Dr. John Trawick Transcript:
Victoria:
Our guest this week is Dr. John Trawick. He is the senior research fellow at Genomatica in San Diego, California. He received his bachelor’s degree in Biology from Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, and then a Master of Science degree from Northern Illinois University in Illinois. Dr. Trawick’s PhD is in Microbiology from the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine. As a microbiologist, interested in genetics, physiology and cell biology, Dr. Trawick worked at the University of Colorado and then San Diego State University before joining the biotechnology industry in 1997. In 2004, he was hired by Genomatica where he continues to this day in the Strain Engineering Department.
Genomatica uses biology to make the building blocks of stuff that is in everyday items, including plastics used in a range of products like shoes, outer cases of laptops, and car dashboards, spandex, and everyday items like cosmetics. This replaces plastics made by non-renewable resources like crude oil. In his career at Genomatica, Dr. Trawick has had several roles, including in the laboratory running projects and writing proposals for new projects. He really likes working with over a hundred people from many different backgrounds and countries.
Dr. Trawick. Thank you so much for talking to us today.
Dr. Trawick:
Well, thank you very much, Victoria. It’s a pleasure to talk to you and your listeners.
Victoria:
Thank you. Is there anything that you’d like to add to that little introduction?
Dr. Trawick:
No, not really. I think we should just get into the questions and discussions. I think everything will come out than you had. thanks for that wonderful introduction by the way.
Victoria:
(Mark – How can you use biology to make stuff?)
(Hallie – How do you get the microbes to make the building blocks for plastics?)
Awesome. Well, thank you. So this first question is actually kind of a pair of questions from Mark and Hallie. And Mark wants to know how can you use biology to make stuff? And Hallie wants to know how do you get the microbes to make the building blocks for plastics?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, those are really good questions, Mark and Hallie. And, the thing about biology making stuff is that it makes stuff all the time, because we, our biology, the cells in our bodies make all the ingredients we need to move, to grow, to live; and biology is making other stuff for us all the time. So, for instance, you know, you like bread. Well, yeast is used to help make bread and pizza and other things. There’s, cheese and yogurt, biology makes those. And lots of other things in our life.
The trick is to figure out what we need to do to change the inside of a cell of something like a bacterium. So that it makes exactly what we want to. Some things are easy, like yeast making CO2 or ethanol for baking bread or brewing beer, but we make more complicated chemicals that aren’t necessarily found in the body. But we figure out how the cell works inside and what you need to do to change to make something that the bacteria doesn’t normally make. So we have to alter genes in a microbe to do this. And we have to understand the metabolism of the microbe, how it grows and lives, and then we change it, we alter it to make it what we want.
And so, if I can talk about, you know, making a chemical product, a chemical is any combination of atoms, like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so on. And we’re composed of chemicals, and everything we use are chemicals of some sort or other. And these are arranged the way we want them, or we need to use them. Oh, so what we do is we teach cell how to take the chemical structure of the sugars that we feed it. So we feed it just glucose, which is just regular sugar and we’ve, have the cell rearrange that to make what we want.
So we turn to things that are called enzymes. These are, you know, proteins in the cell and they do reactions on chemicals and we figure out which enzymes will do which reactions. And we guide those and we choose the enzymes we need: some enzymes chop atoms off of our sugar, others might add hydrogen atoms to it. And to do that, we have to change the DNA of the cell to make those enzymes. And hopefully we can choose a path or a sequence of steps that will arrive at the product we want. And that’s in a nutshell.
Victoria:
(Ben – What types of microbes do you work with?)
Oh, awesome. That is so cool. This is a great follow-up question from Ben. What types of microbes do you work with?
Dr. Trawick:
Yeah, that’s a really good question because there are lots of microbes out there. There is more types of microbes than anybody ever imagined. And we just, you know, are just beginning to understand it.
Well, we work mainly with one called Escherichia coli or E. coli. That’s because it is so well-understood. So there have been for many decades, even older than me, people have been working with E. coli and we understand its metabolism and its genetics very well. So that’s very easy to work with.
Well, we also work with other bacteria. Some of these are not as easy to work with as the E. coli. So it’s harder to do things with them. And we’ve done some things with yeast. Other companies work with yeast, and they work with some other bacteria and many of them work with E. coli as well.
And so, you know, it’s sort of you pick the microbe that has characteristics that you need. There are certain things that you about its metabolism. It maybe requires oxygen, or maybe it doesn’t want any oxygen when it grows, or it makes or does photosynthesis, or it already makes certain types of compounds. And so that’s why you choose a certain one. E. coli is nice because it’s versatile. It’s the Ford of bacteria or Toyota or whatever, it does anything.
