May 24, 2022

Podcast

Episode 15: Biotech Goes to Summer Camp

By Callie R. Chappell, Rolando Perez, Corinne Okada Takara, Lisa Margonelli

Who gets to be a scientist? At BioJam, a free Northern California summer camp, the answer is everyone. This week we talk with Callie Chappell, Rolando Perez, and Corinne Okada Takara about how BioJam engages high school students and their communities to create art through bioengineering. Started as an intergenerational collective in 2019, BioJam was designed to change the model of science communication and education into a multi-way collaboration between the communities of Salinas, East San Jose, and Oakland, and artists and scientists at Stanford. At BioJam, youth are becoming leaders in the emerging fields of biodesign and biomaking—and in the process, redefining what it means to be a scientist. 

Resources

Transcript

Lisa Margonelli: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Arizona State University. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor in chief of Issues. And on this episode, we are going to summer camp. BioJam is a camp in the California communities of Salinas, Oakland, and East San Jose. The camp brings together teenagers, scientists, and artists to learn the principles and practices of biodesign to create art, and then to share what they’ve learned with their communities. I’m joined today by three members of the BioJam team, Rolando Cruz Perez, Corinne Okada Takara, and Callie Chappell. Welcome, Rolando, Corinne, and Callie. I’m going to start with a big question. BioJam is a little bit hard to describe—it’s a camp, but it’s also a way of engaging the community and embodying the future. Could you tell me what BioJam means to you in one word?

Rolando Cruz Perez: Happy to share one. Early on in the development of BioJam, I interacted with a professor, Bryan Brown, from Stanford. He said that BioJam can be activism. It brings together the practice of, of course biology or biodesign, and community engagement. I mean, all these different kinds of engagement, intergenerational engagement. So, you can look at, well, this is what’s happening in my community. These are the kinds of things that are important in my community. These are the dialogues that I engage in. And how can I then take action on even not necessarily solving a problem, that it may be food scarcity or something like that. It might be, well, we want to express ourselves and we want to have new ways of expressing our love and joy in the world. And that can also mean going out and having a support drive for farm workers, where you are making masks and visors for farm workers that are down the chain of priority for folks when we are distributing PPE and so on.

Corinne Okada Takara: So, you are asking for a word to describe BioJam. I would say it’s communion. I think so much of what we do, I’d agree with what Rolando is saying, is expanding who’s in that conversation space and who is elevated. So, he was mentioning agricultural workers. When Rolando and I started BioJam, we both, without realizing it, we were coming from a space of ag community history, Rolando from Salinas and me, my father’s side is from Maui and a plantation community. And we really came from this space of, how do we imagine a new space where we can have these conversations around biomaterial design and synthetic biology and create a space where everybody’s shaping the conversation and questions? And then have teens take what we are learning together back into their community.

So, for me, it’s about communion and storytelling and expanding everyone’s notion of what is science, what is science practice, and where does it exist already, in communities that may not see themselves as practicing science, when really their grandparents are. Their ancestral knowledge has much wisdom. And whenever we are talking about sustainability design, climate change, we do have to look at our more global ancestry and our global community for the best practices that maybe have been kind of shunted aside.

Callie Chapell: I think both of what Rolando and Corinne shared is so beautiful. Thinking about activism, thinking about communion, and then reflecting on that, I think the point where that intersects is courage. I think that BioJam is about humility and courage for everyone who‘s in communion, who‘s pursuing activism together. And my position is coming as an academic to this conversation. And we sometimes talk about how to create pathways that diversify science, and often times it‘s very reflective, of how do we diversify existing structures.

Instead of asking, how can we imagine completely new ways of doing things, of new ways of being, or new ways of thinking about what knowledge—or what science even—can be? And I think something that’s really beautiful about BioJam, is that it is the activism. It is the manifestation of that imaginative future, alternative world of what science can be. But I think from the perspective of an academic, it requires courage and it requires humility to imagine that, and from the perspective of the youth and educators and activists that we also engage with, that are not academic scientists, or don’t necessarily see themselves as academic scientists, it also requires courage to come into the spaces where we can create activism together, and we can have communion in that way.

Lisa Margonelli: Do you want to tell us the story of where BioJam came from, how it started?

