can all turn the lights off, we can all unplug things when we're done with them. We've put out about 10,000 stickers around [00:14:00] campus reminding people to shut the lights off, reminding people to turn their monitors off and those had been put up through student teams. They've also been put up through our power agent team, which is a group of very committed champions of energy efficiency here on campus. Most of them staff members, a few students. And they are also along with our engineers, some eyes and ears of the buildings on campus and they can keep us updated on things that are happening in those areas where they work and study. 

Speaker 5:        [00:14:30] Oh, I'd like to say that we value anybody's input. And you know, I've had people that are gardeners or browns and I've had custodians and various groups that will say, you know, the light was on and you know, the buildings lights are on and things like that and brought it to her attention. So it's just everybody's health. We can do this. It's going to a group effort. Everybody's working together. 

Speaker 1:        Absolutely. And anyone who wants to report any type of oddities [00:15:00] or anomalies and energy use, sending an email to my [email protected] gets our whole team's attention and we get back to everyone within 48 hours and get on the problem. So those types of reports have really helped us resolve some issues 

Speaker 6:        other than electricity. You deal with natural gas. Steam is a big part of the campus as well. And how does water fit into that as issues? 

Speaker 5:        Right now we're just focused on electricity, [00:15:30] they initial phase, but we will expand into it, you know, working closely with the sustainability office and, and water is very important in steam and yeah, 

Speaker 1:        our dashboards even have capabilities of showing water usage and steam usage. But right now we're pretty single minded in our focus on energy efficiency and reducing permanently reducing the amount of energy we use on campus. But the campus does have a goal of reducing potable water use to 10% below 2008 levels by 2020 [00:16:00] and you can find out all about [email protected]

Speaker 3:        [inaudible]

Speaker 8:        spectrum is a public affairs show on k a Alex Berkeley. Our guest are chuck frost and Aaron Penley in the UC Berkeley Energy Office. In the next segment they talk about new technologies and surprising collaborations. 

Speaker 6:        And how does the steam system [00:16:30] here interact? It's shared, right? It's across a large group of the buildings or not because not all the buildings are on the steam [inaudible] 

Speaker 5:        on the core, you know you have some remote buildings that have boilers and things like that and so you're not using electricity at all to develop the steam. Oh, that is correct. So it's just all, it's usually natural gas or gas to do that. 

Speaker 1:        But isn't the steam a byproduct of the electricity production? 

Speaker 5:        You're absolutely right. We have a cogent plant that does cause of the [00:17:00] turbine generate steam that we traditionally use and then we have on boilers that are kind of a backup to that now. 

Speaker 6:        So that's then on top of the power you draw from PGNE the cogeneration. 

Speaker 1:        We actually produce that energy and then sell it back to BJ to PGNE and then we buy it back. 

Speaker 5:        We give 10 cents is the number we typically give because it's kind of a blend, an average of what we pay 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible] I'm interested in the new technology that you're looking [00:17:30] at. 

Speaker 5:        I think fault detection has actually been around for awhile with your control systems. You trended in the building and then you traditionally would analyze it, an engineer or somebody would look in and analyze it. So you automate that. And so what is really changed, and I think it's really good for the industry, the HVAC industry, is you've got people like Google and Microsoft and people that were never in the game before. Now I want to start mining the data from the buildings, analyzing that data for a fee and helping [00:18:00] with the fault detection. So it's a game changer at the industry. Probably in the last five years has changed more than it did 25 years before that. It's amazing. So we got new players in the game and wireless as well. Wireless is very big too. Yeah. The technology, 

Speaker 6:        is it proving to be as reliable as copper wire? 

Speaker 5:        I think it is. It's starting to be embraced by everybody. You have different technologies, ones that require repeaters and then you have mo technology, then self networking [00:18:30] and things like that. So even now we've got pilots going on that are pneumatic thermostats that are really wireless electronic thermostats that go back to a server and the pneumatic combined. And so that allows us to get down to the zone level to really control a building and really look for the energy. A zone would be like the room we're in now and then with the new wireless lighting that actually it looks at occupancy, it looks at a temperature. Also you can start pulling and really getting a good profile or [00:19:00] you're building when the energy is and when it's occupied and things like that. So those newer technologies are very promising. 

Speaker 6:        Obviously you're going to drive the use and drive efficiency at cow and it's going to get harder and harder to reduce the use. Your Delta is going to get smaller and smaller. Where do you find new efficiencies? 

Speaker 5:        We like to call it mining for Golden Nuggets and the nuggets are harder and they're deeper to find as you move forward, [00:19:30] that's for sure. But we've been working with a Berkeley national lab and also the Pacific Northwest National Lab and PGNE Energy Center and facility dynamics on ways to train our technicians to, to find those golden nuggets. So we're putting the technicians out in the field as we mentioned in zones in the learn the buildings and then they'll get the deeper look at the buildings once they understand the buildings, get more familiar with it. So that's where we're hoping to continue the process. But it is it, you're absolutely right. It's harder. You keep going in [00:20:00] whether you call a golden eye, gets her low hanging fruit, there's less and less. This orchard has been picked over pretty good. 

Speaker 6:        This is what's the legacy of your data collection and distribution at this point? 

Speaker 1:        Oh, right now we started April, 2011 and we are just now finishing up our first annual report that contains all of our, our data from the initiative since the inception, so that will be released as soon as it is approved. It is in its final [00:20:30] draft stage. 

Speaker 5:        What was the biggest surprise for you when you started this process? I don't know if it was a surprise, but I was just amazed at how much of the small little pockets of research that are going on than it actually looking people coming forward. And I'd never heard of the before the center for built environment and just amazing what they had been doing for 20 years and they were a great group and they really understand building comfort and the looking at new technologies and things like that. So this personal comfort unit and [00:21:00] again David Color and computer science students, that was just an early surprised me. And then it would be looking at energy and buildings and some of the tools they've shown savings with lighting and just the smart apps they were developing and where they could track you through a building. They knew what you liked in lighting and and the environment and they could actually start to modify the building and the interface with the control system at the building over citrus in the Er. It was just amazing to me. It was a surprise. Okay. 

Speaker 9:        And the biggest challenge going forward [00:21:30] in near term 

Speaker 1:        for you guys is what? I think for me it's to keep reminding people that we're not done and we still have to keep remembering to incorporate energy efficiency into our daily actions. One of the most surprising and interesting things in this work has been seeing what people's attitudes towards energy efficiency are and some people believe that they're doing everything that they possibly can and we continually find that there's probably even more that [00:22:00] you could do somehow or another. So continuing to incorporate that into your daily work routine or your daily coming to school routine is very important. 

Speaker 9:        Chuck Frost and Aaron Fendley, thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thank you for having us. Thank you so much and good luck with saving energy. Thank you. 

