BioBuilder

NATALIE KULDELL: I'm Natalie Kuldell, and for the last 20 years, I've been a college faculty member, with the last dozen years or so teaching in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT. And more recently, I've taken on the additional role as Founder and President of a public benefit organization called Biobuilder.

Biobuilder works to address two important needs. The first is to make accessible an emerging field in biological engineering called synthetic biology. This is a field that takes the successes in other engineering disciplines, like chemical engineering and electrical engineering, and applies those frameworks to living systems.

So for example, we start by thinking about cells as tiny factories that can make things, and DNA as a programming language that can control the living systems. The hope is that synthetic biology can turn biotechnology into something that is reliable and robust and scalable, the same way engineering turned physics and chemistry into those technologies that we all rely on.

So Biobuilder builder takes these real research questions in the field of synthetic biology and converts them into teachable modules. And by turning biology learning-- framing it with engineering challenges, we've seen tremendous success in the classroom with students being exceptionally engaged and interested and understanding these fields better and better.

It's helpful to think about what things look like in other fields. So for example, if you look at the 1993 number of trades on the New York Stock Exchange in any given day, back in '93, that number was around 265,000 in a day. Today, 265,000 trades get made in the first 30 seconds of every day in the New York Stock Exchange.

It took 10,000 years to engineer corn the way we currently have corn in our markets. 150 years ago or so, Mendel was discovering the rules of inheritance. And then 60 years ago, Watson and Crick looked at the structure of DNA and defined that. 20 years ago, we had the first genetically modified produce onto the market. And so we are clearly accelerating in biotechnology, but what will make us ready? What will it look like when we accelerate the way the trades on the New York Stock Exchange have accelerated, when the barriers to entry for doing biotechnology drop in the same way, that the transaction costs drop in the same way, that it becomes so democratized that everybody can do it? And so synthetic biology really is trying to anticipate what that looks like in terms of our world, making the tools available so that it can be done reliably and safely in a fast and robust way.

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NATALIE KULDELL: My appreciation is that engineers really try to apply what we understand to meet real world needs. Biology had not really had that engineers' eye applied to it. But looking at the ability, for example, to put pieces of DNA together without it being an artistic endeavor, that it's not an ad hoc endeavor every time you want to put two pieces of DNA together. Now, there can be protocols and standards that apply to all pieces of DNA that allow them to be assembled in a reliable way. Seems like a way that other engineering fields have scaled and become reliable and had not really been tried really with biology before.

So in coming to MIT as a scientist and teaching in a department that is an engineering department, I saw how effectively these engineering challenges could be used to engage students and have them learn the science as well as discover new things about science. I mean, that's sort of an interesting thing about synthetic biology is that you have both the ability to build new things and have an output that you're hoping to see and generate. But also, in the process of making that or trying to design it, you learn new things about the science and understand your limitations of scientific understanding at that point.

And so I found it a very effective way for students to be learning the science and doing the really hard work of learning. And I was really just eager to share that kind of teaching and that kind of learning outside my walls of my MIT classroom. And so Biobuilder really came about in some ways because I felt like I outgrew my MIT classroom a little bit. And I wanted to bring this kind of content out into the broader, bigger community.

Biobuilder starts with the materials I had been teaching with at MIT and have been teaching with and ongoing challenges in the field. So for example, one of our activities starts with the hope that you can generate bacteria that will smell not so stinky, but actually smell pleasant like bananas. And we ask the students to design a genetic program that will regulate that output of the cell so that it only smells pleasant during a particular phase of growth.

And you might think it's kind of a silly project, a small sort of toy. But really, scent industry is enormous. And the ability to control outputs of cells is key to really any biotechnology. And scent has been an under-utilized reporter for cellular behaviors. And so in some ways, this is a really important project, even though making cells smell like bananas may seem like a not earth-shattering kind of an endeavor.

But the materials for carrying out that investigation are online at the Biobuilders site now, thanks to some teachers that I've worked with to craft them into teachable modules that fit into high school settings and college settings. And so students can start with animations that set up what those kinds of challenges are. There are hands-on laboratory kits that are provided through a distribution company that I've partnered with so that students can then get into the lab with their teachers and study these questions directly.

And then, there's a third portion of the Biobuilder content, which is an online portal for students to share what they've learned. I think that that's something we do as scientists and engineers all the time. We have the opportunity to talk about what we've learned with each other. Students have a portal for sharing what they've discovered on the Biobuilder website as well.

NATALIE KULDELL: The crafting of the curriculum into teachable modules was initiated with an NSF grant that MIT was a part of a larger organizational grant. And it was a remarkable grant in that it was 10 years worth of funding. Midway through this tenure grant, the NSF starts asking about sustainability, and what you'll be doing to enable the continuation of this project once NSF funding sunsets.

