In this episode of the Technology & Security podcast, host Dr. Miah Hammond-Errey is joined by Dr Thom Dixon, whose work explores biofutures and the bioeconomy. We explore what synthetic biology and bioinformation are and how much of an individual person's information signature is biological. We discuss how AI can learn from biomimicry and adaptive natural biological systems. We explore the future of surveillance plants and how sensing in the environment will operate and what it might mean for national and physical security as well as how a future consumer synthetic biology app will accelerate the fields growth and reach.
The conversation covers Australian biodiversity and potential for functionally useful genetic traits to adapt to climate change as well as role of synthetic biology in climate adaptation and accounting, such as carbon cycling and increasing carbon uptake. This episode includes a quick look at some security threats, including the pervasiveness of DNA data collection (and inability to protect DNA instances), role of AI in mediating information and its potential in influence and interference campaigns. Finally, we discuss the need for policy makers to better understand biology. As we see an increase in cyber-physical (and environmental) systems, policy makers need to improve their understanding of biology and how it interacts with technology.
Thom Dixon completed his PhD at Macquarie University. It explores the development of and use of bioinformation and synthetic biology can impact international relations. He was the Vice President for the Australian Institute of International Affairs NSW. He is a member of the ARC Centre for Excellence for Synthetic Biology and the manager, national security and defence for Macquarie University.
Resources mentioned in the recording:
+ Model’s of Life: https://defencescienceinstitute.com/funding-opportunity/darpa-biological-technologies-hr001124s0034/
+ The Substack: https://biofuturesinstantiated.substack.com/
This podcast was recorded on the lands of the Gadigal people, and we pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. We acknowledge their continuing connection to land, sea and community, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Music by Dr Paul Mac and production by Elliott Brennan.
Transcript, check against delivery:
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: My guest today is Doctor Thom Dixon. Thanks for joining me, Tom. Tom recently finished his PhD at Macquarie University. It explores the development of and use of bioinformation and synthetic biology and how they can impact international relations. He was the vice president for the Australian Institute of International Affairs, New South Wales from 2017 to 2024. He is a member of the Arc centre for excellence for Synthetic Biology and the manager, National Security and Defence for Macquarie University. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Thanks so much for joining me, Tom.
Dr Thom Dixon: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: We're coming to you today from the lands of the Gadigal people. I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledge their continuing connection to land, sea and community.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: So congratulations on becoming a doctor.
Dr Thom Dixon: Thank you.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Your thesis, which is the genesis of why we are talking today, outlines what bioinformation is and how it's used in synthetic biology and international relations. So to start us off. What is bioinformation.
[00:01:11] Dr Thom Dixon: Yeah. Thank you. There were two very different concepts for Bioinformation. So you had social scientists that kind of saw Bioinformation as something that existed through human agency. You know, it was the DNA information that we extracted through observations. And the instantiation of that information was in human systems, human processes, human agency. But if you go and spend time with synthetic biologists or biologists in general, bioinformation exists everywhere. It is how organisms communicate internally and externally. It's aromas in the air. Everything in life can be a substrate for information. And so bio information has to be a really broad concept, because there are so many different substrates that organisms use to sense their environment and, and then communicate internally.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: So I want to broaden it out to synthetic biology. it's obviously really high on Australia's critical technology list, but not really discussed anywhere near as often as something like AI. can you define synthetic biology for us as well?
Dr Thom Dixon: Yeah. So synthetic biology is really the basic, fundamental and applied science that is about trying to make biology easier to design or easier to engineer. I would have a carve out for synthetic biology versus engineering biology, and you sort of see them used interchangeably, but there's a bit of nuance to it. So engineering biology tends to be about the scale up to you know, commercial scale, um, of synthetic biology tools and techniques. So Moderna would have used synthetic biology to figure out how to engineer mRNA. But when they scale up to global supply chains, they're using engineering biology to figure out how to do that.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: That's really helpful. I think the success of mRNA technology and Covid vaccines is probably the biggest and first introduction into kind of synthetic biology and what it might do at scale. Obviously, the field of synthetic biology has experienced pretty rapid growth in recent years. It's been around for a long time, and it's led to an abundance of literature that can sort of make it hard to see where the start and end of the discipline is. Can you explain the biggest areas of focus within synthetic biology, and some of those trends over time?