Victoria:
Cool. And is that the same E. coli that kind of makes us sick if we eat it?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, it’s related to it. So E. coli is actually a whole bunch of different bacteria, and some of them live in your gut normally, and they don’t make you sick. And the ones we use in the laboratory are related to those though they’ve been modified.
So they won’t even grow in you, but there are E. coli types that will make you sick and they have special genes and characteristics, and then that do that. And we’ve certainly don’t work with those. Those are dangerous to work with. I’ve handled them and you have to be very careful. So the one we work with is safe.
Victoria:
That’s good. I didn’t realize there was more than one type of E. coli. That’s cool.
Dr. Trawick:
Yeah.
Victoria:
(Juliana – Do you grow the bacteria in petri dishes?)
(Aaron – Do the plastics grow in petri dishes?)
All right. Some other good, good questions about working with the microbes. Juliana wants to know, do you grow the bacteria in Petri dishes. And Aaron asks, do the plastics grow in Petri dishes?
Dr. Trawick:
Okay, so a Petri dish is usually several inches wide. It’s a little plastic dish and you put something called agar in it, and things will grow. And we use those a lot, we use a lot of them. And we use them for certain purposes. When you change the genes in an organism like E. coli, you need to grow it up; and you need to put your DNA into that; and then you need to isolate, what’s called a clone of it that has the DNA you want. And so we use Petri dishes for that all the time. And we use Petri dishes to understand a little bit about how it’s working, and we grow them that way.
But a Petri dish, you know, you can work with, if you’re really, really, careful and don’t mind long hours, you could work with a hundred Petri dishes at a time, but that’s just a drop in the bucket. That’s very little of what you can do. And so we do other ways of growing E. coli and other bacteria. And imagine instead of a Petri dish, several inches wide, you have one that’s just a few millimeters wide. And so it’s a rectangular dish with 96 different little Petri dishes in it with liquid media in it. Or there are some that have 384. Now you need special instruments to work with those. But the nice thing about those is you could do a lot of tests at one time. And so with a 96 one, you can do 90 different tests of finding your bacteria that you want. And with a 384 one, you can do a lot of those.
And we do experiments sometimes where we’re looking at 60,000 different bacteria strains, if you have to. And so you can see that you can never do it with a standard Petri dish. But that’s a great thing to do for growing, you know, initially growing the bug or putting your DNA in. But when you want to do some of these other things, optimizing it, we call it, you need to test a lot of things sometimes. And so we have special instruments where we can grow up lots of these. And the instrument does it, so we have robots that do a lot of these steps and we need people to run the robots, of course, and they have to know a lot about running robots. And these are very, very cool instruments because they can do so much and let you test far more than what you could like when I was a student.
Victoria:
That’s cool.
Dr. Trawick:
And, and just to, you know, to go on from there. So, you know, we make the building blocks for plastics is what our bacteria or E. coli make, not actually the plastics. The Petri dish itself is plastic, but the building blocks are little chemicals that when you link them all together and you put in make a huge molecule called a polymer, that’s a plastic. So we, we make these little building blocks, and that’s the easiest thing to make in the bacterium. And then the chemical company who makes a plastic, they take our chemical or wherever they get it from and they put them together.
And so you can do that on a Petri dish, but generally they don’t make a lot when they’re growing in these Petri dishes, and even in those 96-well or 384-well special plates. We use big tanks to grow things in. Some of these are bigger than tanker cars on trains, and we need special conditions to grow all that, too. And a lot of what we do is learning what those conditions are, how to grow it best, because when you just grow it in a little dish, it’ll make some of what we want, but it won’t make enough, we need to make a lot.
Victoria:
That makes sense. Yeah. That’s, that’s crazy. I’m just like imagining, you know, these huge containers. That’s really cool.
Dr. Trawick:
Yeah. So, you know, these little plates they can stack on top of each other, so you can have 10 and then you might have a whole table for them. And the robot has an arm which lifts a plate and it adds liquid to it or reads things on it and tells you what’s going on. Then of course, there’s a lot of computer programs to understand that and graph it out and find the one thing that might be better or maybe not. Sometimes we have to test a lot of things. Usually not many, it can be a few hundred or a few thousand sometimes, but we have done 60,000 or more when needed.
Victoria:
(Sierra – Do you use CRISPR technology? And what are your thoughts on CRISPR?)