Corinne Okada Takara: Sure. It kind of had two starts, I guess I would say. The first was when I met Rolando. We were in an Uber or a Lyft and we just got to talking about the need for, as I said earlier, just a non-existent space. There is a need for space for teens and youth in general, to engage in conversations about biodesign, sustainability design. So just to back up a little, I’m an artist, a biomaterial artist, and Rolando was a bioengineering PhD candidate at the time. And we both were coming at this idea of more equitable spaces and introduction to important conversations before university. Because we didn’t see people in these spaces that were reflective of Rolando’s community. And in my dad’s day, when he was at university, he also had similar experiences.

Rolando Cruz Perez: Just some background. I came to this kind of, second or third chapter in my life as an academic and bioengineer. It wasn’t a linear path. And so, starting now, and then all the way through to arriving at Stanford, I really didn’t fit in anywhere.

Lisa Margonelli: So, you and Corinne got in the Uber, and you started to talk?

Rolando Cruz Perez: We started to talk. I had been working with some youths at a local high school. They wanted to do some mushroom experiments, and Corinne had long been working with youth and the community. And we got to talking about that and then we said, “Hey, we should bring some youth together and have some workshops.” And then that turned into a camp, and then we were like, “Let’s bootstrap it.” And I was like, I’m at Stanford, they’ve got lots of resources. And it’d be great for Stanford to provide those resources in a way that isn’t uni-directional and that isn’t an extraction of the culture and knowledge from these communities. Instead, provide support, infrastructure, and knowledge for youth in these communities to do a kind of grassroots building, right, of their own, of what they envision of what the future should be.

Corinne Okada Takara: I have to add there, it was not “do a few workshops.” It was immediately, “Let’s do a camp.” So, Rolando is so passionate and so big picture. After the Uber ride, we kept emailing and he’s like, “Yeah, let’s do a camp.” I’m like, “OK, cool.” And I was thinking maybe a year down the road. He’s like, “No, this summer.” So, it was a pretty quick ramp-up. And I think Rolando’s so good at sharing the vision of what BioJam was that we had access to the bioengineering teaching lab. We had a lot of support from within the department in that way. And year one was a pretty quick ramp-up. And then year two, we were really lucky to have Callie join and really add structure, enable the sustainability of this camp as it moves into what it’s going to be in the future. So that was our start—Uber ride. Let’s not do a workshop, let’s do a camp this summer, and it was great.

Lisa Margonelli: So, tell me a little bit about the collaborative learning that happens at the camp.

Corinne Okada Takara: We didn’t want to do it within the standard framework of “We are the educators, and we are delivering information to you and you are absorbing.” Rather, we are entering a space, we are going to talk about these ideas, raise questions. We are going to engage in some biomaterial design activities, some bioengineering activities, but while you are doing it, we want you to think how you would do this better. So, from the start, we were collaborators, and we wanted them to express how they would redesign the whole program. And at the end of each day, we had an assessment board and thoughts for them to add to. So, they entered the program and left the program, knowing that whatever we were exploring together, they were going to take and redesign and take back into community. And so, I think that really changed the equation of expertise and knowledge because youth are experts in their communities, and they are also the trusted voices in their communities.

And so really elevating that, that they come from that place of expertise while Rolando and I may have experienced in these other areas and more years in it, they can look at it from different lenses. And so, I think that’s one way that we did the frameworks. Year one was different because it was in person. Every year’s been a pilot year, so let me just say that as well. First year was in person, it was just a short one-week experience. And then the next year we had to pivot to online and we delivered kits and same with year three, but we had some in-person. So, we are always reinventing it in a way. But at the core of it, how do we do this mindfully—that we are co-collaborating and it’s generative learning.

Lisa Margonelli: Callie, tell us how you got involved.

Callie Chapell: I was a first-year grad student at Stanford, and I found myself in some spaces where there was just this senior grad student who was just saying really awesome stuff. And that person was Rolando. And I met Rolando and he became a mentor for me, completely independent of BioJam. And one day, got an email from him and was like, “Hey, can you meet up with me and Corinne, this artist, and talk about this program?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure.” So, I meet up with them at Coupa coffee, which is the starting of many great ideas at Stanford, I think. And they were like, “Hey, do you want to come to Salinas with me today?” And I was like, “Sure, I can cancel all my meetings and go to Salinas with you today.” And I saw what they were doing was very aligned with things that I never even imagined that could be possible and was like, I have to support this in any way that I can.