Dr Thom Dixon: Yeah. So it really kind of emerges in the 2000 and builds steam on the back of the Human Genome Project, the papers that sort of propose it. What they do is they try to bring engineering concepts and electrical engineering concepts in particular into biology. So that's about abstraction. It's about thinking, you know, there are different there are different levels of the system that you can work at. So it's about taking the Atcs and GS up to genes, up to circuits, to metabolic pathways to organisms and all all of the different abstractions of biology that are in between. And engineering does that really well. When you get a motorbike, you you don't necessarily deal with it on the CAD design drawings that, that some of the designers will have worked with. You're just working with the motorbike, and that's how we deal with most organisms or think about most organisms. Is that that whole scale. But where synthetic biology came in, it was like, okay, well, if you can use some of these new tools and techniques to tinker with or paste, cut, edit DNA, um, how do you then abstract that change all the way through the system so you can actually make functional, useful, directed changes that have intended outcomes and can scale.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: I am really interested in work around human biology and technology and better understanding the implications and intersections and the way that humans interact with technology and the way that technology impacts our biological and physiological responses. It is different to your research, but given your interest, I wanted to ask where you see that going? and do you think there are things that we need to do now to make sure that we're moving towards a safe, secure and equitable future
Dr Thom Dixon: So if you think about what bio information or communication is, it is all that. So for instance, right now when we're looking at each other, we're having, you know, near real time changes in our neural networks based on what we're seeing. So I am changing your brain just through you looking at me and the people listening to this, their brain is actually changing right now through interacting with this information.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Now I also love neuroplasticity. But.
Dr Thom Dixon: But but when you think about scaling that across a population and you think about smartphones, you've essentially got this portal to the brain through the eyes and the ears, and you can hack that if you know enough about it. And so I think that's where bio information is really important to understand, because you're talking about optical and audio inputs to the brain. And so you're having a real time impact on the neural substrate.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: obviously the one of the kind of biggest challenges that we are looking at in society at the moment is around the way that technology is involved in our actual lives. So if you look at so many of the current legislative responses, whether they're from banning social media from young people, you know, whether it's about mis and disinformation, you know, export controls of specific types of data or information, like so much of this is trying to regulate the way that we interact with technology, because many people are concerned that the current human responses to it are not healthy, you know, are not helping, wellbeing are not helping, mental health, it's a very contested space, I wanted to press you a little and ask where do you see the tension points of our interactions with technology and what is most important from a bioinformation perspective to think about?
Dr Thom Dixon: So one of the key tensions that I see is that the information flow that we live in now, you know, at an individual level, at a society level, at a civilisational level, is moving too fast for us to within our biological boundaries of being, to work with. And that is not historically how information has sort of existed in relation to human societies. And so what we're beginning to bring into that is AI as a mediation tool to sort of sit between us and that flow, and it helps to then take what is in an impossible amount of information, moving at a frequency and tempo that is just simply cannot be kept up with. To turn that into something that is human readable, or at least engageable and can be engaged with at a human level. The issues with once you've got that sort of arbitrage happening between the actual the actual information and then the mediation of it, is what happens in that gap that that is a perfect gap to get into to then completely.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: This is the social media algorithm gap, right?
Dr Thom Dixon: Exactly. So you are warping a sense of reality because you're shaping the mediation of, of the real and the digital world. And that is that's the risk is that we, we're seeing like we're just seeing the impact now of two decades of, of that kind of mediation process. And, you know, I see it I see it quite a bit where until you actually physically go to a location, you can never, ever know what's happening there. And it's as simple as that. Like, to actually physically be somewhere is the point of truth, but it's not something that that is often done now. We often sort of take for granted that we can get access to truth without going to a specific location. [00:11:07]
[00:09:30] Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: [00:11:07]And of course, as a political scientist, I would be remiss not to mention that there are always many truths in a situation too. [00:11:14]
I want to bring it back to your PhD, though. So the thesis identified three kind of really big developments in international relations. I wanted to really hone in on the specific one, which is about the development of novel uses of biology to support new methods of grey zone warfare. Can you firstly, though, take us through that development and kind of how you framed it.
