BioHackers Podcast

BioHackers Podcast Ep. 1 - What is a BioHacker featuring Alex Feltus

• David James Clarke IV and Alex Feltus • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Welcome to the inaugural episode of the BioHackers Podcast!

In this episode, David and Alex discuss the formation and growth of the BioHacker movement, including the first BioHackathon (for Bill Paseman), the next iteration of the Vulcan Academy, Chaos Theory, the Praxis AI mission, Climate Change, and details on how you too can become a BioHacker (for free)!

Watch the Video Podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/41VnqSEHLk4

Here is a list of topics: 

• Welcome to Episode 1 (00:00)
• What are you vibing right now? (02:02)
• What is a BioHacker? (04:31)
• BioHackathon collaboration in Discord (09:48)
• Education to employment with digital credentials (13:34)
• Expanding the Feltus lab (17:32)
• What excites you in science today? (21:14)
• BioHacking climate change (25:07)
• Praxis AI mission (27:56)
• Wrangle BioHackathon for lung cancer (28:24)
• How do I become a BioHacker? (29:22)
• Join the BioHacker journey (32:37)
• Do gigaflops empower systems biology? (35:38)

Enjoy the Show!

hi and welcome to the biohackers podcast i'm david james clark the fourth here with the esteemed professor alex feltus how you doing today alex pretty good excited about this all right cool thank you hey you know what this is our inaugural podcast key the fanfare[Music] so the whole idea of this podcast was about 20 years in the making you and i have been friends for two or three years but we have very similar backgrounds interdisciplinary backgrounds i'm into digital learning have a little bit of a scientific genetics background you're heavy into bioinformatics genomics and a little bit of learning background so together you know ham and egg it perfectly so we thought hey let's build a podcast about the biohacker community and we're going to dive into that in just a moment this first podcast is really just you and me uh but we'll be having guests on the future podcast but in general the format is pretty straightforward it's about 30 minutes the first couple of minutes you and i will be just chatting away which we'll have a hard time keeping it to five minutes something we do all the time and then after that we'll go into a few key questions you'll be the guest and i'll be the host for this one but in future podcasts we'll have esteemed guests from all over this the world of science so i'm super excited about that and i will talk about what biohackers are about digital learning about democratizing access to skills and resources for solving the world's big problems it's an incredibly audacious goal and something that you know you and i have been passionate about for years and then in the last few minutes it'll be a call to action hey how do you become a biohacker how do you support the community so how does that sound sounds perfect i'm excited all right good so i always like to start with something you know kind of simple like what are you vibing right now what's going on in the world that you know has your that that has your attention that you're excited about i'd say one of the biggest things that's exciting to me is that is this this hackathon concept i teach classes in a university setting but i also do a lot of work with people outside of the classroom and talking about like you know analyzing data sets for medicine and agriculture and all this stuff and it's really you know kind of it's complex like biological genetics type analyses but i'm really excited about the concept of uh bringing together like the learning component of you know learning some basic skills learning some genetics whatever those things are and mixing it together with real data that really impacts people on the planet and we're working with people right now with their actual their data sets from their their cancer and trying to understand what's different in them relative to other people but what's really exciting to me is being able to do this from a hackathon perspective which is a way of getting together and coming at a problem with like you know some concept of where you're going to go with it but no rules a little bit off the rails and being able to go and have an experiential hands-on you know deep dive into the data while having fun and trying to understand what's happening and this is what i try to do in my my research environment as a professional scientist but i'm really trying to break that out into more of a democratized open source way of learning and that's that's the thing that jazzes me the most and there's a lot of pieces to that puzzle sure there absolutely are i would say nostalgia's having a moment right now and and you know as you were just talking i was i was kind of vibing a foundation you remember that uh sci-fi uh series back in the day asimov and they've apple tv just created a series for it uh dune of course i just had a movie uh and so a lot of those kind of the star trek vulcan academy concept you know and and you know i give you lots of props for trying to bring that to life here in the the 21st century i should mention you're a professor of bioinformatics and genetics at clemson university so clearly like you said a lot of research a lot of digital education especially over the last couple years um so as we as we progress into transition into the you know the biohacker part of the podcast uh let's talk a little bit more about what that is and you know how you brought this community of really interesting scientists students you know researchers together in a virtual way and then had them tackle these big problems in these bio hackathons right i mean it's a little it's com it's complicated um but let's see if i can explain it so i i teach a class it's called bioinformatics right it's it's complicated material it's a lot of it's like i teach juniors and seniors at the college level but um it's it's a class right and so i get people in the classroom and i try to teach them something i've always taught it where i taught it from a um like standing in front of them in a lecture format and gave them homework and all this kind of stuff it never was satisfying to me what was satisfying to