Wow. Amazing.
All right. This next question comes from Sierra. Do you use CRISPR technology? And what are your thoughts on CRISPR?
Dr. Trawick:
Okay, Sierra, that’s a great question. Because CRISPR is something that’s very popular. You hear it in the news today. It’s a genetic tool is what we call it. And it’s the people who recently got the Nobel prize, two women just got a Nobel prize for this technology. They realize that bacteria had in them enzymes that help them block viruses from growing in the bacteria, there are viruses that grow in a bacterium; and they realized that the way it worked, it was cutting DNA in certain places, and you could make the CRISPR thing work on any DNA and do exactly what you want. And so out of that, they’ve developed and a lot of other people have developed the tools that get called CRISPR, but actually, you know, we call our there’s something else. Nonetheless, it’s descended from that. So, we’ve modified the tools and other people have modified the tools before us. And so, lots of, every company is using this now. And some of it is used in people to help genetic diseases. And others are being used in bacteria. And so CRISPR is a revolutionary tool, that there was nothing like it before, it’s very handy to use.
But it’s one of many things and we use other methods too. And so anything we do could be done with one of the earlier methods, and I’ve been doing genetic modification since the 1970s, and the technology was more primitive, but there’s a lot of similarities. And a lot of it is you find the gene you want, and you can put it where you want, and make it turn on and turn off the way you want it to turn on and turn off. And in short, that’s what CRISPR is used for. And a lot of other technologies, it’s just one of many things that we use.
And our people who are working on these, they went to school like I did, but they also have to keep looking for new methods and learning those as they go along. And we all learn these as we, as we continue to grow, even while we’re working in industry.
Victoria:
(Shaelyn – How much plastic material can a microbe make? How many microbes would be needed to replace big factories?)
Awesome. Okay. this is a question from Shaelyn. How much plastic material can a microbe make, how many microbes would be needed to replace big factories?
Dr. Trawick:
This is a really good question. And, then numbers are going to be hard to understand, but let me try to explain it in a couple of different ways.
So, one microbe is very small. One cell of the E. coli is so small. You can’t see it and you need a really powerful microscope to see it. So one of those cells, even when we made it make as much of a chemical as it possibly can, it doesn’t actually make that much. You need a lot of cells. And that’s the key and that’s the secret.
And so what you need to do is you need to feed these bugs, these bacteria, sugar, and glucose is one sugar. You can feed it sucrose or fructose and some other sugars. And the idea here is when we’ve modified the bacteria, it’ll make a certain amount of a chemical from a certain amount of sugar. And the way you might think of that is, well, if you gain 20 pounds, when you’re growing over the next few years, you’re going to be eating a lot more than 20 pounds of food to get there, right. And you never get more than you start with either. So it might take two, three or four pounds of sugar to make one pound of our product. And that’s what we call yield and we try to make it work as efficiently as possible because then you use less sugar and you save money. However, it can only do so much. And so, you have to figure out and what’s one of the secrets we have at Genomatica is understanding metabolism. So we can predict how much of something we can make in a certain way. And because that can ultimately save a lot of money.
But again, it gets back to one cell doesn’t use a pound of sugar, it uses a tiny amount and it makes a tiny amount of our product. You need billions and billions of bacteria. And so we make a lot of stuff to do this. And so you can’t do it in, like, as I said, a Petri dish, you need to do it in a big tank. And these tanks are, can be very large, and they vary in size, but some of them are about a hundred feet tall by 20 feet wide. So think of that is three two or three or four swimming pools, right? That’s a lot of water. Okay. And if you’d line up those swimming pools all in one row, you know, you’ve got a huge amount of water. Now we grow the bacteria in something like that, and you grow it so there are so many cells. The density is what we call it, the number of cells per bit of liquid is very high. And one way of thinking about it is just imagine how much liquid you swallow when you take a drink of anything, water, milk, soda pop, juice. And so that’s, we call it, you know, that’s several milliliters, maybe 10 or 20 milliliters of liquid at one time, right. And we grow the bacteria so that there’s so many bacterial cells. In that, just in that one swallow, that’s more than there are people in the entire world. In fact, it’s probably more than there have been people in the entire world in the last 50,000 years. That’s a lot of cells. It’s billions and billions of cells. And we grow it up in all those swimming pools worth. So think of two or four swimming pools. That’s a lot of cells. It’s hard to, you can’t even comprehend those numbers. Nobody can. They’re very large. And that’s what we do. And so when you have that many cells, each of them making a tiny amount of product, but you have zillions and zillions of those cells, you can get a lot of your product, right?