And I feel like my role in BioJam has been to carry on the legacy and the vision that Corinne and Rolando inspired in me and share that out as much as possible. And part of that has been in growing the organization. I think what I’ve tried to bring to the conversation is some organizational management, in how we can expand the impact of the work that we have as broadly as possible. So as Corinne alluded to, the first year was in person, and I actually wasn’t involved that year, but then we pivoted to a virtual camp in 2020 because of the pandemic. And after 2020, we had a real conversation that’s like, “What is the future of BioJam going to be?” And we believed so strongly in what we were doing that we wanted to continue to grow it.

And so, with a lot of really generous sharing from Corinne, we’ve created an infrastructure around BioJam to allow us to continue to grow. And that includes and really is centered in the visions of the community and the needs of the community. And so all of our work is driven by three advisory boards. The first advisory board is the teens. So, teens that have participated in camp, they actually can come back and be teen mentors. So, help leading the curriculum and guiding the direction of camp the next year, but they could also join what we call our teen advisory board, which gives feedback about the long term overall direction of the program. In addition to our teen advisory board, we have a community advisory board with community organizations like community gardens, artists, educators who provide us with the vision for where camp should go and really deeply embed us in the world of the teens in a lot of different ways.

And the last advisory board is the academic advisory board. So, we have an interdisciplinary group of academics that also guide from a framing and paradigm-shaping lens where we should be going. And so those are the kind of vision-setting organizations that lead where we go. And they all interact with each other. We meet on Zoom; we are also working on having several in-person meetings. We also build relationships with everybody, right. So, dropping off cookies at people’s houses, right. Checking in on how people’s kids are doing. Those are all kind of central pieces to how we build trust and move with the speed of trust in our organization.

And then we have a variety of educators who lead the curriculum design, including Corinne and several others now that we’re growing. And the last component is the Stanford component, which is really the follow and support arm of these three groups that I’ve mentioned. And that is a student group of undergraduates, graduate students, staff, faculty, and post-doctoral researchers, that do a lot of the logistics in day-to-day to make sure that camp can run. But really the vision is not in Stanford. The role of Stanford is to really support the vision, direction, dreams, and imagination of the other groups that I’ve mentioned here. And so, we are hoping that with that structure, we can continue to grow BioJam into the future.

Lisa Margonelli: So let me just sum up here. So sometime in 2019, Corrine and Rolando got into an Uber in Pennsylvania and started talking and decided, OK, we are going to change this whole idea of how “science communication”—I’m using air quotes here,—is done. We are going to start something that’s based in a community. It’s going to be in the community of Salinas, and we are going to do a camp. And you did a one-week camp first, then that grew to a year-round program. So, youth came in the camp, and then they leave the camp, and they work year-round on projects in the community.

And then you have sort of a huge network of people. You have a youth board that steers this, you have a community board that provides feedback. You have an academic board that provides feedback. And you also have a group of Stanford students who produce sort of prep work and other things to enable this other experience. So, what started as a little camp turn into a giant web of people, right. This kind of reminds me of a mushroom. I mean, there is a sort of a mycelia sense to this whole thing. You started with a little thing and then it gets woven more and more into communities. Can you tell me, what are you doing with mushrooms and youth?

Rolando Cruz Perez: The first time someone to put a mycelium material object in my hand, it just blew my mind. I’m a bioengineer trained in molecular biology, all these other things, in synthetic biology, but this very simple artifact of taking corn cob waste and mixing it with a mushroom and then forming it into an object, putting it in your hand. I was like, wow, I can actually hold this thing, whereas everything else I do is kind of invisible to the eye. And Corinne was working with mycelium materials, I think already, at the time. And so, we wanted to incorporate that into some of the education or programming or trainings that we were doing. And Corinne, of course, tapping into her amazing art practice and knowledge, came up with the idea of a quilt made of mycelium, which is just ingenious.

And along the way, we engaged with the youth, collaborated with the youth, to, of course, build the curriculum, doing simple things like, “What do we want to learn today? And here’s a choice of things that we can learn today. Which ones would you like to, should we explore?” Terms that would come up or discussions that would come up of social justice. We would sit in lunchtime and breaks and have these discussions with youth. And we would define vocabulary with their own terms. And we named the program through, with input from the youth, and also the quilt as well was derived with Corinne’s feedback and the youth engagement, and I’ll leave Corinne to describe the quilts.