Dr Thom Dixon: Yeah. novel uses of biology are, are a trend that we're continuing to see occur kind of again and again. And Crispr is kind of the technology that we go to to sort of think about gene editing right now. But, you know, there are a host of other technologies that do gene editing. And I think we're at what Crispr 2.0 or Crispr 3.0 already. It is improving. The proposition put forward was simply that these things are going to continue to happen. And I think mRNA engineering is a really good example of that. For many. That was a technology surprise, but there was 20 years of research behind that and the speed at which that got to global scale. And I think the significance of that event in terms of designing something in silico and pushing it back out into mammalian substrates, is we sort of gloss over that as the in terms of the significance just in, in human history? that's just going to keep happening. And we we're really at the very cusp of seeing what AI does when it's given well structured, well tagged metadata about biological information.
Dr Thom Dixon: And we don't have a lot of biological information. And so there's some grandiose claims being made by people who are on the AI side at the moment but on the more the bio-technology side or the bioinformatics. We just don't have the data, and it costs a huge amount of effort and time to collect well structured biological data So they're very high throughput, very high scale things. They cost billions of dollars. And that's where the well structured metadata comes from for building out the AI models. But there will be and there are organisations that are going to do that. And the models that they will develop will allow them predictive power. That is very difficult to anticipate.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: I know you love sci fi. you give us a kind of a vignette?
Dr Thom Dixon: So let's let's say you can build out a model so that you get a very accurate, accurate prediction of how neurons behave. And then you can scale that up to the connectome. We've just seen the fruit fly connectome map published, which was transformative. So if you begin to be able to have very good predictive power for the connectome of the mammalian brain, and you sort of scale up that direction, you're getting to the point where you're going to be able to predict, within varying levels of accuracy, how certain stimulus is going to going to cause that, that connectome to respond. that has incredible dual uses when you're talking about how best to design a command and control room, how best to, um, how best to optimise the warfighter, knowing exactly what kind of information stimulus is detracting from optimised behavior and knowing knowing what you can drop in to. To degrade like. Decision making and where to put it is really critical sort of stuff. We're just at the beginning, I think, of learning those sorts of things.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: I want to pivot to genomic mapping. Yeah. Over the years, there have been, several Chinese companies collecting genetic data for sweeping research on the traits of populations. Where do you think the level of collection on traits in populations is at. And what does that mean? You know, for warfare, for societies.
Dr Thom Dixon: Yeah. I think if you look at all of the data that have been, say, lodged in 23 And me and Ancestry.com from Americans, and you sort of work on the assumption that you can get to the third cousin of, of a genetic instance. And so you can attribute you can reasonably attribute characteristics about the third cousin of, of someone's DNA. That's 60% of European ancestry in the US that was captured just by what was in those commercial databases And so the risk for me is I think the DNA ship has sailed. I think that based on just the amount of material that is already out there, and because of that third cousin element where the similarities are of that material is uncontrolled. So the idea that you could have a sensitive group, say, like a group of special forces soldiers and you could actually be be making sure that their DNA instances were protected. I think that's pretty difficult to do. Where we've got an opportunity is to think about other areas of, you know, of biological abstraction. So the proteome, mitochondrial DNA, things that haven't really been collected and published yet. And what that means, because DNA doesn't operate in isolation.