And so you need a lot of sugar to start with, but you get your product out of it. Does that help?
Victoria:
That is awesome. That is a great way to like visualize it and, yeah, it’s crazy. Is there a unit that you usually think like, or that you would talk about? Like, instead of saying, we’re going to take, you know, this zillion bacteria here and do this, is there a unit that you would?
Dr. Trawick:
Okay, so the largest fermenters, which is where we grow them, are, you know, several hundred thousand liters of, so a liter is about a quart. So that’s a lot. And the way we express the number of bacteria is we use exponential notation. So. Many students are doing have learned that, and that might be 10 to the ninth per milliliter. So one liter is a thousand milliliters, right? And so there’s a billion cells in one milliliter. And that’s what I meant by when you swallow 10 milliliters, you may have a more, yeah, may have a 10 billion cells. So there’s six or 7 billion people on the earth right now. Maybe there were 20 billion in all of human history. So you can see, that’s just a little bit of the total amount. So multiply that by 500,000. Okay. So now you add six numbers to that nine. Right? So you’re in to the 10 to the 15th power, you know, the numbers, you can’t, it’s hard to get these numbers.
Victoria:
Yeah. Those are big numbers.
Dr. Trawick:
You know, that’s why we break it down to those numbers. 600,000 liters for a fermenter, but we talk about it how many cells we have in one milliliter or maybe one liter. And we never talk about it a hundred thousand. Cause it’s just too much.
Victoria:
(James – What are all the materials can you replace with stuff made from biology?)
That makes sense.
All right, let’s see here. Okay. This next question comes from James. What are all the materials that you can replace with stuff made from biology?
Dr. Trawick:
You know, that’s a great question, James, and I’m sure a lot of the other students thought of something like this, because it’s limited largely by your imagination. I mean, obviously there’s some things like metal that are hard to work with, but bacteria can take metal and they can put it in a certain place. So you can use bacteria sort of as little nano machines, maybe. We don’t do that, but you could.
But anything else, that’s a chemical, that has carbon in it, and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen. Those are the things we make from biology. And even all the stuff that we don’t make from biology, that are fossil fuels, were made from biology at one point. So maybe millions of years ago, hundreds of millions of years ago, all the plants that died and got compressed down made coal and oil, and we use that coal and oil to make chemicals. Well, you can also, you know, make the same chemicals from sugar and that’s what we do.
So you can imagine anything, fuels, like biodiesel, that comes from like the oil you might be frying donuts in. And ethanol, you can grow that you can make ethanol in a fermentation plant growing yeast. That’s used for drinking or, but it’s also used for car for fuel. And there’re building blocks for plastics. A lot of what we do are those things. And other companies are making building blocks for plastics as well. And a lot of, at Universities that are learning the same things. There’s some whole plastics that can be made in microbial cells. We don’t do that. Those are in the sort of in a special class, but they are there. So they’re natural plastics in a sense. But there are other chemicals too, and some of them are things you don’t necessarily expect. Detergents and shampoos, so the stuff you clean things with, you can now. Those can be really toxic to cells, including ours are bacterial cells, they can dissolve the cell. But there are certain ones that can be made by cells, or you can make a precursor and then, you know, something that will become the detergent and modify it. So you can make it in the cell. And biology makes those things anyway. You make soap from fat, and we can grow fat and bacteria and make a detergent. And actually one of our things is working on that sort of thing.
Other things though, are medicines. Most medicines come from, you know, they’ll be called natural products. Like penicillin comes from a mold, and a lot of other antibiotics come from bacteria or molds. And, those are examples of those kinds of medicines. Other medicines come from, you know, laboratories, but they start with something made by a bacterium or a fungus, and then they build on it. Or you can actually, if you find a medicine, you know, that works, the chemistry may be so complicated that the best place to do it is a microbial cell. And so a lot of medicines are made this way, and more and more will be made going forward in the future.
And food is of course, you know, obviously everything we eat is biology. But we grow things specifically bacteria and yeast to make certain foods. So cheese starts with milk, but they’re bacteria and fungi that change that milk into cheese. And bread, you use yeast to make it, you know, your bread and beer and wine and other things use it. Yogurt is an example: you add the cultures in yogurt, have bacteria in it. Those bacteria are bacteria that are really good for you. You can eat them and they’re fine. They don’t bother you.