me was the way i was training the students in my lab to get phds and undergraduate students as well um where we have to deep deep dive into into the science right and i wanted to have a way of doing that so i started teaching my class online and this is you know prior to covid and you know i guess it was good timing or whatever because yes because it was coming right but i was able to go and take all my students and have them not only learn the material the theory and do some some hands-on work but actually go in and onto into the code or not fully programming but using the command line to be able to go and like look at data but using the computer because our brains can't handle these complex patterns we need tools to be able to do that so i did that with my students the same thing i was in my classroom that i was doing in my lab and so i really wanted to do something you know even further or just how far can i take it right i've always been a person yeah how far could you take it that's right it's out four yeah there's i don't believe in ceilings until i hit one but um yeah they they do exist right but so but i really want to do this and i had a student um who it was a great undergraduate student she started a hackathon her name is courtney shearer to call her out and you know she was in my lab doing undergraduate research and she she showed me what a hackathon was where people get together um maybe a bunch of freshmen in college or just a bunch of people that are kind of you know computer geeks getting together and doing things and they just have to solve a problem like a website or something like that you know but they learn while they're doing they usually do do it in a very short period of time like in a day 24-hour period usually sometimes they'd stay up all night work on it but i saw this creativity and i saw people like learning how to code in python like freshmen like 18 year olds in 24 hours like they had no skills and then they could skill it and then i i'm thinking about that in in the like the the kind of stuff that we do in my lab and in my classroom like can i take that to the hackathon can i have people get them the skills if they don't have them give them enough time to look in the data and find out what's going on and and it's working we're doing this right now we're doing some the biohackathon which is we're talking about we're trying to create essentially a perpetual long-lasting hackathon where people bring in ideas and data and then you know experts and emerging experts at all levels can come in and start to attack problems with well-established or incredibly naive ideas which to me both of those are the the way to do science and all doing it from an interdisciplinary approach with computer scientists and biologists and patients the people that have the most skin in the game are people are interested in helping them out literally yeah it was one thing i was excited to see in that first bio hackathon and you know i wasn't there for all 55 hours but you know i hung out for a little while was you know the patient uh bill passman was especially engaged right and and and he gave a presentation he led one of the three teams that had their different hypotheses and uh and and he was learning he was learning workflows he was learning a little bit of python coding you know during that 55 hours very exciting if anybody wants to see that it's up at hackers.bio and you can see his presentation but also you know you brought together uh medical students from meharry medical college one of the sponsors of the biohackathon you brought in some of your your own uh not only your own students but you know people colleagues that you've mentored that are professors at other schools we had professors from the harry so wow what a interdisciplinary group uh and all focused on bill's data rare kidney cancer and he had a brain tumor trying to figure out you know using his data and your awesome workflows from the feltus lab and some computers and discord which is a very cool kind of gaming platform talk about a great application of a gaming platform right for collaboration um and i must uh i must give you a shout out uh because you just won an award by the american business association as the gold medal winning hackathon of 22. so this was you know voted by independent panel as the best hackathon of the year i i can't think of a more deserving organization so talk a little bit about the collaboration that occurred and then how you've extended it because it didn't it wasn't just a 55 hour event i mean you're having weekly office hours the the research is ongoing yeah it's it's it's it's this is an ongoing experiment that seems we're getting some good results back um saying it like a scientist right but this is ongoing so we have not ended this hackathon we're working i'm still working with bill passman the the patient um some people in my group and others are working on analyzing at my hairy college medical college analyzing the data looking for new new like molecular patterns like you know we dig deep into the into this into the cell you know down to the dna to see what's going on and trying to really understand what's happening with this particular case um but what's happened is that's continuing and our goal is to with a lot of these hackathons a big goal is to publish a paper where people actually get a product that they can use for resumes and curriculum vitae and all that kind of stuff um but also just like proof of learning right proof that they've made a product and fulfilled you know a a research assignment and and really learned on it but what's really interesting to me is that i'm able to turn this too into more training so i've basically taken the hackathon framework the model and like at the harry medical college working with some summer uh rotation students people who work in the lab over the summer and helping them with the research products and i've had i guess it's been about a month and a half since the hackathon began because it's not over where i've had a couple of students come to me with some pretty crazy ideas uh through this hackathon model that are great seeds for future hackathons and i'm really amazed at what's happening and uh i'm just hoping that