Speaker 8:        [00:22:30] If you're interested in reducing energy use at cau, visit the website, my power.berkeley.edu there you'll find building dashboards and strategies for taking action. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible]

Speaker 8:        spectrum shows are also archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/cadillacs [00:23:00] spectrum here at spectrum. We like to highlight a few of the sides to technology events happening locally. Over the next few weeks. Brad swift and I 

Speaker 9:        present the calendar. The last few days of the bay area science festival are this weekend tonight in San Francisco, science improv blitz where comics and phd students synthesize laughs for the sake of amusement and learning. This is happening at the south of Market Street Food Park [00:23:30] four 28 11th street from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM this is a festival event and free discovery days at at and t park. A T and t park will become a science wonder and when Bay Area Science Festival 

Speaker 4:        concludes again with the Free Science Extravaganza last year, more than 30,000 people enjoyed a nonstop program chock full of interactive exhibits, experiments, games, and shows all meant to entertain and inspire [00:24:00] with more than 150 exhibits or something for everyone to unleash their inner scientist. This festival grand finale is Saturday, November 2nd at the home of the San Francisco baseball giants at 24 Willie Mays plaza in San Francisco. It opens at 11:00 AM and runs until 4:00 PM 

Speaker 9:        the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and Berkeley City College will host a free public talk on verifying greenhouse gas emissions by Dr Inez Fung as part of the lecture series, not on the [00:24:30] test, the pleasures and uses of mathematics. Dr Inez Fung is a contributing author to the assessment reports of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, a scientific body under the auspices of the United Nations. Dr Fung will discuss how we measure and verify claims about emissions related to global warming. Dr Fung is a professor of atmospheric science at UC Berkeley where she has studied climate change for 20 years and has created mathematical models that represent [00:25:00] CO2 sources and sinks around the globe. The event will be held in Berkeley City College Auditorium on Wednesday, November six from 7:00 PM to 8:15 PM RSVP for the free event [email protected] 

Speaker 4:        the November installation of the monthly lecture series. Science of cow will focus on art inspired by science and mathematics. You see Berkeley Professor Carlos equin will speak about how math and computers [00:25:30] are being used to create new artwork every day. He will also try to answer the nearly insoluble question of whether art or science came. First. Professor sequined began his career at bell labs as part of the group that created the first solid state image sensor compatible with American broadcast television. He later joined the faculty at UC Berkeley where he eventually focused on the development of computer aided design tools for architects and mechanical engineers. Professor sequent has also collaborated with many artists over the years to make the most of computers [00:26:00] and the emerging rapid prototyping tools to create geometrical sculptures and a wide range of scales and materials. The lecture will be held at 11:00 AM on Saturday, November 16th in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building on the UC Berkeley campus. The lecture is free and open to the public haired spectrum. We like to share our favorite stories about science. Brad Swift joins me for the news 

Speaker 9:        science daily reports that scientists at the University of Wisconsin Madison [00:26:30] have constructed a three dimensional model of the so-called missing link, cold virus, Rhino virus c Rhino Virus C is believed to be responsible for up to half of all childhood colds and is a serious complicating factor for respiratory conditions such as asthma. Together with Rhino viruses, a n B. The recently discovered virus is responsible for millions of illnesses yearly at an estimated annual cost of more than $40 billion in the United States alone. [00:27:00] Because of the three cold virus strains all contribute to the common cold drug. Candidates that focused on rhinoviruses a and B failed antiviral drugs work by attaching to and modifying surface features of the virus. This highly detailed three dimensional structure for rhinovirus c will give pharmaceutical companies new targets for designing cold thwarting drugs. 

Speaker 4:        UC Berkeley scientists have designed a satellite [00:27:30] that could detect large fires across the western United States by snapping a constant stream of photos of the earth below. Then scanning them for new hotspots that could indicate wildfires. The UC Berkeley teen described their plans for the satellite known as the fire urgency estimate or in geosynchronous orbit or flags. In the October 17th issue of the Journal. Remote Sensing Lego works by analyzing its infrared photos using a computer algorithm to detect differences in the land, especially bright lights [00:28:00] that may be fledgling fires. The program can analyze the entire west in minutes. Creators hope that the early detection of wildfires help to prevent loss of life and widespread damage that usually occur as a result of extensive wildfires. Researchers hope to raise the several hundred million dollars required to build the satellite through a combination of public and private means. 

Speaker 9:        The Northern California chapter of the Society of professional journalists has awarded greater good science center editor in chief [00:28:30] Jason Marsh, uh, 2013, excellence in journalism award for his story. Why inequality is bad for the 1% a gripping look at how income disparity can negatively impact both the wealthy and the poor. Relying on cutting edge research. Jason's story illustrates the ways in which having wealth may adversely affect an individual's ability to be compassionate, understand social cues, and trust others. Those deficiencies can hinder social connection, a key part [00:29:00] of our happiness and our physical health. To read the article, go to the website. Greater good.berkeley.edu 

Speaker 7:        [inaudible].

Speaker 9:        The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon 

Speaker 7:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments [00:29:30] about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot [email protected] join us in two at this 

Speaker 2:        time. [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's. Next. 

Speaker 2:        N. N. N. N. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x, [00:00:30] Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 4:        Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show. Today we're talking with doctors, Tonya Wilkie and Chris Rink of the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek. They recently published an article entitled insights into the Phylogeny and coding potential [00:01:00] of microbial dark matter in which they have to characterized through relationships between 201 different genomes and identified some unique genomic features. Tonya and Chris, welcome to spectrum. 

Speaker 5:        Thanks for having us. Thank you. 

Speaker 4:        So Tanya, what is microbial dark matter? 

Speaker 5:        We like to take life as we know it and put it in an evolutionary tree in a tree of life. And what this assists us is to figure out the evolutionary histories of organisms and the relationships between [00:01:30] related groups of organisms. So what does this mean? It's to say we take microbial diversity as we know it on this planet and we place it in this tree of life. What you will find is that there will be some major branches in this tree, about 30 of them, and we call these major branches Fila that are made up of organisms that you can cultivate. So we can grow them on plates in the laboratory, we can grow them in Allen Meyer, flask and liquid media. We can study that for CLG. We can figure out what substrates they metabolize, [00:02:00] we can figure out how they behave under different conditions. 

Speaker 5:        Many of them we can even genetically modify. So we really know a lot about these organisms and we can really figure out, you know, how do they function, what are the genetic underpinnings that make them function the way they do in the laboratory and also in the environment where they come from. So now coming back to this tree of life, if you keep looking at this tree of life, uh, we will find at least another 30 off these major branches that we refer to as [00:02:30] Canada. Dot. Sila and these branches have no cultivators, representatives, so all the organisms that make up these branches, we have not yet been able to cultivate in the laboratory. We call these kind of dot, Fila or microbial dark matter. And the term dark matter. All biological dark matter has been coined by the Steve Craig Laboratory at Stanford University when they published the first genomes after a candidate, phylum TM seven. We know that dark matter is in most if not all [00:03:00] ecosystems. So we find it in most ecosystems, but to get at their complete genetic makeup. That's the key challenge. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah. And if you, if you want to push it through the extreme, there are studies out there estimating the number of bacteria species they are and how many we can cultivate. And the result is all there. The estimation of the studies we can cultivate about, you know, one or 2% of all the microbial species out there. So basically nine to 9% is still out there and we haven't even looked at it. So this really, this major on culture microbes and majority is [00:03:30] still waiting out there to be explored. So that sort of carries on the analogy to cosmological dark matter in which there's much more of it than what we actually see and understand. Right. 