Dr Thom Dixon: So yes, there's plenty of things you could you can think about attributing through DNA, but still there's a lot of contest around utility. If you were, say, through genome wide association study, able to figure out, you know, criteria for addictiveness some negative attributes which you might then be able to target and compromise if you, if you wanted to compromise someone. I think they're seeing these, these are attributes that that sit in the environment. And so they're sort of probabilistically caused. And they work in quite complex networks within the body and within the body, within the environment. So can can you work out if someone has a 20% higher chance of becoming addicted than someone else? Maybe. Can you then do something with that information? Well, that's difficult to tell. It's not just human DNA going for, like, let's collect the DNA of everything on the planet. Um, so I think there's quite a few programs that sit in in that area. And while we do sometimes bolt this, bolt this down to human DNA, just the truth is it's that wider. There is so much more that's valuable for potentially other reasons. And so you've just.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: So I kind of want to go to some more of the pointy biology and warfare stuff. The ability to use particular weapons or even medications, that activate when someone only has a specific characteristic attribute. that's the kind of the holy grail of of warfare, right, is to be able to to find weapons that only affect the people that you want to affect,
Dr Thom Dixon: what you're talking about is the ability to trigger. So there is an area that looks at caging genes. And when you cage a gene, what you essentially do is you turn it into a switch and you figure out how to activate that switch. This is most mature in the area of optogenetics. It's a it's a well-studied area of neuroscience where you use lasers to turn genes on and off. And then you're able to study certain types of undertake certain types of studies, mostly in mouse models. Now, the idea that you could have some kind of biological weapon, which was activated via near-infrared that can penetrate reasonably deep into biomass. So you can have something circulating that's inert, that you can activate at will. It's the triggering functionality by biological weapons have always sort of fallen down on triggering, but being able to deploy and trigger at a later date that that is concerning [remove sound]
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Would it be possible to connect bio information with other data about individuals and create new, effective ways of employing information campaigns, influence and interference?
Dr Thom Dixon: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this this comes back to how useful is socially deterministic information. So if I had all of the DNA of everyone in Australia now, and I then analysed that against against social media patterns. I have what I would call socially deterministic information in that it's really only useful in terms of that person's position in space and time. So it's got limited utility because they're constantly changing. But if I am able to collect and act on that quickly, then that can be quite useful. Or more importantly, if I'm seeking to preserve the current distribution of power so that it doesn't change. And this is where it becomes, I think, particularly important when it's about surveilling a specific group of people. And socially deterministic information can be useful because I'm trying to make sure they do not change and that they stay in that particular structure or distribution.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: is it possible to connect bio information and use that in a new way of kind of micro-targeting shifting people's thinking or affecting those shared factors?
Dr Thom Dixon: Yes. And I mean, that comes back to what we were talking about earlier, where? Thinking about bio information as sort of, you know, the optical link you have to a smartphone is important because that is having a real time change in your. In your neural substrate. But I think if we if we separate out from, say, the smartphone related hacks to sort of changing people over longer, longer time scales. You know, there was and I don't know if it's still happening, but I think. Seal team were doing sort of like daily DNA sequencing so that they could try and figure out who was best optimised for deployment. if that sort of thing is successful and you can and you can find the best, the best team on a given day based on, based on their DNA read, then you might come to rely on that. And so suddenly that is actually a point to try and to try and get in, get in and actually change. Change. Um, truth. So I think the issue is that as we start to sense more about Bioinformation and rely on it more, and Whoop is a great example in terms of wearables. If we start to rely on that for figuring out who is most optimised for deployment, then we can also figure out who is least optimised. And suddenly you can be accidentally fielding the completely wrong team because what you're seeing is not what's real.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: we're seeing more BCIs in the medical space and hearing lots of aspirations to bring those into the consumer space. But we talk comparatively less about sensors in our environment. Can you talk us through that and how you think sensing in the environment will change?
Dr Thom Dixon: So when when I was writing one of the chapters in the thesis, I think anyone who was near me was was getting their ear talked off about how I thought plants were going to start talking. And one of these crackpot scenarios I had was that someone was going to engineer a whole bunch of plants and then put them outside Russell, and that they would just sit there and collect information
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Video surveillance plants. Right.