And so working with MIT's Venture Mentoring Service, it really became clear that my goal was to bring this content out into the broadest of communities. And that a nonprofit organization would enable me to do that. And so we founded BioBuilder as an educational foundation about four years ago. Since that time, it has been sustained with individual contributions, with partnerships, with companies that will sell the kits through additional grants, and through foundation support.

And we are now in 40-plus states around the country which has BioBuilder classrooms. We have more than a dozen countries that are carrying out BioBuilder experiments. And we're expanding into additional areas like a middle school level curriculum. And also an after school club to help people who may not want to bring it into their formal classroom setting, but would like to get their hands wet, and just try this in a club setting after school. We're expanding the offerings significantly. We're excited about the directions it's going.

One thing that I think will help tremendously is the publication of the textbook for BioBuilder. O'Reilly Media just partnered with me to present BioBuilder as a book. Individual chapters are available online. But the bound form is available through O'Reilly and Amazon.

And it's beautifully illustrated. I got to work with a terrific artist. And consequently, I think BioBuilder is now additionally making its way into the world of art and design. Because people are just interested in biology as a beautiful substrate for artistic work, as well. So BioBuilder has sort of found its way into many different niches. And I'm super excited about where it's heading.

We're now looking to build a dedicated teaching and learning space at a local biotech startup hub here in Kendall Square called Lab Central . So we're looking to raise funds for 10 years worth of operations and programming in a dedicated teaching space in an entrepreneurial environment like Lab Central where there are 20 startup biotech companies starting their work, as well.

I could not have imagined myself as the person running a public benefit organization just half a dozen years ago. But there is something about being at MIT that makes you very brave, and makes you believe that you can do the work that you think is important and that needs to get done. I thought we had something exciting to teach and exciting to bring out into the world.

The Venture Mentoring Service at MIT was critically important in helping me think about how to scale this work so that I didn't have to be everywhere teaching it. That teachers could become ambassadors for the program. That we have a model that allows people to answer questions together through online portals. And allows the distribution of the materials through distribution channels that doesn't require that I run things down to the post office and mail them out to teachers.

And so I can't really imagine another place other than MIT that this could have happened. And certainly for me, it's been transformative. I continue to rely on the mentors I've had at MIT to guide me as I become the spokesperson and the leader of this initiative that I think is important and that I'm super excited about.

NATALIE KULDELL: So one of the added benefits of running this Biobuilder program that I hadn't anticipated going in was this wonderful community of teachers that we have developed around Biobuilder. Teachers, it turns out, love learning. And somehow, working with teachers to bring this really new material and new way of thinking into their classrooms really reconnects them with their love of teaching as well. And the teachers have become tremendous ambassadors for this program.

So they run teacher training workshops all over the country. They speak at professional meetings about Biobuilder. They develop additional curriculum. The middle school level curriculum is being developed by teachers who were excited to bring Biobuilder into the sixth and seventh grades.

One of the important outputs of a synthetic biology curriculum like Biobuilder is to engage people in conversations around synthetic biology that are informed and that diminish the scary messages that they get from places like the movies and places that have a particular agenda to push. I think with Biobuilder, you can understand what the limitations are of the field. It's really not possible to grow a dinosaur from a snippet of DNA that we've seen. Or the idea that some goo will escape from the lab is an important point of discussion, right? And understanding where the safety around biotechnology is being anticipated or thought carefully about by the practitioners of the field is a great conversation to have, and one that students seem really excited to have, actually, as well.

I've always sort of joked that if I had only learned science the way it was taught to me in the classroom setting, I probably never would have become a scientist, that it really was a chance to work in an investigative lab when I was actually in high school that made me realize how fun science could be, how open-ended it was, how creative it is as a process. And so I've always tried to engage my students around authentic research questions. And that leads to collaborative learning. It leads to team-based learning. And really, it's just sort of lasting moments of engagement that are meaningful.

So Massachusetts is a great place to grow a company. And there have been government initiatives like the Massachusetts Life Science Center that provided equipment grants to teachers I've been working with. Through one of these equipment grants, I developed a relationship with the company VWR, who has an education branch associated with them. And now, that education branch, called Ward's, have been distributing the materials to carry out the Biobuilder experiments and investigations. And really, that started thanks to these initial grants from the Mass Life Science Center.

And since that time, it's grown to partnerships with places like New England Bio Labs that want to provide reagents to the clubs that we run. This partnership with LabCentral has come about because of the entrepreneurial spirit in the area. There are plenty of additional places where companies could help with supporting Biobuilder and education in general.

I think there are levels of expertise that the scientific community and the sponsors of biotech companies have and real legitimate agendas that they have to bring community into the biotechnology that we carry out around here. And I think reaching into the community and sharing what we do with the broadest of publics and bringing public access to the biotechnology is an important mission for Biobuilder, for the biotech companies in the area, and one that I think we can accomplish together.