Speaker 5:        So how common and how prevalent are, are these dark matter organisms? Yeah, that's a really good question. So in some environments they are what we would consider the rabbi biosphere. So they are actually at fairly low abundance, but our methods are sensitive enough to still pick them up. [00:04:00] In other environments. We had some sediment samples where some of these candidate file, our, actually what we would consider quite abandoned, it's a few percent, let's say 2% of opiate candidate phylum that to us, even 2% is quite abandoned. Again, you have to consider the whole community. And if one member is a 2%, that's, that's a pretty dominant community members. So I'd arise from environment, environment 

Speaker 4:        and Chris, where were samples collected from? So altogether we sampled nine sampling sites all over the globe [00:04:30] and we tried to be as inclusive as possible. So we had marine samples, freshwater samples, sediment samples, um, some samples from habitats with very high temperatures and also a sample from a bioreactor. And there were a few samples among them that for which we had really great hopes. And among them were um, samples from the hot vans from the bottom of Pacific Ocean. The samples we got were from the East Pacific virus sampling side, and that's about 2,500 meters below the store phase. And [00:05:00] the sample there, you really need a submersible that's a small submarine and you can launch from a research vessel. In our case, those samples were taken by Elvin from the woods hole oceanographic institution and now you have a lot of full Canik activity and also the seawater seeps into the earth crust goes pretty deep and gets heated up. 

Speaker 4:        And when it comes back out as a hydrothermal event, it has up to [inaudible] hundred 50 to 400 degrees Celsius. And it is enriched in chemicals such as a sulfur or iron. [00:05:30] It makes us immediately with the surrounding seawater, which is only about a two degrees Celsius. So it's a very, it's a very challenging environment because you have this gradient from two degrees to like 400 degrees within a few centimeters and you have those chemicals that uh, the organisms, the micro organisms could use blast. There is no sunlight. So we thought that's a very interesting habitat to look for. Microbial, dark matter. There were several samples. That's a to us. One of them is the Homestake [00:06:00] mine in South Dakota and that's an old gold mine that is not used anymore since 2002 but are there still scientific experiments going on there? It's a very deep mine, about 8,000 feet deep and we could all sample from about 300 feet. 

Speaker 4:        And we were surprised about this Ikea diversity we found in those samples. There were a few Akia that were not close to any, I don't know another key out there for some of them. We even had to propose new archaeal Fila. Stepping back a bit, Chris, [00:06:30] can you tell us more about Ikea and perhaps the three domains of life? The three domains were really established by Culver's with his landmark paper in 1977 and what he proposed was a new group of Derek here. So then he had all together three domains. You had the bacteria and archaea and the eukaryotes, the eukaryote state. There are different one big differences to have the nucleus, right? They have to DNA in the nucleus and it also includes all the higher taxa. But then you have also their key and the bacteria. [00:07:00] And those are two groups that only single cell organisms, but they are very distant related to each other, the cell envelope, all. And also the cell duplication machinery of the archaea is closer to the eukaryotes than it is to the bacteria. 

Speaker 5:        Yeah, and it's interesting, I mean Ikea, I guess we haven't sequenced some that much yet, but Ikea are very important too, but people are not aware of them. They know about bacteria, but Ikea and maybe because there aren't any RKO pathogen [00:07:30] and we'd like to think about bacteria with regards to human health, it's very important. That's why most of what we sequence are actually pathogens, human pathogens. So we sequence, I don't know how many strains of your senior pastors and other pathogenic bacteria, but archaea are equally important, at least in the environment. But because we rarely find them associated with humans, we don't really think about archaea much. Our people aren't really aware of Ikea. 

Speaker 4:        Talk about their importance, 

Speaker 5:        the importance [00:08:00] in the environment. So Ikea are, for example, found in extreme environments. We find them in Hydro Soma environments. We find them in hot springs. Uh, we, they have, they have biotechnological importance and not a lot of, quite useful in enzymes that are being used in biotechnology are derived from Ikea in part because we find them in these extreme environments and hot environments and they have the machinery to deal with this temperature. So they have enzymes that function [00:08:30] properly at high temperature and extreme conditions, really extreme on the commerce extreme or fields. And that makes them very attractive bio technologically because some of these enzymes that we would like to use should be still more tolerant or should have these features that are sort of more extreme. Um, so we can explain it them for a biotech technological applications. [inaudible] 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible] [00:09:00] you are listening to spectrum on k l x Berkeley. I'm Rick [inaudible] and I'm talking with Kanya vulgate and Chris, her and Kate about using single cell genomics. You're expand our knowledge that the tree of life, 

Speaker 5:        [00:09:30] so again, we called up a range of different collaborators and they were all willing to go back to these interesting sites, even to the hydrothermal vent and get us fresh sample. No one turned us down. So we, we, we screened them again to make sure they are really of the nature that we would like to have them and the ones that were suitable. We then fed into our single cell workflow. Can you talk briefly about that screening? There were two screens in waft. One screen was narrowing down the samples themselves and we received a lot more sample, I would say at least [00:10:00] three times as many sample as we ended up using. And we pre-screened these on a sort of barcode sequencing level. And so we down selected them to about a third. And then within this third we sorted about 9,000 single cells and within these 9,000 single cells, only a subset of them went through successful single cell, whole genome amplification. And out of that set then we were only, we were able to identify another subset. And [00:10:30] in the end we selected 200 for sequencing 201 

Speaker 4:        and how does single cell sequencing work? 

Speaker 5:        So to give you a high level overview, you take a single cell directly from the environment, you isolate it, and there's different methodologies to do that. And then you break it open, you expose the genetic material within the cell, the genome, and then you amplify the genome. And some single cells will only have one copy of that genome. And we have a methodology, it's a whole genome amplification process that's called multiple displacement amplification [00:11:00] or MDA. And that allows us to make from one copy of the genome, millions and billions of copies. One copy of the genome corresponds to a few family or grams of DNA. We can do much with it. So we have to multiply, we have to make these millions and billions of copies of the genome to have sufficient DNA for next generation sequencing. 

Speaker 4:        Are there other extreme environments that you guys didn't take advantage of in this study that might be promising? Definitely. Um, so we, [00:11:30] we created the list already off environments that would be interesting to us based on, you know, on the results from the last start in the experience we have with environmental conditions and the is microbes we've got out of it. So we're definitely planning to have a followup study where we explore all those, um, habitats that we couldn't include in this, uh, study. 

Speaker 5:        So some examples of the Red Sea and some fjords in Norway and their various that were after 

Speaker 4:        the, that the Black Sea is a very interesting environment too. It's, it's completely anoxic, high levels of sulfide [00:12:00] and it's, it's really, it's huge. So that's a very interesting place to sample too. And how historically have we come to this tree in the old days? And I mean the, the, the pre sequencing area, um, the main criteria that scientists use to categorize organisms whilst the phenotype. That's the, the morphology, the biochemical properties, the development. And that was used to put, uh, organisms into categories. And then with the dawn of the sequencing area, and that was [00:12:30] mainly, um, pushed by the Sanger sequencing, the development of the Sanger sequencing in the 70s. We finally had another and we could use and that was the DNA sequence of organisms. And that was used to classify and categorize organisms. Does a phenotyping still play a role in modern phylogeny? It still does play a role in modern philosophy in the, especially for eukaryotes. 

Speaker 4:        Well you have a very significant phenotype. So what you do there is you can compare a phenotyping information with the [00:13:00] genomic information and on top of that even, uh, information from all the ontology and you try to combine all the information you have doing for, let's say, for the evolutionary relationships among those organisms in modern times, the phylogeny of bacteria, Nokia, it's mainly based on molecular data. Part of our results were used to infer phylogenetic relationships into the started. The evolutionary history of those microbes. We'll be, well do you have for the first time is we now have chine [00:13:30] ohms for a lot of those branches of the tree where before we only had some barcodes so we knew they were there, but we had no information about the genomic content and they'll seem to be hafted for the first time. We can actually look at the evolutionary history of those microbes and there were two, two main findings in our paper. 