Dr Thom Dixon: Surveillance plants. Right. And I would sort of go back and forth on questions like, you know, what do a soldier's boots actually smell like? And if I was placing an olfactory sensor into a forest and connecting that into the wood wide web. You know how much information can I glean from that sort of thing? And I think this is where I feel we're a bit unprepared because there is just so much, so much of a person's information signature is biological. And we're only just beginning to learn how to really kind of sense different aspects of that. And olfactory is a really important one because it's such a sensitive sensing, and it is one of the quickest ways of getting information because, you know, the nerve bundles directly in the olfactory sense. And that's across like so many different types of creatures. So if we figure out, you know, really how to engineer olfactory sensing, there is it is very difficult to to pretend to be someone else, because I would anticipate that we all have a unique olfactory Factory signature.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Yeah. I mean, in the same way that we all have different neuro signatures, right? I mean, this is this is what is so incredibly fascinating about the body is that it is actually quite unique, even though, across species, we can be similar. We actually have an incredible amount of uniqueness. Um, and we also know so little about it, actually.
Dr Thom Dixon: Yeah and that's that's what makes it so interesting And they are just so incredibly complex. And when you look at the information systems, even inside a single cell, the amount of redundancy built into the information network across different substrates like chemicals, optics, electricity is huge. And and, you know, we design systems in computer chips today, which just, you know, one thing breaks in the whole the whole system is catastrophically failed. And biological systems have answered that question time and time and again by using completely different approaches to engineering information.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: So adaptive.
Dr Thom Dixon: And that and that is something that we can.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Learn from, right?
Dr Thom Dixon: Yeah. We can learn so much from how that works in terms of biomimicry. And then also how do we deploy it in a useful way?
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Yeah, absolutely. Australia has some pretty unique flora and fauna. And you've pointed out elsewhere that some of those are really resistant to heat. Can you talk me through some of the specific ways that this could be used to, monitor, adapt or mitigate the effects of climate change?
Dr Thom Dixon: Yeah. So I think the example I was using there was I was thinking about rice. Rice productivity tends to cap out at around 35 degrees. So if you have days over that you're going to start to get decreased productivity and growth. And there are examples of wild rice in Australia that grow quite well above that temperature. And that is just one example of, there would be genetic traits there that are functionally useful. And there are groups that do research in that space that is across the board. We have a remarkably dry, hot environment. We would have a lot of genetic information for how to optimise productivity and growth in agricultural staples just sitting there. I think, when when we're talking about biodiversity in Australian biodiversity, we share national similarities with Indonesia and Brazil, for instance, in terms of what we're what we're sitting on, where we differ a bit with Indonesia and Brazil is our relationship to Antarctica. And so we we have we just have a unique biological footprint. And, and a special part of that is it's been curated and under the custodianship of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities for, 60, 70,000 years.
Dr Thom Dixon: And so all and so all of the genetic material we have is actually a co-design process between those communities and the environment. And when we think about benefit sharing, if we're going to if we're going to, redeploy some of this material in an economically different context, those communities absolutely have to be a part of it.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Yeah, absolutely. Could you use that kind of example then as an entryway to talk about how human, animal, environmental bioinformation might be used in climate monitoring, mitigation and adaptation?
Dr Thom Dixon: So a huge part of of it is thinking about the carbon cycle. And I think as as carbon cycling matures in the economy, we're going to need much more accurate and much more robust ways for tracking the carbon cycle. And that ultimately means biosensors throughout the environment for understanding how like if you have a piece of land which is getting tax credits because it's just growing a forest, how much carbon is that piece of land actually locking in. How much is it depositing? Is soil like all these sort of questions which kind of will probably have tax consequences at some point? Um, they, they will need sensors and they will. That's where synthetic biology is going to produce technologies that do the sort of accounting, like the really boring accounting side of carbon cycling. Um, and then you've got a company, you've got a company in the US, which is engineering trees to have increased carbon uptake. And so you have these opportunities to take to take trees that grow fast and increase the growth rate, increase the carbon uptake for those trees, run them on plantations, and then use that biomass to make sustainable aviation fuel, for instance. And so that part of the, carbon cycling economy is really interesting to me right now. I think that's where synthetic biology has maximum impact for Australia. We are incredibly good at biomass, and this is the only technology that has to be close to biomass to be economically feasible. So either we're going to import a lot of synthetic biology companies into Australia to be situated next to our biomass and valorise it and take profits offshore, or we make those companies ourselves.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Let's go to a segment called Interdependencies and Vulnerabilities. What are some of the interdependencies and vulnerabilities around synthetic biology and information in international relations that you wish were better understood?