this is the this is what happens is it just keeps spur you know spawning new projects new hackathons and the more i do this and sort of my my plan i guess to go forward with this is that it's really what i'm trying to do is create my lab and democratize my lab for everybody because we want this to be open source we want this to be open to the planet so everybody come in and learn yeah and see how far we can go and i don't i certainly can't have a you know manage a thousand hackers but i could manage you know ten a revolving door of 10 to 20 and then if there's other you know managers or people that are directing charges yeah or just you know people are like they want to get the problem solved that's why they came to the hackathon to begin with like i have problems and i'm interested in my lab other people do too and it's like just having a that you know environment to be able to do this kind of like real just it's it's really about finding patterns and a lot of data um you know using all sorts of workforce ready skills too right these are skills people need to get jobs yes and i want to talk about that in just a second but um one thing that comes to mind is one of those students i just recently witnessed one of your office hours is has this these crazy ideas about using chaos theory and quantum physics you know to apply to this type of you know cancer research and bioinformatics and we're hoping to have him on as one of our guests here pretty soon and he'll be kicking off his own bio hackathon you know so any of you out there interested in chaos theory and its application to biological systems you know look out for that bio hackathon oh yeah but you mentioned workforce ready skills and that's one you know i want to transition over a little bit to one of the other really cool benefits of the bio hackathon and that is providing a bridge for students from education to employment and i know that part of that bio hackathon you built a journey in the praxis platform the virtual uh virtual learning digital learning platform it also has labs and access to these you know super computer workflows and um 24 7 the students pre during and post the the bio hackathon went through this cancer transcriptomics journey and when they completed it they got a biohacker digital credential uh yes from credly then the largest uh digital badge platform on the planet and so that digital credential motivated and credentialized the biohackers so that they could then go to employers a lot more of the technol biotechnology and and pharmaceutical employers now are practicing what's called skills-based hiring and they're they're not so much focused on the degree as much anymore although that's not going away but they're more more interested in experience and skills demonstratable skills assessed validated skills and so that's what that digital credential gets them so being a biohacker means more than just you know learning new skills you also get to validate and credentialize those skills with the biohacker digital badge with you know the experience you get from the bio hackathon and the subsequent research uh it's something that's really really hard to get you know in your traditional kind of higher education system so kudos for you this could it's it's getting close to the vulcan academy i don't know if you're single-handedly transforming higher education but you're definitely making a dent yeah that's that's that's we'll have to explain the vulcan academy what that actually means yeah yeah but i i like i think it's like a i don't know so much over my life like when i i'm i went to high school you know i went to elementary i went through the the public school system in the united states of america and that you know at times i was a good student most time i was average wasn't completely focused on things you know the the passion wasn't there because it wasn't really like something real not about like you know when i'm 18 i'm like looking for i want to get the workforce skills to get a biotech job like the meaning of like of what it of the of the learning that i was doing was so abstracted like you know learning calculus or you know learning whatever kind of you know the way the way things are taught but when you like do research and this is um i think it's something that's really important it's very it's very important actually at the higher ed level i see in a lot of schools is that concept of doing research going in you go to your classes that's great awesome i mean learning theory is critical for foundations for for doing things but it's not until you go into the lab and that could be you know a humanities lab or science lab it doesn't have to be you know any you know only stem stuff but you you go in and you realize that you um that nothing's perfect that you go and you apply these theories and then it doesn't actually like work the way you expect it right it's like learning how to drive a car in a video game that's great when you've got to drive a car and it's like well you you hit a wall right because yeah you know there's a feedback kind of thing right but that's what's really really trying to capture that that that really like experiential messiness of of the real world and learning and using real data and if you do that that's why it's workforce ready right because then you know if you're using the contemporary skills and that's what we do in our in the biohackers for the biotech level training biotech research and development but it's just like it just it's you know one one minute of that's worth you know like 30 minutes of a classroom or i don't know what actually it is it is and again you're talking about application and con contacts so let me just ask you i mean you know this lab the feltus lab how many students are in the feltus lab in it at a typical time well i don't know how to answer that question because the feltest lab is is expanding yeah in the past right now maybe 10. and then well so i i've uh i usually i have i'm very hands-on with my my trainees right i'm there and they're they're not really students to me they're more collaborators just to clarify that because i just don't really believe in the hierarchical structure of learning it just doesn't really make a lot of sense to