Speaker 4:        One was that for a few groups, the f the placement that taxonomic placement in the tree of life was kind of debated in the past. We could help to clarify that. For example, one group is they clock chemo needs [00:14:00] and it was previously published. It could be part of the farm of the spiral kids, but we could Cully show with our analysis that they are their own major branch entry of laughter or their own file them and a a second result. That's, I think it's very important that that's because they didn't share a lot of jeans with others. Bifurcates is that, that's, that's right. So if you placed him in a tree of life, you can see that the don't cluster close parakeets, they'll come out on the other side by out by themselves, not much resembling if the spark is there. And the second result was [00:14:30] that, uh, we found several of those main branches of the tree of life, those Fila the class of together consistently in our analysis. 

Speaker 4:        And so we could group them together and assign super filer to them. One example is a sweet book, Zero Fila Debra Opa 11 or the one and Chino too, and also almost clustered together. So we proposed a super final name. Potesky and Potesky means I'm bear or simple. And we choose that because they have a reduced and streamlined genome. That's another common feature. [00:15:00] I'm Andrea and I, I have to say that, you know, looking into evolutionary relationships, it is, it is a moving target because as Tanya mentioned, especially for microbes and bacteria and like here, there's still so many, um, candidates that are out there for which we have no genomic information. So we definitely need way more sequences, um, to get a better idea of the evolutionary relationships of all the books. Your Nokia out there 

Speaker 6:        [00:15:30] spectrum is a public affairs show about science on k a l x Berkeley. Our guests today are Tanya. Okay. And Chris Rink k you single cell genomics to find the relationships between hundreds of dark matter of microbes. 

Speaker 4:        And can you speak to the current throughput? I would have thought that gathering up organisms in such extreme environments was really the time limiting factor. [00:16:00] But I suppose if you have this archive, other steps might end up taking a while. I will say the most time consuming step is really to to sort those single cells and then to lyse the single cells and amplify the genome and then of course to screen them for the, for genomes of interest for microbial like metagenomes [inaudible] that was a big part of the study. So actually getting the genomic information out of the single cells and if that can be even more streamlined than uh, and push to a higher or even more stupid level, I think [00:16:30] that will speed up the recovery of, of novel microbial dogmatic genomes quite a bit. 

Speaker 5:        Well, we have a pretty sophisticated pipeline now at the JGI where we can do this at a fairly high throughput, but as Chris said, it still takes time and every sample is different. Every sample behaves different depending on what the properties of the samples are. You may have to be treated in a certain way to make it most successful for this application and other staff in the whole process that takes a long time is the key. The quality control [00:17:00] of the data. So the data is not as pretty as a sequencing data from an isolet genome where you get a perfect genome back and the sequence data that you get back is fairly, even the coverage covered all around the genome. Single cell data is messy. The amplification process introduces these artifacts and issues. It can introduce some error because you're making copies of a genome. 

Speaker 5:        So errors can happen. You can also introduce what we call comeric rearrangement. That means that pieces of DNA [00:17:30] go together that shouldn't go together. Again, that happens during the amplification process. It's just the nature of the process. And on top of that, parts of the genome amplify nicely and other parts not so nice. So the overall sort of what we call sequence coverage is very uneven. So the data is difficult to deal with. We have specific assembly pipelines that we do. We do a sort of a digital normalization of the data before we even deal with the data, so it's not as nice. And then on top of that you can have contamination. So the whole process is very [00:18:00] prone to contamination. Imagine you only have one copy of a single cell, five Phantogram, one circle of DNA and any little piece of DNA that you have in that prep that sometimes as we know comes with the reagents. 

Speaker 5:        Because reagents are not designed to deal with such low template molecules. They will call amplify, they will out-compete or compete with your template. So what you end up with in your sequence is your target and other stuff that was in was in the reagents or again, in your prep. We have very rigorous [00:18:30] process of cleaning everything. We you read a lot of things we sterilize, so we need to get rid of any DNA to not, um, to, to have a good quality genome in the end. And so that said, we have developed tools and pipelines at our institute now that specifically help us detect contamination. Sometimes it's not easy to detect it and then remove it. We want to make sure that the single cell genomes that we released at as single cell genome ABC are really ABC and not a plus x and [00:19:00] B plus k because accidentally something came along and contaminated the prep. And especially with candidate Fila, it's, it's fairly difficult to detect tech contamination because what would help us would be if we would have referenced genomes, we're actually generating this reference genome so we don't have a good reference to say, yeah, this is actually, that's our target organism and the rest is public contamination, so it's very tricky. 

Speaker 4:        Are there other examples for [00:19:30] single cell sequencing being used on this many organisms 

Speaker 5:        on this many organisms? No, not that I'm aware of. I know there's an effort underway and the h and p, the human microbiome project where they also identified there, they nicely call it the most wanted list, so they have the target organisms that are quite abundant in different microbiomes within the human body associated with the human body and they've been very successfully able to cultivate. A lot of them bring a lot of them in culture [00:20:00] and it may be easier for the h and p because we can mimic the conditions within the body a little bit better and more controlled. We know our body temperature and we know sort of what the middle year is in the different parts of our body. So it's a little bit easier to bring these organisms and culture than going to the hydrothermal vent and try and recreate these conditions which are extremely difficult to recreate. So that said, um, there are some that they are now targeting with single cell sequencing. So that's another large effort [00:20:30] that I know of that's specifically using single cell genomics to get at some of these reference genomes. 

Speaker 4:        Can you get more out of this then? Sort of phylogenetic links? We found a few unique genomic features and one on one dimension is we found a recode. It's stopped caught on in, in two of those, a bacteria from the hot vans I mentioned earlier. And to give you a little bit of background, so, um, it's, we know the genetic information of each sale is and coded in its DNA, but in order to [00:21:00] make use of this genomic information, this genetic information has to be translated into proteins. And then proteins that could be enzymes that are employed in the metabolism to keep the cell going. And a dispensation is pretty universal between the three domains of life. The way it works, we have three basis in your DNA and three basis are called the core done. And each call is translated in the one amino acid. 

Speaker 4:        So this way you'll build a chain of amino acids and then this chain is for a folder [00:21:30] and then you have your ready made protein. This call them triplet. This three basis also work for start and stop. So there are certain colons that tell the cell, okay, that's where you start a protein. And another called in to tell us the cell. So that's, that's where you enter prod and you're done with it. There are some slight variations, but in general does a universally called, is perceived between all three domains of life. And what we found was very interesting in two of those bacteria from the hot vans. Ah, those two caecilian bacteria, we found the [00:22:00] recording. So one of the accord on did not called for a stop code on anymore, but in the quarter's for an amino acid in that case, glycine. And that has never been seen before. Were you surprised by these results? 

Speaker 5:        To us, they were surprising because they were unique and they were different. On the other hand, I have to say I'm not that surprised because we haven't, like Russ said, we haven't looked at heart yet and considering that we can only cultivate a few percent of all the microbial diversity that exists on this planet as far as, [00:22:30] as far as we know it, it's not that surprising that you find these novel functions and there's these unique features and novel genetic codes because it's really, it's a highly under-explored area. 