Lisa Margonelli: Yes, let’s turn to Corinne. But before that, just getting the youth to come up with the vocabulary is completely the opposite of the way that science is taught. Science is so often taught where you sit down, and you have to memorize stuff. And the barrier to getting into science is, so frequently, just this enormous vocabulary that you have to learn. And the fact that you sat everybody down and you came up with your own vocabulary to the start, seems like a very, it creates a space for everyone to be in there.

Corinne Okada Takara: I agree with that. And I think personally, I had the privilege of growing up with family that introduced science through making and story sharing on my grandma’s Lanai. We would collect materials from Maui, and you didn’t really know a material or a plant unless you knew its name in Hawaiian and Japanese and its uses and the legends that go with it. And so, the knowledge of science, it really does reside in community and ancestry. Rolando and I had many conversations also during COVID about our parents and grandparents and the knowledge they have in field labor. And so, we wanted to create a space where the students came with science knowledge.

So, for example, Rolando was mentioning the quilt project. Well, while I was working with mycelium from one direction, he was working from another, and we invited the students to bring in, day one, a mason jar full of—or baggies, we had the Mason jars. But to bring in materials from their own community and lives that we could then autoclave and feed to mycelium. And we had them emailing us saying, “Can I bring ramen, because that’s what I eat. Can I bring this or that?” And we are like, “Sure, we don’t know if it will grow or work. We haven’t tried it.” So, I think positioning ourselves as not being experts is really ideal and also positioning ourselves from a place where we are going to experiment and we may fail. So, for that particular quilt project, I had not succeeded in that yet.

I had tried to grow mycelium-grown assemblies through different meshes, and they’d all rotted. And I told them that. And we were going to try again, but we are going to try a synthetic mesh. And so, inviting them to work on something where we didn’t really have the protocols yet, I think was kind of fun and exciting. We didn’t know if it was going to work. It did, and it turns out the ramen grew the best. But it was great story share because they brought in the food of knowledge, a waste stream of knowledge, shared the story of it, and then after Rolando autoclaved them, they were able to share those substrates and then stuff it into their vacuuming form molds—which they also had designed that represented themselves or their culture. And so, it was physical sharing of the substrate to inoculate the mushrooms while also story sharing. And I think that just kind of set up for what Rolando would often describe as this mycelial network of people in community and space.

Lisa Margonelli: So, let me just ask you, can you tell me what the quilt looked like? So, everybody has brought food from home, then you autoclaved it. Then you stuffed it into a vacuum mold that everybody made, for form. And then they inoculated it with mycelium and then something grew and there was a mesh—how did the mesh play into this?

Corinne Okada Takara: I pre-cut nylon mesh and they stuffed their mold forms into the vacuum form mold. And then they clamped down sterilized mesh on top of it. So, the mycelium and the substrate grew together and then grew into the mesh. And then the mesh was such that I could bake it at a low temperature without the mesh melting. And then you had a square that you could hold up and it had the mushroom mycelium there, grown into whatever the substrate was.

Oh, and the mycelium shapes that the students had, they had designed—we had a pre-exercise for them to do. They learned how to design in Tinkercad. They designed their mold form, which is called, in vacuum forming, it’s called a buck. So, they designed their own bucks that we vacuum formed off of Shop-Vac. And we had a kind of DIY setup, but some of them designed one design, a Concha pastry to represent her Mexican heritage. Another one did a Kendama Japanese toy. We had another student do soccer ball, one did an Indian pastry. So just whatever they wanted to do, they represented themselves. And then those are all seen binded along the edges. For those of you who saw, individually because we knew we wanted them to take it home, each one separate, not stitched altogether.

Lisa Margonelli: And that way they could share it with their family. Interesting. And so, they also learn in addition to autoclaving and inoculating and thinking about mesh and experiments, they also were using CAD to design the mold. And then that was, I would assume, 3D printed. So, this is a very super high tech ecosystem. And you are bringing it to places like Salinas, where it could be really hard to access a 3D printer or CAD or some of these other things. Callie, tell us, how did BioJam camp make that transition to working remotely? Were people able to do these same sorts of projects or did you have to kind of rethink it?