So there’s lots of different things and, the sky is the limit, and right now, you know, people are just imagining what you can do because we make chemicals that bacteria don’t normally make. But the tools are there and we can modify things so that it’s made. So that’s the, that’s the key. And it’s because basically everything, it comes back to biology, you know, unless it’s stone or metal or glass, it’s probably from biology one way or another.
Victoria:
That is super cool.
Dr. Trawick:
Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s really what makes us interested in this. A lot of it.
Victoria:
(Austin – How many items do you produce in a year?)
Yeah. This is a good follow-up question from Austin. How many items do you produce in a year?
Dr. Trawick:
You know, some of that is a business secret and I don’t necessarily even know that, but thousands of tons as what I can say, and that’s the idea. You want to make thousands of tons, because a lot of these chemicals, they use millions of tons per year and we can do it thousands of times at a time.
Victoria:
(Dante – What is the most unusual item your company makes with the new plastic?)
Cool. And this next question is kind of a fun question from Dante. What is the most unusual item your company makes from with the new plastic?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, you know, this is a really good question. Because it takes a lot of thinking. What is an unusual object. Before the 1930s, any of the things we make were unusual because there were almost no plastics, right? There’s rubber and a couple other things. But now they’re normal. They’re ordinary. The idea is that we’re making the stuff that you need in your everyday life. So a lot of it is you, you know, you’re used to it. But we’re trying to make it a better way instead of having to pump oil out of the ground and make plastic from that, which pollutes, and there’s only so much oil, we’re using microbes to make the very same things. So some of them aren’t that unusual. So there’re fabrics like spandex. So if you have a stretchy fabric, well, one of our chemicals can go into that. And nylon, which is used for carpets and clothing and a lot of other things. Well, we’re making things that you make nylon from. And so those are ordinary sorts of things, but nonetheless, the way we’re making it as the unusual part. And the same with liquids and soaps and detergents, and we’re also making moisturizer creams, and, and other things. And, you know that, so they’re not maybe that unusual when you think about it, but we’re doing it in a different way and a way we hope will lead to what people call a circular economy, where the resources we use are as renewable as possible. So we pollute less, we have less global warming and we have a, hopefully a better future for everybody.
Victoria:
(Joe – What specific products have you worked on?)
That sounds wonderful. This next question is from Joe. What specific products have you worked on?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, I’ve been at Genomatica for over 15 years. So I’ve worked on a whole bunch of different projects there, and some of those are different products. The one I’m really proud of is our first one what we call BDO or butane diol, well, it goes into spandex and it goes into like, the urethane and running shoes, and, a little, coffee pods that are made in Italy. We have a plant in Italy that a company called Novamont runs using our technology, and they make cups for a Lavazza. And those are like K-cups, but in Italy. And they’re made from our BDOs. So I’m really proud of that, because we’ve got it there, it’s being done commercially, people can buy those products, mainly in Europe, but there they can buy those products.
I’ve worked on several other ones over the years. Some of them related to that and some of them are newer chemicals and also plotting out all kinds of different projects that we do now. So I got my hands and almost everything we’re trying at the moment.
Victoria:
(Tanner – Is there somewhere that we can buy the things your company makes?)
(Lee – Do you ship all over the world?)
That’s awesome. There’s a pair of questions from Tanner and Lee that follow up to that pretty well. Tanner wants to know, is there somewhere that we can buy the things your company makes? And Lee wants to know, do you ship all over the world?
Dr. Trawick:
Okay. So we work with companies all over the world. So right now, Novamont in Italy is making our BDO. And we’ve made another chemical called Brontide, which we’ve done at the Novamont plant in Italy. And that one goes into a lot of products. Some of them are sold in stores like Sephora, and one of them, I know, I don’t know exactly where it’s sold, but it’s Very Cherry Bright from Pharmacy. So these are moisturizer creams and things like that. Brontide are one of our natural chemicals goes into, instead of something made from petroleum. And so Brontide is B R O N T I D E. And it’s made from a Genomatica chemical. And so you can buy those things. I actually don’t, just because I don’t use very much moisturizer cream and some of these other cosmetics. But my daughter does. And so, she goes to those stores like Sephora and buy some of these. And they’re in those. And hopefully there’ll be in more. And I mentioned Lavazza cups. Well, you can’t buy those in the US but they’re sold in Europe. And Novamont in Europe makes plastic bags that are compostable plastic from our chemical. And I hope that we’ll do more and more of that in the US, cause I want you to buy our things, because that’s the idea, there’ll be more, they’re better for you because it’ll be compostable and it’s from a natural source, not fossil fuels.