Speaker 4:        It is very rewarding. But if you look in the future, um, how much is still out of the sequence? Of course we're interested in that. So we looked at all the files show diversity that's known, that's out there based on this, um, biomarkers that Tony mentioned earlier and we just compared it to the genomes that we have sequenced so far. And we really want [00:23:00] to know, so if you want to cover let's say about 50% of all the fall diversity that's out there, how many achievements do we still have to sequence and the number of the estimate was we need to sequence at least 16,004 more genomes 

Speaker 5:        and this is a moving target. So this is as we know, diversity of today it and every day we sample my environments, we sequence them deeper and everyday our diversity estimates increase. So what we've done with these 201 it's the tip of the iceberg but it's a start. 

Speaker 4:        [00:23:30] Well Tanya and Chris, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Yeah. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible] that's what shows are archived on iTunes to you. We've queued a simple link for you. The link is tiny, url.com/calex 

Speaker 7:        spectrum 

Speaker 8:        irregular feature of spectrum is a calendar [00:24:00] of some of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. Here's Brad swift and Renee Rao here today. Majority tomorrow. Expanding technological inclusion, technological inclusion is not an issue for some of us. It is an issue for all of us. Mitchell Kapore, co-chair of [inaudible] center for social impact and a partner at Kapore capital. We'll moderate a panel discussion among the following [00:24:30] presenters, Jennifer r Guayle, executive director of Latino to Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code Connie Mack Keebler, a venture capitalist with the collaborative fund. Vivek Wadhwa academic researcher, writer and entrepreneur here today. Majority tomorrow is free and open to everyone on a first come first seated basis. This is happening on the UC Berkeley campus in Soutar de Di Hall [inaudible] [00:25:00] Auditorium Monday October 7th at 4:00 PM 

Speaker 7:        the second installment of the six part public lecture series, not on the test. The pleasure and uses of mathematics will be held this October 9th Dr. Keith Devlin will deliver a lecture on underlying mathematics in video games. Dr Devlin will show how casual video games that provide representation of mathematics enabled children and adults to learn basic mathematics by playing in the same way people [00:25:30] learn music by learning to play the piano. Professor Devlin is a mathematician at Stanford, a Co founder and president of Inner Tube Games and the math guy of NPR. The lecture will be held on October 9th at 7:00 PM in the Berkeley City College Auditorium located at 2050 Center street in Berkeley. The event is free and open to the public. 

Speaker 8:        The Leonardo arts science evening rendezvous or laser is a lecture series with rotating barrier venues. October 9th there will be a laser [00:26:00] at UC Berkeley. Presenters include Zan Gill, a former NASA scientists, Jennifer Parker of UC Santa Cruz, Cheryl Leonard, a composer, Wayne Vitali, founding member of gamelons Sakara [inaudible]. This is Wednesday, October 9th from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM on the UC Berkeley campus in barrels hall room 100 

Speaker 7:        how can we prevent information technology [00:26:30] from destroying the middle class? Jaron Lanier, is it computer scientists, Kim Poser, visual artist and author. October 14th linear will present his ideas on the impact of information technology on his two most recent books are title. You are not a gadget and who owns the future. The seminar will be held in Sue Taja, Dai Hall, but not auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus. Monday, October 14th from 11:00 AM to noon [00:27:00] and that with some science news headlines. Here's the Renee, the intergovernmental panel on climate change released part of its assessment report. Five last Friday. The more than 200 lead authors on their report included Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Michael Warner and William Collins who had a chapters on longterm climate change productions and climate models. The report reinforces previous conclusions that over the next century, the continents will warm [00:27:30] with more hot extremes and fewer cold extremes. Precipitation patterns around the world will also continue changing. One-Arm Collins noted that climate models since the last report in 2007 have improved significantly as both data collection and mechanistic knowledge have grown using these models. Scientists made several projections of different scenarios for the best, worst and middling cases of continued greenhouse emissions. 

Speaker 7:        [00:28:00] Two recent accomplishments by commercial space programs are notable. Orbital Sciences launched their sickness spacecraft on September 18th a top the company's rocket and Tara's from wallops island, Virginia. On September 28th the Cygnus dock did the international space station for the first time, a space x rocket carrying and Canadian satellite has launched from the California coast in a demonstration flight of a new Falcon rocket. The next generation. Rocket boasts [00:28:30] upgraded engines designed to improve performance and carry heavier payloads. The rocket is carrying a satellite dead kiss IOP, a project of the Canadian Space Agency and other partners. Once in orbit it will track space weather. 

Speaker 2:        Mm mm mm. Mm Huh. 

Speaker 7:        The music [00:29:00] heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Yeah. 

Speaker 3:        Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Address is [inaudible] dot [inaudible] dot com 

Speaker 9:        [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Amy Herr's research focuses on bioinstrumentation innovation to improve quantitative measurements in life sciences and translating that work to provide better clinical diagnostics. Amy is Professor of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Mm MM. 

Speaker 3:        Yeah. 

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x [00:00:30] Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 4:        Good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Our guest this week is Amy, her associate professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley. Amy is a teacher and a researcher. Her research focuses on bioinstrumentation innovation to improve quantitative measurements in life sciences [00:01:00] and how to translate that work to provide better clinical diagnoses. She is a pioneer in the new field of proteomics. Brad swift and I interview Amy, her. 

Speaker 5:        Amy, her. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum and welcome. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. How did you become interested in bioengineering? So I am actually a trained mechanical engineer and I think what really peaked my interest in bioengineering was during graduate study in mechanical engineering. I realized that a lot of [00:01:30] the measurement and instrument challenges that exist that face engineering today really are in the life sciences. So this messy area where things are not necessarily tractable or well-described protein measurement is an area that I've been interested in for some time and I've been working on. And it's especially challenging from the perspective of designing instrument technology, measurement technology. What are protein biomarkers and what makes them elusive? Yeah. So protein biomarkers really is just sort of a catch [00:02:00] all phrase for indicators of disease state, um, indicators of living, organisms, response to treatment, just sort of indicators of what's going on in the organism at a particular time. 

Speaker 5:        So there's many different types of biomarkers. You may have heard quite a bit about this genomics revolution and our use and understanding of information that's coming from nucleic acids. And what we're really looking for in Dow is building on what we've learned from our understanding of nucleic acids. How can we try [00:02:30] to understand proteins, which are the effectors of function, if you will, in living organisms and really try to use that information from proteins to understand all of these questions surrounding disease. So who has a disease, who might respond to specific treatments, who might not respond to specific treatments? How you are responding to specific treatments and in our mind it's released the next phase of what genomics has laid the groundwork for an area that we call proteomics. Can you give us a quick run through [00:03:00] of how molecular diagnosis works now and what new things you are trying to detect and what new information we can get from those? 

Speaker 5:        I guess it has been striking to me as an instrument designer, innovator developer. If you take a look at our understanding of the role of proteins in disease right now, there's a treasure trove I would say, of information that's come out of basic discovery. So trying to understand what proteins are upregulated or downregulated or modified in [00:03:30] response to disease or treatment of disease. Right. So I would say there's definitely more effort that needs to be done in discovery, but we've done a lot of great work in discovery. A huge challenge and unmet need to use the engineering design terminology that exists right now is we have these potential indicators of disease or response to disease or prognosis, but very, very few of them have made it into a clinical setting into a diagnostic. Right now there are less than a hundred [00:04:00] different biomarkers that are being used for diagnostics. 