me you know but um i've gone from a couple probably i guess i started off my lab about three students and i got up to about 16 and that was too much because i just have enough time in the day to really spend you know at least an hour a week with every student so they can we can just talk and find out what the problems are because you know if you do in five seconds there's not enough time to explain what's happening you need to have some quiet periods and conversations and so that's it but now if i never satisfied with that i knew i couldn't do more good and succeed in that too much but now i'm like i'm shooting for a thousand yeah people you know through the biohacker community and not all the time right just sort of as a an ecosystem of a lab that i don't run i don't i don't like this whole you know hierarchical model of in the 21st century for stuff like this it needs to be collaborative or it's not going to be interdisciplinary it's not going to work so my point is i mean you know 16 very lucky students in fact we're going to have some of those you know our colleagues sorry we're going to have some of those you know colleagues from the past on the show uh in later episodes because they're doing some incredible amazing work one of them for example we talked about chaos theory um and you mentioned another one courtney so however what about the thousands of other people who really could benefited from that experience and needed access to the you know the guidance that you'll provide i mean even though you know you're not teaching or leading the you know the feltest lab you you are in a way it's it's heart and soul and so you know there's some workflows you've created some some scalable infrastructure some digital learning you know other labs things that you've created that they can benefit from so the idea was you know how can that value find its way into all sorts of underrepresented groups the hbcus the american indian higher ed you know consortium you're doing some work with ahec there for the tribal colleges and universities you know students at pretty much any university and students not at any university and students not just in the united states right so the idea of of serving kind of the population taking that model expanding on it then branding in some way right those those people those colleagues as people you know as biohackers in a good way that means giving them credentials they've been through some validated you know labs they've participated in bio hackathons helped solve big problems help teach each other um so that's really the magic right is that you're taking that amazing lab that you've created at clemson university for the last 15 years and expanding it to a thousand people or more globally yeah as you think about just shifting gears a little bit so as you think about some of the cool new kind of exciting topics happening in in science bioinformatics and you know we talked about chaos theory and quantum mechanics what you know i know we're going to talk about the next biohackathon in a moment i think it's on lung cancer but what ex what are you seeing in the scientific world the scientific community right now and and what kind of um discoveries are exciting you just across the board uh it's it's i was told this years ago that you know there's when you have like a period of like uh they invented electricity or something some quantum leap and the understanding of the universe and that practical applications i was told that that's happening all the time and it is and you can't even see these massive shifts because they're they're all blended together so there's just not you know it's just absolutely amazing i mean the pandemic for example yeah for biotechnology yep yeah and just i mean the ability to handle a pandemic or be able to even think about handling a vaccine for a pandemic and the short period of time that happened is just unbelievable i mean so many people lost their lives in the pandemic and and i it's that's there's no way to ever you know fully recover from that but there's a lot of people who didn't lose their lives too because of technology and it's i'm so excited about things like that like to be able to go from having like you know a biological sample a frog or you know somebody's their spit for when they're they're sick and going in there and sequencing the dna to see what's in it is the ultimate barcode the ultimate fingerprint right for what's happening to even the point of like you can look in something and say hey this is a this is a virus and this is a bad virus this is a new variant you can see tiny differences in the dna sequence that are like you know one this one needle in this haystack of you know quadrillions of needles right you can see it you can look at a tumor and you can say well this tumor is just a little bit different than that tumor which would have a big impact on treatment so it's like it's really like to put into like kind of like i guess lame like uh science words like it's the the measurement technologies that are out there right now are so unbelievable and in my lab we're actually we're collaborating with another lab and this is happening all over the place we can actually not only see like individual molecules inside cells we could actually take tissue that used to be like a you can take a tumor that has all these different blood vessels and good cells and bad cells and immune cells and everything mixed together instead of like trying to understand that big complex chunk of stuff you can actually separate them out into individual cells and see what individual cells are doing so we actually have the ability now of like you know you can't even if you look at any closer you're you're going into like the quantum mechanical realm and you know that's not so critical for how biochemistry works if biological systems work so i mean if you have that you measure if you've measured the you know normal and tumor or you know plant you're drink crop genomics you have a plant that's not yielding what you want and one that is yielding you can find the differences between them at unprecedented resolutions and the the cure for cancer the ability to make a new crop it's in there it's baked in to that dna that we can see now um