Callie Chapell: Yes. We have “Lab on a Cookie Sheet” designed by Corinne. So, imagine at home you are living in one or two rooms, you’ve got tons of siblings running around, where can you have a lab? Well, turns out that all you need is a cookie sheet or a box and the right attitude, and any place can be a lab, whether that’s in your kitchen, whether that’s in a driveway, whether that’s in a garden. And we created these really innovative kits that had lots of different materials, biomaterials, circuitry materials, general making materials, fun tape and markers, scissors to really imagine in your own space. And scavenging for things that might be waste or might be treasures, depending on how you look at it. How you can create with biology at home? We made sure that all of the things that we shared were commonly available things at home.

For example, if you need to sterilize something, you can use isopropyl alcohol, rubbing alcohol, right. And all of the mycelium, for example, that we sent home was food grade. But the most important thing is, I think, doing science at home helps you realize that you’ve always been doing science at home. If you’ve been making yogurt in the kitchen, or if you’ve been growing things in the garden, even asking questions and trying to figure out how to answer them, that is doing science. And so, I think there was a real beauty to having people create in their own homes, even if we were interacting over Zoom as opposed to being together physically. Those people couldn’t imagine the science that already has been happening. And I think our curriculum really tried to emphasize that.

Lisa Margonelli: I think it’s really interesting that part of this education is, you’ve always been a scientist. We have all always been scientists. Corinne, do you want to talk a little bit more about what happened that first year that you all went remote and had this distributed lab in all these different places on cookie sheets?

Corinne Okada Takara: Yes. It was really fun. And I would just like to elevate the BioJam teams from the year prior who helped put these kits together and design them as well as create videos. So, some of the youth from our first year helped and were youth teen mentors and came back. So they helped put these kits together. So, you were asking about what kind of things can you do? And I think that’s a space where biomaterial design can step in as a really great first engagement spot. So, bio art growing bacterial cellulose. You can use a kombucha leather that grows on top, growing mycelium into forced geometries, using different mold forms, doing millifluidics with coffee filters and tape.

Lisa Margonelli: What’s millifluidics?

Corinne Okada Takara: So instead of microfluidics, it’s on the millifluidics scale and you can laser cut coffee filters into channels that you then sandwich between tape and then cut ports and do mixing experiments, pH mixing experiments.

Lisa Margonelli: So, it’s an analog to what you might do in a lab?

Corinne Okada Takara: Exactly.

Lisa Margonelli: So, I want to sort of step back from this a little bit. Two of you come from synthetic biology, I think. Which is sort of two different things. One thing is, it’s a practice of taking genes from one place in nature and sort of putting them in another to sort of enable new possibilities of life. So it might be that you change the way a plant grows, or it might be that you change a microbe’s capability, so it can eat old newspapers and turn it into some other useful chemical. So, on the one hand, there is this sort of researcher lab practice. And then the second aspect of it is really this sort of dream of creating a sustainable economy, where we replace petroleum products with other sorts of synthetic biology-derived chemicals.

But the one thing that nobody discusses is who is going to do it, and what is the world that they create going to look like. And that’s really interesting, because there has been kind of a preconception that the people who are going to do synthetic biology are wearing lab coats. They are people who have gotten access to very high-level labs, or maybe they work in a big industrial situation in a big refinery. And it strikes me that what you are doing at BioJam is changing who does this and who has the ideas and who asks the questions and who figures out which problems to solve. Do you want to talk about this?

Rolando Cruz Perez: The definitions you prescribe, outline for synthetic biology, of course, those are very canonical and accepted conventional definitions. I’ve tried to push my own thinking about it into a more abstract, higher-level layer of the word synthesis or the idea of synthesis, synthesizing together different knowledge or synthesizing something as art. So, to me, synthetic biology has evolved into, for me personally, into this space of synthesizing relationships with living organisms or living matter. For me personally, thinking about synthetic biology of this cultural socio-technical kind of cultural practice, I can then connect that to the development of maize or of potatoes or of “domesticating” animals and even ourselves and our microbiota, for instance.

And so of course, it’s important, absolutely—the who and the where and the what of synthetic biology. And that’s important; maybe one specific reason there, biosecurity, let’s talk about that. That world of distributed or open-source technology, it becomes realized, we’ll have questions in particular in the time of a pandemic right around biosecurity. It’s my, and others’ belief that in that world we are going to all need to love biology. We are all going to need to love synthetic biology because we need to have openness and transparency and care, transformative justice, as opposed to punitive justice, because in a world of punishment, there will be blind spots. There will be dark corners. And we don’t want that with biotechnology because of the intrinsic facts that we are biology and we are the technology—we are made up of it.