Speaker 5:        That includes nucleic acids of DNA, RNA and proteins as well, just metabolites as well, right? So very, very few of the known existing bio molecules are being used in any way as a diagnostic measurement. And so there's really a huge gap right now between all of these promising markers that have been identified and those that are currently being used to make a diagnosis. So one of the things that we're [00:04:30] trying to do is to just build a basic framework for measurements that will allow people to make many, many, many measurements of a particular biomarker of potential interest so that you can look at many, many different patients' samples, many, many different disease states. We won't be really data limited. So the technologies that we use right now for a lot of these protein biomarkers to see whether or not the promising ones actually answer a clinical question, they're really rate limiting. 

Speaker 5:        [00:05:00] They're really slow or they require a lot of material and in some cases this biospecimens these materials from patients are precious, hugely limited, right there, sparingly available. So we're just trying to think about ways that we can use these microfluidic architectures that require just tiny amounts of sample to run one measurement. How we can use those to scale up to make thousands of measurements. We're right now tens of measurements can be difficult and to make those measurements on, you know, a [00:05:30] microliter of sample from a patient as opposed to tens to hundreds of microliters. So that for us, this so-called biomarker validation question getting from yet this might work too. Okay, here are the clinical questions this marker can or cannot answer as the gap that we're trying to fill. Are you building these instruments? A major focus of my research group is looking at innovating new instrumentation, new technologies. 

Speaker 5:        So by understanding the underlying physical principles [00:06:00] of the types of transport that we use. So electrophoresis and diffusion and by understanding unmet clinical or life sciences needs. So questions or challenges that currently exist out in life sciences laboratories or in clinical laboratories. We're basically trying to bring those two aspects together to develop new tools. All of the new tools that we develop are developed really to meet an unmet need either in the clinical setting or the life sciences setting and they're built with an understanding these underlying principles, but they all [00:06:30] have to be validated. So when we make a measurement with a new tool, we have to have some confidence in how well our measurement reflects our current understanding of the systems. And we typically do that by using conventional gold standard measurement technologies where appropriate. I think recently we've just come into this really interesting and exciting gray zone where we can make measurements that there really are no existing tools to be able to validate whether our measurement makes sense or not. And so we've had to put some effort and careful thought [00:07:00] into how do we validate our measurements using maybe indirect approaches so that we can say with some confidence the limits and the benefits of the tools that we're introducing. 

Speaker 4:        You said earlier that a lot of your research comes from trying to meet the unmet needs of both the life sciences and the technological aspects. How do you go about picking which needs to meet? Do you find ones that you think, okay, well this is doable, or do you find ones that you think, maybe no one else can do this? I'm going to work on it? 

Speaker 5:        Right. [00:07:30] That's a great question. So as an engineer, as an engineering designer, one of the first things that we do is really try to understand the world around us and try to understand how people approach existing problems, how they define those problems, why they approach them in a particular way. But I think this is one of the most exciting aspects of the work that we do. It's certainly true that if you get this first stage, this identification and understanding of unmet needs wrong, you're going to go down the wrong path, but if you get it right, you can make a huge difference in terms [00:08:00] of how people are approaching either science or medicine and our work is really translational in that way. So we're engineers and we're passionate about making excellent measurements and as you say, measurements that are currently not possible are the measurements that we're really looking to impact. 

Speaker 5:        Measurements that are currently possible but needs significant improvement. We do focus on those as well, but when you can find a measurement that when you're talking to a biologist and explaining kind of what you can do and they look at you and say, oh my gosh, there's no [00:08:30] way I could do that right now, then you know you've hit upon something that's really important to at least consider further to fill a gap and unmet need that's out there at the present time. In many ways, I think it reminds many of us of why we chose to be engineers in the first place. I mean, certainly I can speak for myself and say I'm really excited about being able to make measurements that no one else can make. And understanding how those measurements, how good they are, how much more improvement they need, and maybe trying to understand the physics and think about [00:09:00] is something possible that we've discounted to date. But I think in many ways connecting with the end user also adds another layer of excitement and passion and motivation because you can really see how your work in the lab can make a difference in the world around us. 

Speaker 6:        Aw. [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum k A. L. Alex Berkeley. Our guest today is Amy her in the next segment, [00:09:30] Amy talks about her lab at UC Berkeley. [inaudible] 

Speaker 5:        how long has your lab been up and running? So my lab has been a, at Berkeley six years before I came to UC Berkeley. So I did my doctoral research at Stanford in mechanical engineering and then I loved a research and I wanted to continue doing research and so I worked for five years at a national lab and then coming to UC Berkeley was a big change in many ways, but I think [00:10:00] I'm working with an excellent team of, in many cases, junior colleagues here now, training them, postdocs and students just being invigorated every year with the fresh approaches that students, the frust questions that students ask about why are we doing some things in the way that we're doing them, or why is our understanding limited in this way as a faculty member? Just a huge source of inspiration and motivation over the six years. Has Your approach within the lab changed much? 

Speaker 5:        Our lab has certainly changed. Yeah, [00:10:30] and I think as an individual, you as a researcher over the course of six years, certainly I will have also changed. You learn as you go and you learn on a technical level for sure. Absolutely. I would also say I've learned a lot from my groom to the students and the postdocs and the way that they approach problems. It's been just a fantastic honor to be able to work in bioengineering here at UC Berkeley with an amazing group of people who all come with different perspectives. And I've really pushed the research directions [00:11:00] in my group in ways that I couldn't have imagined six years ago. And they also come from very different disciplines as well, don't they? And has that mix changed for you over the six years? Yeah, that is absolutely true. So bioengineering, when I was in graduate school, which I'd like to think was in a long time ago, but it was, I finished almost a decade ago now. 

Speaker 5:        It didn't even really exist. Right. It was just kind of starting and the graduate level widely at universities around the u s and globally as well. So most of the faculty, if you look at bio engineering, our formal training is [00:11:30] not in bio engineering. We're too old for that, I guess. And so the students who currently come to do doctoral study at UC Berkeley and with our partner institution, University of California, San Francisco, they all come with different backgrounds. More and more of them are coming with a biomedical or bio engineering undergraduate degree. But we certainly, you know, in my group alone have had students who have come from uh, aeronautics, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry, just a wide range of backgrounds. As someone who essentially [00:12:00] witnessed the genesis of an entire field of engineering and especially one that is so connected to the world. Can you tell us what that was like and how that's affected you? 

Speaker 5:        Yeah. Seeing bioengineering starts really and become just the huge discipline in the really impactful area of research and study that it is today has been really inspiring. It's also does raise a lot of questions, questions about what is the appropriate curriculum for undergraduates who are studying. Bioengineering is something that [00:12:30] the faculty in my department, we talk about all the time. We try to refine our approach to this really, really important basic study that students undertake in their undergraduate years. Right? So there's that aspect of it wanting to make sure that we help them prepare themselves to be the best engineers possible when they leave UC Berkeley on the other hand, just seeing the huge advances that engineering is making in medicine and the way that it's changing the lives of people and has been for some time [00:13:00] for the better is really inspiring. I will say I often notice that students that I come into contact with here, they're really driven to make a positive impact in the world around them. 

Speaker 5:        And I think that is really at the core of what engineers want to do. We want to understand, but we also want to make something, we want to make a positive impact with what we're doing and maybe I think in a very practical sense that's what an engineer is. I wanted to ask you a little [00:13:30] bit about what you've referred to the engineering mindset and I think it's a really interesting perspectives to want to maybe put us in that mind frame. Yeah, I think the engineering approaches to really just question question what you're observing, question what people are telling you. And so the engineering mindset I think is to be skeptical and to be observant, to not listen to necessarily what people tell you, but to use your own eyes and to discuss with peers or mentors [00:14:00] to try to understand and make sense of all of the different perspectives you're going to get when you're trying to understand the problem. 