you know almost almost routinely we're still probably a couple of technology iterations away from having dna sequencing be super cheap but you can go to 23andme and get your dna sequenced on black friday for 50 bucks so yeah definitely getting there it's amazing um yeah so let's you know with bio biology this the science of life right so uh biology is i think a broader application than most people think and a lot you know we've been talking a lot about cancer and primarily human um you know human species but yeah um there's a another very very large global challenge happening right now that everybody is starting to get behind i'm hoping it's not too late i know you have very strong feelings about climate change and yes and more importantly the impact of climate change you know on us on the planet on other biological systems um and you know the biohackers are tackling that too we've got you know again alex harkis uh over at hudson alpha and auburn working on plant genomics and you know you just mentioned different crops species you know different variations of crops that might be able to handle some of the you know the effects of global warming and and drought resistant you know corn or that kind of thing talk a little bit about what the biohackers can do for globe for climate change because i know that's coming i would say the the the top level which we didn't really talk about is that it's the the biohackers are getting the skills to do what i call data intensive computing so really big data sets that never you can't even put them on your laptop right they just don't fit you have to process them on on big super computers like we use in a lot of academic settings and the government labs in the cloud but what to be able to process these data sets like biological think dna sequence data sets you have to be able to use these computers and there's a skill set that's workforce ready highly in demand skill set to do that so the biohackers are learning how to analyze the dna sequence data right that they can then use to develop better bioenergy crops which is i did that almost exclusively for about a decade of just working on things like sorghum and crops that grow crops that you can grow to you know be able to have them be have a lot of biomass to convert them into ethanol and other other renewable resources right very cool but then you start to do that and you start to mix that together this is where at the future this is the vulcan academy this is the the way it needs to be i think is that we you you socket those people together with another group of people have the same skill set they're using the same computational tools but they're modeling climate or they're looking at like precision agriculture like more of the applied agricultural type type work and using artificial intelligence and lots of data-driven models to then you know how do you how do you roll out you know a million trees in the southwest with minimal water or you know solving massive problems like that so it's like that biohacker we're trying to do to me is like create the person with the skills that they can apply to you know complex interdisciplinary biological problems that can affect climate change but also being able to translate that out into other disciplines because we need a lingua franca right you need a the ability to communicate in its code that you can do that code and data and using the same you know approaches to analyzing data sets it's all about finding patterns and that sounds like you're uh the tagline of your company praxis ai which you know is empowering uh data humans and machines to work together to solve some of the world's biggest problems so at a high level that's what it is and um i know your first bio hackathon was uh for bill passman rarekidneycancer.org with the mahari medical college um you have another one coming up that is tied to lung cancer i know there'll be a climate change bio hackathon coming up very soon as well afterwards but let's talk about the wrangle uh bio hackathon and and uh what you're thinking there i think july right yeah yeah it's still it's still it's it's it's 99 ago it's july july 22nd and it's going to be um looking at lung cancer and looking for biomarker detection or finding biomarkers that are bloodborne for early detection of lung cancer and we'll be working with john rangel who's a a physician at medical university of south carolina um who you know he sees patients and and treats them and uh very very passionate guy looking for new ways to detect the cancer early because that's that's the for a lot of cancers that's the the secret sauce right if you catch it early you might be able to keep it down enough to you can maybe die of something else at least right if not that's the goal absolutely so um so that transition thank you so much i mean absolutely fascinating conversation so i know the question on everybody's lips right now is how the heck do i become a biohacker where do i go or how do i support the biohackers i know you've got a website uh www.hackers.bio so that's a great place to start you post the biohackathons there uh there's there's a lot of learning journeys available through praxis ai um your email alex at prxai.com my email david prxai.com we're available anytime people can reach out to us uh suggest bio hackathons participate they're free to participate in um anything else you'd like to add call to action um go for it do it if you're interested in this like one of the things i want to do is i'm not a i don't you're never going to be able to force anybody to do anything it's in academia people are always talking about herding cats you can't hurt cats right they just do what they want to do and that's great so what we're trying to do is create an environment where people are so excited about it that they are going to come and be a biohacker and you know window shopping is fine come in and check it out sit in a hackathon just you know we're in a discord commute server it's a community environment it's built for gamers right a community of people that are not there to cure cancer that are religious originally they're there to have fun and i i'm a gamer too cancer can be fun by the way it's there's yeah leveling up and you know a