Biotechnology, Design and Story, and the persistence of the plastics problem

The BioDesign Challenge has come and gone for another year, and we are left to consider what it tells us about the intersection of biotechnology, design, and story. You can learn all about the Challenge, the worthy staff that runs it, the students from high school to graduate school who compete, right here.  Five projects that did not win the grand prize but which resomnate strongly in the mind, are here.

The winning entry in 2024, CONSUME OUR CONSUMPTION, via a team from the University of Texas, was at the intersection of story and science. It was a satire on technology, based on the ability of some microbial critters to eat plastic. Just imagine what we could do with the world, goes this entry, if we could just bring that genetic capability to higher organisms. Well, that was the general idea. Worried? Transfer gut bacteria to eat plastic. Hungry? Eat some plastic. Concerned about waste? Eat more plastic. Concerned about food resources? Eat all you can eat.

You get the idea, longer on comedy than science.

Well might you ask, why is there a BioDesign Challenge? 

For one thing, at such an event, you notice something about young people: how impressively organized and thoughtful they are. 

Armed with education, devices and the internet, their projects are astonishing when you compare their depth of engagement to those of young people in 1980s New York, who struggled over problems such as the fastest, cheapest way to get to King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut at one o’clock in the morning. Today, there’s an app for that.

Silos and the Breaking of Them

There’s no app for solving our bigger problems, climate change amongst them but not alone. Today, we rarely sweat the small stuff, but we are bedeviled by the big concerns and how to percolate solutions throughout the economy. The storytellers are never grounded enough in the science, the scientists are never grounded enough in the story. 

It’s been observed elsewhere, or should have been, that if you want optimization, build silos, 

So, we turn to the breaking of silos. This work is necessary, messy, and heartbreaking. Along the way, one discovers that people want change, but don’t want to change. People are more invested in their habits than their values, I find.

The only way to solve our problems, in the end, is to start with the young. It is a hard road. The young have innocent ideas and imperfect understanding. Also, persuading quilters to think outside the quilt, persuading scientists to work within the culture of quilting, is something that back in Australia we would have called hard yakka, tough work.

So, I turn again to this year’s winning effort at the BioDesign Challenge, the satire of our plastics dilemma.

Odi et Amo

We tussle over plastics, not because we misunderstand the problem. Rather, we have no effective way to replace plastics at the same price and performance. They hold a monopoly not by predation and disinformation but by efficacy. They are, in a sense, natural’ monopolies, as we have with some utilities. They sit atop vast, efficient supply-chains that suffocate every attempt to replace these pesky polymers. Odi et amo, I love and I hate, Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris. Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior — Why I do this, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it happening and I am in agony. Catullus understood our problem, so well.

The fact that modern supply-chains break down from time to time — famously, in the pandemic —  shows just how pervasive, complex and impactful they really are. 

Their purpose is to serve incumbents — hey deliver what you need today and not what is needed tomorrow. So, they are the companions of silos, and the same old same old.

So, they serve petroleum and natural gas and these in turn become ingrained in our economies, via the beloved and affordable products they spawn. Legos come in many shapes and colors, but they are all made from the one molecule and the one commodity. Monopolies lead to unintended consequences that pose threats to our way of life, or at least they seem to. Yet, there’s a long line to enter the Lego Store in Manhattan or Disney Springs, and hardly anyone spends time considering the molecules, much less the commodities. They comes for the design, and the stories.

People want change, but don’t want to change.

So we fret about our problems but line up for out appetites. The alternatives are too damn costly, or involve impacts on infrastructure that are hard for people who want change, but don’t want to change. To mention that again.

It is not a new problem. We saw much of this, even before the Industrial Revolution, although the platform commodities of then are not the same as now. Then, think sugar, slaves, serfs, wool, gunpowder, spices, metals, and tea. It is distressing to the modern mind to grasp that human beings were once commodity goods, through slavery and serfdom, but fortunes and nations were built on the trade and they will not, by and large, be unbuilt.

Then, as now, complex, global and near invisible supply chains built up to acquire and distribute these commodities. The tea drinker in England knew nothing, and cared less, of the ships which transported tea, the conditions of plantation workers in India, the dubious means by which genetics and know-how were transferred from China to India, of warehouses, wharves, counting shops, currency traders, letters of credit, sailors, growers, field hands, overseers, officials, ropes, cutters, barges — the so on and so forth that defined the tea trade. 

It is the same for all commodities, then as now. No one can “see” the entire supply-chain. A fog descends upon the mind of the consumer and the retailer. Not dissimilar to the fog that clouds the mind on a hard bench in a joss house, smoking opium, gaining distance from troubling thoughts, lost in the bodily pleasures that the smoke brings.

The Opium of Distance

We smoke the opium of distance, by which we tolerate practices we would never tolerate at home, we strip commodities from consequences and look only at performance and price. 

In our opium haze, we can indulge in the romanticism of wealthy societies, that we can live outside of the supply chains and materials that define our affluent times. It warms the heart to see people turn, out of idealism, to vegan diets, off-grid living, organic foods, homespun cloth — but it should not beguile the mind from acknowledging the trap which all of us have fallen into.

The very wood we use to construct off-grid houses, the hybrid seeds we utilize for organic plants, the panels we use to harness energy, the pipes we use to move water — they are so highly engineered over so many years that one might as well eat pig, spend hours on Facebook, use genetically modified seeds and claim to stand apart from the ills of modern life and the technologies that prop it up.