Speaker 5:        And so as engineers, we're always challenged with getting into kind of one way of thinking and that can push you down a path that could be productive. But if you really step outside and try to integrate a really holistic view of the world or the problem you're trying to understand, you might happen upon new approaches that users would never have dreamed of. Right? So there's that aspect. I think the engineering mindset is also to be objective. And in [00:14:30] our case in bio engineering, trying to be as quantitative as possible and to understand the limits and the advantages of being quantitative. And then certainly in bioengineering, there is a huge aspect of our mindset, which is to translate our solutions out into the world around us so that we can have a positive impact on society and the world more broadly. Spectrum is a public affairs show on k l x Berkeley. [00:15:00] Our guest today is [inaudible] 

Speaker 6:        Amy her in the next segment, Amy offers advice to students interested in bio engineering. 

Speaker 5:        Can you explain how you're using mathematics to reveal biological systems and create new medical applications? Yeah. One of the big things that we've seen lacking in instruments to make protein level measurements is any sort of quantitation, so a lot of the technologies [00:15:30] are just qualitative. You can see the presence of a particular protein of interest or okay, maybe it's higher presence in one sample versus another, but inherently in the way a lot of the conventional approaches, the conventional assays are run, there's very little confidence in being able to pull out exactly how many micrograms and material are present in a sample two it's hard to do comparisons between different samples except in a very qualitative way. What we're working on are technologies that are quantitative. [00:16:00] So that can allow you to pull out absolute mass level or concentration level information about how much protein is present in a particular sample. 

Speaker 5:        And the hope there is that by doing that we can allow ourselves to create large databases of quantitative information about how much protein or particular form of protein is present under specific conditions. So you can imagine if you were doing a study, for example, on a particular biomarker [00:16:30] of interest, so prostate specific antigen, let's take, right. So if you knew that a particular isoform of this protein was present in certain cases, you could actually quantify how much is there. Enter that information in a database and a researcher say in Norway, who's also making similar measurements, but maybe on a different patient cohort could also upload their information. You can compare head to head. So these data sets could get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then potentially looking at questions of cell signaling [00:17:00] and in proteins that carry that signaling information. Perhaps integrating those quantitative levels of these particular proteins back into bioinformatics models that have been developed would lend insight into the exact response of a protein signaling pathway to a particular stimulation and give those bioinformatics models some actual numbers to work with as opposed to just relationships between specific proteins and are you building some of those models? 

Speaker 5:        So a lot of what we do is collaboration with [00:17:30] specialists in protein signaling pathway models. So my lab is into bioinformatics lab, so we don't do a lot of that ourselves. But through our collaborations with the bioinformatics community, we know that quantitative levels of proteins at particular times is really important to these dynamic models. And so that's a major focus of our work as well. 

Speaker 4:        It's interesting that you bring their PSA test up because I think that's been getting a lot of attention lately. I'd say look at more data. They're realizing it's not quite the silver bullet that people thought it was. [00:18:00] Are there any other examples like that that waste have completely overturned people's ideas of what we were seeing once we look at this large scale data? Yeah, 

Speaker 5:        in particular a very striking example that you bring up the test for free versus total prostate specific antigen in blood. Right. And that's been used for many years as an indicator of prostate cancer. I think there are just three beautiful studies that have come out in the last year, one from UCF that have really pointed to the fact [00:18:30] that actually some of these PSA tests are really good at finding prostate cancer. They're just really bad at telling us if it's an aggressive or a slow moving prostate cancer. Right? So the prognostic information, how the patient is going to fare in the long run is just not there. So we're finding the prostate cancer, but we're not able to determine whether we should just watch full weights and see what happens or if we should actually embark upon some treatment. That's been a big interest of our group is looking [00:19:00] at specific diagnostic questions. 

Speaker 5:        Who in the case of prostate cancer, can we improve prognostic information and trying to look at specific forms of the protein. So in this case, working with the researcher at Stanford Medical Center looking at different glyco forms of prostate specific antigen that may be more indicative of longterm outcomes for the patient. That in particular is a really interesting one for me because we started working with this researcher maybe six years ago before these big studies came out that showed the prognostic usefulness of the PSA [00:19:30] test was not so good and I definitely remember us submitting several proposals to funding agencies and basically getting the comments back that will we have an indicator for prostate cancer right now, we don't need another one. And so just even over the short time that we've been working on it, seeing that just turned on its head because of this ability to integrate all of this patient level information across countries and across different sites to try to understand how good is this test really have led us to realize it's not, as you [00:20:00] said, the silver bullet that we once hoped or thought that it was. I think that's a really good example. I think in some of those same studies, mammograms have also come out yet, right, is not necessarily answering the diagnostic questions that they hoped that that diagnostic would answer. What advice would you give to a young person thinking about bioengineering, about preparing for work in a multi disciplinary lab? 

Speaker 5:        I think major advice that I would give to a young [00:20:30] person who's thinking about working in an interdisciplinary lab like those that you'll find in bioengineering, but also across the campus for sure. I know this interdisciplinary focus is something that permeates engineering right now and I think rightly so on many levels. Many of the problems that we're trying to solver so big are complex. That having these different inputs is just critical. I honestly think that is part of our community. We've not done a great job of communicating to either new engineers or people who are thinking about going into engineering and just this idea that [00:21:00] I can work on these really big challenges with teams of amazing people trying to have a positive impact through my work. I can get paid to do that. I can travel the world to do that. I can work on many different types of problems over the lifetime of my career. 

Speaker 5:        Just an amazing career path really for anyone to consider. It's certainly very exciting and it certainly challenges you and it allows you to operate in these spheres that you would never imagine you could. So either with [00:21:30] different teams of people or just on problems that you maybe never even imagined you would come across. I think some of the advice I would give a undergraduate here at UC Berkeley, I would definitely urge them to seek out opportunities, clearly urge them to seek out mentors, so people who are maybe several years older than them, so people who are role models, who they might want to be like when they quote grow up. Right? We all have those people that we look for no matter how old we are. Look also for people around you who are maybe just a couple years [00:22:00] older than you, who have gone through a programmer or embarked upon research in a particular field and pick their brain about what worked for them and what didn't. 

Speaker 5:        If they went back in time, what would they do differently or what are they so glad that they did? I think just finding these resources and making use of them and then paying it forward when your time comes and you have the experience to share insight with other people and advice is advice. You don't have to take it. But I do think it's certainly in my own career really helped me to listen to it and then weigh it for myself. [00:22:30] I think in an interdisciplinary field like bioengineering focusing on getting the rigorous fundamental understanding of engineering and the particular area that you're interested in is really key. Certainly advisees, I urge them to consider either a minor or some sort of emphasis material science, mechanical or electrical engineering cause it might help them out a little bit. But just making use of the resources that are around you and finding those resources is something I would urge students to do. I'd love to [00:23:00] know your favorite protein. Oh my favorite protein. I think actually right now it would be prostate specific antigen. Yes. Because there is so much controversy around it for sure. Yeah. So it was a good question. Sure. Amy, her. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Great. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:23:30] [inaudible] 

Speaker 5:        on the webcast of spectrum, we've chosen to include a new section of Amy's interview suitable. The more technologically inclined among us, she would discuss her exciting work inventing novel means of biological measurement. One other term I wanted to have you weigh in on is the term scale dependent physics and chemistry, and how is that important to your work? So [00:24:00] we are a bioengineering lab. We're an instrument innovation and development lab. So what we look at, or are there new ways to make protein level measurements that can inform our understanding or our approaches to disease? Right. And that's through this portal of proteins is indicators of disease. It's really interesting as you look at some of the basic fluid and material transport phenomenos. So things like diffusion or things like, in our case, we're interested in electro migration, so charged analytes. If you apply an electric field, [00:24:30] they're going to migrate, right? 