battlefield is not as good as curing somebody but anyway we're is this it's a friendly environment and um we're very inclusive i mean or super inclusive like i believe everybody on the planet has the right to be a biohacker to come in and solve problems you know and so just come on by and check it out and you know maybe you like it maybe you don't maybe you come back later maybe you have a problem you can't solve i have problems i don't have time to solve i have colleagues have problems they can't solve like nasty complex biological problems we're creating an environment where somebody can go and throw the problem at a group of people who will take it up and solve it and then yeah everybody publishes papers gets badges like there's rewards like very practical very lucrative rewards for some of the skills that you learn right but also just that sense of like the purpose of helping out humanity you know while while you know helping out your country while helping out your your pocketbook all those things those are all good things and uh just reach out and ask to be you know to join the biohacker server on discord and and uh you'll get a chance to see firsthand you know how people are collaborating uh so this has been uh a blast i don't know why we didn't do this any sooner i'm very excited about many of the episodes to come we've talked a little bit about the you know the quantum quantum theory chaos theory uh bio hackathon we talked a little bit about john rangel and the future bio hackathon are there any other subjects i know maybe harkis on plant genomics are there any other subjects that you're super excited about you want to give the the audience a preview about upcoming episodes um there i have a lot of uh embryonic ideas or something or maybe like someone remember right some of them are decades old that i want to bring to that but the goal here is that we were trying to really we're launching the ship right we pushed them out and then the the the waves and the the the breezes that moved the ship around those are coming on the journey and i want the hack the hackers to come up with it that that's the way it's going to be um sustainable yes people come up with it and you really a lot of times i think everything cool i've ever discovered in science was not what i intended to do you know you go down a path and then you start talking about things and somebody has some crazy idea or just the data like opens up a little window and you look into it and you're like oh i see something there and then you go yeah so i don't want to over script the plan but i do have if i've got lots of ideas what yes all of it from my perspective it revolves around complex systems like we have it's all just going to go a little bit uh philosophical here from a scientific perspective is that we the scientific method has been very it's incredibly valuable valuable a million years from now but we've taken such a reductionist approach to understanding things like climate change the weather you know how a liver cell develops but it's there's so many things that are happening that we need better ways of being able to have that data and analyzing so a lot of what underpinnings of what i'm trying to do is is at least expose people to thinking about things from a like a many many things perspective like from a you know a multivariate perspective as opposed to looking for like this and that like cause-and-effect relationship so it's like one gene or something like that you know it's about all that so all the hackathons that i want to do and at least i'm going to inject that you know philosophy into it so that we can have people really look at the world as it is and and not stop trying to reduce it into what it isn't as a complex system yes and that the interactions between different elements within the system are infinitely complex and and it's not just a cause and effect of you know this causes that therefore you know we're gonna pinpoint this one thing i think you have to try and look at it as a system climate change cancer you know any of these big problems and that's where i think systems biology uh quantum systems mechanics chaos theory these types of um interdisciplinary theories can play a really interesting role in helping us tackle big giant problems um yeah so and for a lot of the basic sciences it's engineering it's a transition from basic science to engineering you know an engineer doesn't make something that doesn't work an engineer makes something that works and a lot of scientists like just find pieces of things it's not the full picture it's that fully functional system that is an organism that needs to be is reverse engineering it and we just need to do it more in a holistic way than a reductionist way and and i think that everything's going to change this becomes a normal practice do you think and now we're just waxing poetic again do you think that the reductionist scientific theory hap happened because we didn't have the computational power to understand these gigantic complex systems and now that you know we can run gigaflops and and and have a scale computing uh that now maybe we're starting to build the systems that are smart enough to understand the complexity that occurs between these systems so um part of the part of the technology that we use to interact and understand these systems drives us to a better understanding of the system well hey thank you so much um now homework for everybody out there is um make sure to read up about the vulcan academy and uh that's a star trek reference for those of you who aren't techies uh but it was um built by this race of aliens called the vulcans and the idea was very much like what alex and and i are doing with the biohackers and that is democratizing access to skills and resources so everybody can play a role in solving the world's biggest challenges i think that summarizes the vulcan academy thanks again alex feltes you were fabulous it was a lot of fun and i look forward to the next episode[Music][Applause][Music] you

People on this episode

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Alex Feltus, Ph.D.

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David James Clarke IV

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