Isaac Newton made a modest remark, that if he saw farther than others, it was because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, though not of the benign, Jolly Green Giant type. The advanced technologies used by rebels in separating from our way of life might feel so mundane that it feels natural, close to earth, without consequence, benign. 

The Wheel and the Pot

Consider the wheel, or the pot. If you can absent yourself from the containers of food and water or a means of efficiently transporting objects of weight, I salute your ambitions but I doubt you’ll last a week cupping your hands at the creekside to drink the water that even your ancestors of the Neolithic knew was bad for them. Our friends the microbes will have your guts in a fatal thrall, and right quick. 

The wheel might feel like it is not technology, or a benign invention. It is anything but. More deaths, and more terrifying in nature, rained down upon more people via the chariot, field artillery or the tank, than the atomic bomb. Millions inhabited Europe in the Neolithic, speaking languages much like Basque, and where are they? The vanquishing Beaker people, vanquished by the Yamyana, they in turn by the Celts, the Romans, the Saxons, the Normans, just to name the conquest chain of Britain. 

What did the conquerors do? After conquest of land, they exploited pigs for meat, oxen for thrust, sheep for wool, jute for cloth, serfs for service, grasses for grain, reeds for shelter, woods for warmth, metals for structure, water for power, Africans for labor, cows for milk, yeast for beverages and cheese. 

What did the conquerors bring? A knowledge of useful and nefarious things to do with wheels. Wheels for wagons, wheels for pots, half wheels for arches, wheels for steering, wheels for gearing, wheels for mixing, wheels for locomotion, wheels for turbines, wheels for roasting, wheels for timekeeping, wheels to measure time, wheels to grind, wheels for the pump, wheels for the larder, wheels in the gun.

Trapped in the Story Dark

We are all of us, trapped in technology, language and the dark story. English, the language of invaders, Dutch too, French as well, German, and Spanish. Also, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Bantu, Berber, Russian, Mongolian, Mandarin, Hebrew, Portuguese, Sioux, Iroquois, Crow, Thai, Celtic, Japanese, Hindu, Urdu, Farsi and on, and on, and on. 

Almost everyone on Earth speaks a conqueror’s language, delights in some invader’s culture, some oppressor’s traditions. 

Every culture arrived where it is today, feared by the animals, dreaded by the plants. Only the microbes have acquired the skills of indifference to us, and to their misfortune.

For, now, we aim to rule over microbes, too. They are our new serfs, we seize them in the name of better living for ourselves and our like kind. The microbes are tiny and feel inconsequential, but we are seizing them without permission and altering their future without consent, or regard except to our own advantage. 

The Dumb Microbe, ripe for our ways

We comfort ourselves in thinking microbes dumb and incapable of care or distress. We are left to guess, because we do not know, because we do not ask.  Despite our machines, our technologies, we know very little about the world around us, the inner life of plants or animals, much less microbes. 

What we are learning is how to yoke microbes to the harness and drive them with the carrot and the stick. Dance, microbe. Serve, microbe. Give up to me, microbe, Always the criteria is human need, human fulfillment, human want. These are important things, but they are not the only things.

What is a civilization to do, when it knows so much of exploitation and so little of the exploited? A civilization must carry on, that’s what it must do. It serves human needs. IIt is all we are, it is all we know. We support this advance in the name of humankind, we oppose that advance in the name of humankind. When we landed on the moon, the plaque read, we came in peace for all mankind. Not a word for the animals, the plants, the fungi, the lower microbes. 

There is nothing wrong with interpreting the world from one’s corner, being all in for humanity above all others, as long as one acknowledges that it is a perspective from a corner.

As long as one does not complain when the yoke is placed on our shouldersPandemic — that’s nature’s way of evening the score. Our hard lot! Indeed it is ours. But not, in the broad c. omparison, hard. Think of the chicken. 

Some preach an effort against climate change because of the peril to nature. I’ve heard it, probably you have too. They are not wrong that change will come if we do not prevent it, but they are wrong that it is a threat to Nature. Earth has supported a 90 degree atmosphere in the past and here we are, the children of the heat, products of a climate we could not ourselves survive.

Not a Fight for Nature, but for Us

So, no, sorry my matey, we are not fighting for Nature, We are fighting for the narrow ecological niche that supports us. 

Yes, the niche is at risk, and woe betide us when it collapses, because the tsunami that follows will spare few, and none on the basis of merit. The judgments of the Lord are righteous altogether, as Lincoln observed.

So, facing peril, we seek escape. It is our way. Yet, technology can’t save us all by itself — because story gets in the way. The story told by the mythologist, the apologist, the knave, the fool, the pettifogger, the self-server. Worry not! goes the say-so, and it has currency because, as I observed earlier, people love their habits more than their values, and listen to the smoothies who preach inaction.

Story will not save us, because technology gets in the way — there’s no actual Ironman suit, and the Marvel Cinematuic Universe is powered by Unobtnaium. Some of the dreams of unlimited clean energy too.

Where technology meets story, that’s where the BioDesign Challenge sits, and it travels on a noble road. 

This is us: we watch, adapt, speak, assay, grab, yoke, dominate. The hour calls for all our skills in the cause of transformation. Can we break the silos and find a new language for our civilization, a new story to tell?

We can, we must, we might.