Speaker 5:        They're going to go towards the cathode or the anode depending on their charge. These sorts of physical transport phenomena can really benefit from shrinking link scales. So in our case, we're interested in using tiny channels, so channels that hold fluids, liquids in particular channels that have a dimension about the size of a human hair. So they're very small. As you scale down channels to that size, you start to get some really beneficial properties that come out about the fluids. And then in particular, the use of [00:25:00] the electric fields benefits from those tiny channels because the channels have a very high surface area to volume ratio. So as you shrink a channel down, you get more and more surface area for a tiny volume. And that essentially means that if we apply a field, an electric field along a fluid that's in that channel, we can apply a very, very high fields and those high fields are going to make the fluid start heating something that's called jewel heating. 

Speaker 5:        So in the electric circuits you have in your computer, for example, if you apply a field, you're moving electrons, not liquids, [00:25:30] but you're still getting this jewel heating because of the motion of those particles. As we have these really high surface areas, we can dissipate heat really effectively. So we can apply high, higher and higher fields than you could even say a millimeter diameter channel. Now we have channels that are microns in diameter, so orders of magnitude smaller and they cool very effectively. So that allows us to access a transport spaces that aren't accessible kind of in the macro scale. 

Speaker 5:        So my [00:26:00] lab is really focused on taking fabrication approaches that have been developed for the semiconductor industry. So moving electrons around in tiny channels, if you will, and applying that with those sorts of approaches to now, not moving electrons but moving fluids, right liquids around. Um, and the reason we do that is because as we scaled the channels down, the channels that hold the liquids, we get beneficial properties. So heat dissipation is one of those beneficial phenomena. It really starts to [00:26:30] become more and more efficient as we scaled it. The dimensions, the cross section of the channel down. So in our case we like to use these tiny structures, these tiny fluid channels. Again, diameter of about if human here in cross section because it allows us to operate under really, really harsh conditions if you will. So at very, very high field strengths. In addition to that, another beneficial aspect of scaling down is much of the transport that happens inside these tiny channels really ends up relying on diffusion [00:27:00] as being the major mechanism of transport and diffusion a is very efficient over short distances, over long distances. 

Speaker 5:        The scaling is not necessarily favorable and it might take you a long time for a molecule to diffuse a long distance, but as we use these techniques, these fabrication techniques to develop micro and Nano fluidic channels, those distances in those channels are tiny. So microns or nanometers and that means diffusion all the sudden becomes a very effective transport mechanism. [00:27:30] So we use these effective transport scalings these beneficial scalings to allow us to do things like mixing. So we can bring two analytes or two reagents in contact with each other and just rely on diffusion to get them to mix. Whereas in the macro scale we would want to stir or agitate the fluid in some way so we can use passive approaches and rely on diffusion to get effective mixing. Whereas on the macro scale we would have to have some sort of active stirring in order to get those, those species [00:28:00] to come together and react. 

Speaker 5:        So are these techniques being applied to both your understanding of biological systems and in your applications that you're trying to build? It's a great question. So I think primarily a lot of the physical phenomena that we're using are really trying to drive towards efficient assays, efficient measurement technologies for specific applications. So for example, we might be looking at a particular protein mediated signaling pathway [00:28:30] and we might be really interested in different isoforms or different versions of proteins, the same protein, but maybe it has some sort of phosphorylation modification on it. Um, and by using these really efficient separation mechanisms like electrophoresis on the micro scale, it's electro migration properties, we can actually start to resolve species or separate them when if we were to use a less efficient architecture, we might not be able to separate them basically and tell them apart. So it allows us to in some ways [00:29:00] access information that sometimes is not accessible using conventional methodologies, conventional assays. 

Speaker 5:        Um, but it also lets us get at looking at reactions for example, on timescales that you just can't do using macro scale techniques. So being able to look at very fine time points because we have really precise control of fluids using these micro architectures, these microfluidic channels. So there's kind of two answers. One, we want to look at specific proteins as related to clinical [00:29:30] questions. So those applications and in many cases we can do that more efficiently. But on the flip side, the fundamental understanding of biology, we might want to look at timescales that we can't measure box systems as well. Have you discovered anything really new and exciting with this novel level of precision? We have started to move into an area that's a little bit unknown and recently some of the work that's being generated in my lab and we're excited to be preparing now for communication to the broader technical [00:30:00] community is being able to look at protein signaling pathways on a single cell level. 

Speaker 5:        So flow cytometry is one example of technology that exists that allows you to look at literally millions of individual cells and you've basically stained those cells with antibodies to a particular protein. So the cell is going to glow a particular color because the antibody has a floor for conjugated to it. The cell is going to glow as particular color of the antibody binds to an analyte of interest of a protein of interest in that cell. But the [00:30:30] problem is with flow cytometry, if you're looking for proteins that we don't have antibodies that are specific to them. So some of these isoforms for example, there's not an antibody that's just specific to a particular isoform. It's very difficult to to make a flow cytometry measurement or there's other cases, for example, with stem cell research or circulating tumor cells. We have so few starting cells that if you use flow cytometry, you're basically going to lose all of the material before you can make the measurement. 

Speaker 5:        [00:31:00] So using these microfluidic architectures, we can um, do separations of single cells and be able to look at isoforms of particular proteins even if we don't have antibodies specific to one of the isoforms. If we have an antibody that's specific to all of the isoforms but we can resolve them from each other before we use an antibody to probe for them. Or if we have such a tiny starting population of cells like circulating tumor cells, we're going to be able to make measurements of the protein signaling pathways on those, you know, 10 or a hundred cells [00:31:30] that are of interest that we just can't do using conventional technologies. I should say. One of the major methods that my group has been working on over the last couple of years is this idea of western blotting. And this is a really powerhouse work horse analytical technique that's used in clinical and research labs all over the world. 

Speaker 5:        Basically it's an assay that allows you to separate the protein contents of a particular sample, so to resolve species proteins by differences in molecular weight, for example, and [00:32:00] then it allows you to come in with an antibody that's specific to a target of interest and see at a particular molecular weight. Does this antibody recognize that protein? If so, most likely that is the protein that I'm looking for, that's my target or the candidate that I'm looking for. And so we've pushed in several different lines of inquiry, new ways to make this specific measurement. It's two measurements, molecular weight and this binding to an antibody or an immune regent of interest. We've really benefited from materials design, so developing [00:32:30] materials that we can change basically from molecular sieving matrices that are useful for the separation stage. Two materials that actually immobilize the of interest upon exposure to light and after we immobilize the proteins, we can come in with the antibody and probe to see if that particular band at that specific molecular weight is the target of interest. This is, I think, been really informative from the perspective of allowing us to design these systems to operate, say, at the single cell level [00:33:00] or to operate on clinical samples that are difficult to analyze using conventional technologies. 

Speaker 2:        Mm MM. 

Speaker 3:        Okay. 

Speaker 1:        The music heard during this show was written in, produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to [00:33:30] us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x hit yahoo.com join us into 

Speaker 7:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        [00:34:00] probably.

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