Lisa Margonelli: Corinne, do you want to talk a little bit about what it means for everyone to be a biologist?

Corinne Okada Takara: I come from a community arts activist space. and so any engagement that we have with the public I feel is really important, and we are part of the public. And how do we create these new spaces to address these concerns that Rolando has? So, if we can buy plasmas off Etsy, yes, we need to all be scientists, we need to love biology. We need to see ourselves as part of the conversation and not only growing our knowledge of the vocabulary of science, but expanding the vocabulary we are using—including more accessible words, accessible tools, and create those initial engagement spaces much earlier and multi-generationally, in spaces that people can access. And I know a lot of universities and museums do “community outreach.” I’m doing air quotes.

But I really think BioJam is a model for what should happen. And that is science communion, in community spaces, whether that’s a parking lot, a community garden, a farmer’s market, where are the spaces we can interact with people serendipitously in their places of expertise, their spaces. So, they know they can bring the vocabulary and knowledge to these conversations that right now are only engaging a few. So BioJam, I think, at its core, is asking that question, what might these new spaces look like? How can these be multi-generational; how can they span across spaces beyond academia?

Callie Chapell: Well, I think I just want to highlight something that has been brought up earlier, which is that BioJam is activism in changing what we consider scientific knowledge to be. And I’m not really a synthetic biologist. I’m trained as a molecular biologist, but I’m actually an ecologist now. And what I’ve learned was when I was growing up, I’m actually from the rural agricultural Midwest along the shores of Lake Michigan, was that ecology and evolution, ecological communities, and the way that evolution functions in the world is synthetic biology, right. Every time that we modify the atmosphere by emitting CO2, we are bioengineering every organism on the planet, right. We are also bioengineering organisms when we make bread at home, right? And in being an ecologist and thinking about the world from that perspective, you see that, for example, mycelium live in symbiosis with trees, in some cases.

And then when we had these organismal collaborations as artists working with bio-organisms, as scientists, working with other organisms, right, as biologists, or just existing in the world. That we can really expand how we think about what synthetic biology means, what art means, and what science more fundamentally means in this more expansive way. And so, the mission of BioJam is not just to create these experiences for teens that we are working directly with, but really changing the conversation and decentralizing how we think about knowledge production in biology. And not just knowledge production, but also who drives the conversations and who creates the technology. So we are really working towards a vision where everyone feels empowered to make with biology—not make with biology necessarily in academic labs or for companies or corporations—but make with biology for play, in their local communities, in their kitchens and agricultural fields, right. And empty lots.

And when people feel like they are biologists, that’s how we get innovation to address the most pressing challenges that everyone has a say in. Not just the people who see themselves as synthetic biologists. Just briefly, I want to highlight something that has been mentioned by both Rolando and Corinne about this being an intergenerational challenge. And something that we talk about a lot is power and transience, right. That what we think and what we see as liberatory biotechnology or biodesign is very reactive, like Rolando said, to current challenges that we have. But it should always be changing, right? It should always be re-evaluated and who we are liberating and what we are liberating ourselves from and also what our future could be. And I feel I’ve really learned a lot about what liberatory means in this context from youth.

And I think back to a really amazing webinar, they were thought leaders in Salinas on a local webinar. And they described what they envisioned their liberatory bio future to be. And their ideas, I’d never heard, policymakers, right. They are imagining worlds where we are addressing critical issues in climate change, social justice issues, incarceration, dynamics, power dynamics between the Global North and Global South, as it relates to decolonization using biology as a metaphor or as tools to enable those global changes to how the world can operate. And as they describe what they envision their future to be, I hope that we can empower that and actualize that vision.

Lisa Margonelli: That’s fabulous. I want to thank you, Rolando, Corinne, and Callie. This is just a fantastic conversation and hopefully a spore for future work and collaborations between communities and bio scientists. To see the BioJam artwork and learn more about the camp, visit issues.org, to read their essay, Bioengineering Everywhere for Everyone. Visit our show notes to find a link to the camp itself.

Thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode and this season of The Ongoing Transformation. We will return in September with new episodes. If you have comments, interview suggestions, or questions, please email us at [email protected], and you can also visit us at issues.org for more conversations and more articles. I’m Lisa Margonelli, editor in chief of Issues in Science and Technology. Thank you for joining us for this season of our podcast.