Dr Thom Dixon: So synthetic biology is a general purpose, science and technology. And it is going to and is already affecting every single element of the economy. We have absolutely no idea what this looks like, to the point where the consumer app for synthetic biology still doesn't exist. Like the deployments at the moment are business to business. We are still in mainframe era. so that that movement from centralised to decentralised when it happens and it will happen fast is it's just going to change the shape, the shape of the world and the shape of human civilisation.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: What are some of the indicators that that's happening?
Dr Thom Dixon: the biggest one was obviously Moderna's deployment of mRNA. For me, that was the turning point where for the very first time, we designed something in silico make it on mass, push it into a human substrate, and are essentially packaging a message in chemicals to modify to modify the human organism. So for me, that's the first step. Now, if you think about the time frame that that occurred across, it's it was what, two three days from release of the from release of the genome for the coronavirus that they were able to scan through all of the different libraries and pick their viable candidate. And within a week they were working on it. And then 11 months, ten, 11 months, you have an emergency authorisation that that is going to be a long horizon in terms of where we're headed. It's obviously going to decrease and decrease. So how quickly can you can you identify something and push it out to an organism? The other thing with mRNA that fascinates me is this sort of technology is going to be useful generally for all organisms. And so there are plenty of things like I might want my houseplant to be red today, and we're not yet really in a world where that would be accepted for me to just go out and, you know, dose it with something and have a red House plant and then want it to be yellow tomorrow. They are the sort of scenarios where you think about what we were concerned about for biotechnology in the 1980s versus what we're concerned about now. And this the transition in technology from having to put a moratorium on doing DNA editing at all to where we are now. Then if you fast forward another 40 years, it is very difficult to anticipate where we will be.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Are there areas of it that you're watching really closely?
Dr Thom Dixon: So climate change mitigation is obviously where I am most interested right now, because that is the number one area of deployment for synthetic biology. You talk to anyone who works in the space, and they almost exclusively focused on solving that problem, that that problem is a biological problem because we're dealing with carbon. And we are slowly seeing the technologies mature that give us the pathway to atmospheric carbon capture and deposition. And you can kind of see the roadmap for it now where you've got companies like Lanzatech and Lanzajet that will do point based carbon capture for large infrastructure refineries, gaseous carbon waste. And they're going to turn that into products that then displace petrochemical products. And you can see that over time, if we start capturing all of our gaseous carbon waste, it's very easy to sort of ratchet up, okay, maybe 1% of that should be deposited as soil into an unremediated mine. And you can kind of see this trajectory that we are going to accidentally in a way, um, fall into where my. And this is the most optimistic projection I'll give you, which is that the flip side to the biological weapons is that we will actually be unsustainably drawing down atmospheric carbon at some point in this century, because our current economy relies on more carbon inputs than it then outputs. so once we flip over to actually drawing down atmospheric carbon en masse, and this is, you know, quite a way into the future, we will do that unsustainably, just as we have unsustainably extracted it from the Earth.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: I thought that was meant to be your optimistic view.
Dr Thom Dixon: There's a lot there's a lot of carbon around.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Let's go to another segment called Emerging Tech for Emerging Leaders. What do you see as the biggest challenge for leaders in the current technology environment?
