Michel Maharbiz & Daniel Cohen, Part 2 of 2

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 [e-mail]

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 [e-mail] join us in two weeks at this same [00:29:30] time. [inaudible].

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