Dr Thom Dixon: We don't know how to think biologically. So I spent a good year wracking racking my brain on why policy makers in the security space struggled with thinking biologically. so anyone who goes through international relations now learns a whole host of concepts that are about the highest level of abstraction of biology on this planet, the nation state. And yet they never once interact with, you know, ecosystem science or a whole range of other things which describe how biological entities interact. And so we learn all these concepts that are kind of poor cousins to their actual biological equivalents. And so when it comes to something like having to deal with a global biological shock. We don't necessarily. I think as policymakers have the language to understand what is happening, because all biology is metaphor. Every element of that sort of abstraction stack is so alien to our ways of thinking that it has to be dealt with in metaphor. And so unless you learn that language and learn those metaphors, you you're just you're sort of dealing with Shakespeare.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: So what do you think are the biggest shifts needed for leadership to engage in biology better?
Dr Thom Dixon: So we have to find a way to understand, I think and this is this is where the metaphors and language of synthetic biology become important. It's a way of understanding how biological instances of things interact. So policy makers now need to do the same thing where they need to kind of approach biology as a discipline and search for the language that conceptually is going to help them deal with the world. Because plants and animals are exceptional at mediating the information environment through a diverse array of sensors. And that is something that we are really struggling with right now. They are exceptional at, highly redundant information systems. And that is something that if you're going to design a system that cannot break down or needs 99.99% uptime. It is the sort of thing that we need to learn from.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Let's pivot to a segment on alliances. How can we collaborate with other nations to mitigate harms and learn better from one another?
Dr Thom Dixon: Yeah. we how do we collaborate with the US on this? Because they have been leading quite far ahead with the bold goals, and their work on engineering biology. And when you look at the way that the US has approached this, so you've got the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, the EBRC, and they put out roadmaps for industry around here are the problems that you need to solve in energy, in engineering, biology to like these are the general problems of the industry. And they are um, they're done in exactly the same way as the way that Sematech worked, and Sematech was the semiconductor manufacturing consortium that grew up in the 1980s in response to Russian nuclear missiles and Japanese semiconductor advances. And that was what coordinated us there. I don't quite know what the Australian government's engagement with some, with an organisation like Biomade would be, but we have a lot to learn. They are possibly ten years ahead of where we are in terms of their their industrial policy around bringing the the workforce training, the multinationals, the startups all together around scale up infrastructure, around pilot infrastructure. And this is something that we we should learn from and know how to do and ultimately be a global leader in.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Let's go to another segment called disconnect. How do you wind down and unplug?
Dr Thom Dixon: So very, very recently I actually started a Substack. Um, and so my way of winding down and disconnecting is to try to figure out how to use creative nonfiction writing to communicate like these sort of concepts How do we make it funny? How do we make it engaging? How do we tell a good story? And so that's actually where I've gone for winding down.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: a segment coming up is Eyes and Ears. What have you been reading, listening to, or watching lately that might be of interest to our audience?
Dr Thom Dixon: So because I've been reading a stupid amount of Substack lately, an essay called Models of Life, and it is a sort of science fiction cast forward almost out to, I think, 2070 or 2080. Decade by decade, what it looks like to have, an AI model, living systems and what happens as that technology advances to the point where it is so accurate, we don't even go to the living system to ask a question anymore. It was one of it was possibly the most engaging piece I've ever read this year.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: final segment is called Need to Know. Is there anything I didn't ask that we should have covered.
Dr Thom Dixon: So synthetic biology and the reason I was attracted to it. If you think about existential catastrophic existential threats to humanity, you kind of got nuclear weapons, climate change and pandemics and then lower down the order, maybe AI supremacy and synthetic biology hits the top three because it is producing technology that will approach the climate change mitigation problem if dealt with correctly. It deals with the pandemic problem. And a lot, a lot of, uh, deterrence doctrine is heavily interwoven with biological weapons and likelihood of conflict, which is also interwoven with climate change. If you fix that nexus, you deal with the three big existential threats. And so that's why I'm why I'm so fascinated to engineering biology, because it offers this pathway to actually go about holistically mitigating all three of them.
Dr Miah Hammond-Errey: Well, what a fabulous way to end. Tom, thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr Thom Dixon: Thank you so much for having me.