Victoria:
That’s awesome. I’ll see if I can find some links. that I can post in the description of the episode. And there’s also just going to be some information about your company links to the, to the website and everything for those that are interested in the description of the episode. So you can just click on them from there.
Dr. Trawick:
Yeah.
Victoria:
(Joe – Do you foresee clothes made of plastic that will be “smart” in that they will fasten (button and zip) themselves? Or perhaps make small adjustments to better fit a person when the clothes are put on?)
All right, this next question is from Joe. Do you foresee clothes made out of plastic that will be “smart” in that they will fasten (button and zip) themselves? Or perhaps make small adjustments to better fit a person when the clothes are put on?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, that’s a fantastic idea, Joe. And that’d be cool. We don’t really do that sort of thing. We don’t make the clothes or figure out how to make the clothes. So that’s not really the stuff that we focus on. But, you know, the stuff we focus on is making these chemicals that can make well, some of the same things that you use, but maybe some new things. So maybe there can be new kinds of plastics and new kinds of material that will do some of these things, it’ll fit you better, that you could put on, and instead of sagging it all, you know, fit tight yet, never be too tight and never be too loose. And so you can do those by combining different chemical building blocks to make different plastics. So the more different things that we can make or other companies like Genomatica can make, the more different kinds of materials you can get. And maybe some of these will happen. And I’d sure like them, but you know, we’re, we’re not there yet.
Victoria:
Makes me think of Back to the Future when Marty goes to the, or I guess the second Back to the Future where he goes and they have clothes that do that.
Dr. Trawick:
Yeah. The self-tying shoelaces, those are cool. I think of like in the Avengers movies, you know, you have unstable molecules making the costumes you can stretch or whatever.
Victoria:
(Jun – Who is your biggest client?)
Well, lots of fun ideas.
All right. This question is from Jun. Who is your biggest client?
Dr. Trawick:
Well Jun, we work with some of the world’s biggest companies. I can’t really say exactly what our biggest client is, but we’ve done work with the world’s number one chemical company BASF; the number one materials company, a company called Covestro, Germany; we’re working with the number one agribusiness company, Cargill, you know, they don’t make plastics, but they make the food that goes that we use to make the material that goes into the plastics, right; and we’ve also worked with a number one energy company in the world, Exxon Mobile, and so they’d like to do renewable things instead of just fossil fuels. Plus we worked with a lot of different companies. Some you may not have heard of, but they’re, they’re big in their own ways in areas, Novamont, Aquafill, Dicel, and more.
We can’t talk about, you know, how much they buy of what or exactly what we’re doing, but, you know, we’re trying to do this all the time, and make new deals, so we can sell our stuff and keep in business.
Victoria:
(Max – Are there a lot of companies doing things like this? Do you collaborate with a lot of other groups?)
And a good follow-up. I know you’ve mentioned some of the other companies, but Max wants to know, are there a lot of companies doing things like this, and do you collaborate with a lot of other groups?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, there are a lot of other companies and they’re more and more, hopefully the pandemic isn’t going to hurt too many people that way, but, we’ve compete with some of these companies. And we’ve worked with some others. So we’ve publicly said that we work with a company called Gingko Bioworks in Boston, and they’re a pretty cool company. And we work with professors at universities and national laboratories, and they also obviously all work independently of us too.
Victoria:
(Sierra – What is the official definition of bioengineering and what are some other examples of jobs in that field?)
All right. Switching gears a little bit. Here’s a question from Sierra. What is the official definition of bioengineering and what are some other examples of jobs in that field?
Dr. Trawick:
Okay, well, Sierra, that’s a great question. Bio-engineering is, is taking living things and doing something with them in a way you’ve planned to accomplish the task you want.
So that covers a huge area. And so there’s genetic engineering that we do and metabolic engineering, which is part of that to make the chemicals that we make. And so there’s all kinds of jobs in that for cloning the genes or making the enzymes work better or growing the organisms, figuring out how they do or analyzing them chemically. And just in our area that we’ve got several different departments and all kinds of different jobs. And when you expand it and look at the whole field, there’s a lot of different things and they can be things that you don’t expect like and physical therapy and medicine. A lot of that uses bioengineering to help people recover from illnesses or whatever better.
And like, I have an example of it. My knee joint had to be replaced and a couple of years ago. That’s bioengineering. And you can become a surgeon.
Victoria:
That’s cool. Yeah, just have to be creative and think creatively.
Dr. Trawick:
That’s. And go to school. Learn what you are interested in.
Victoria:
(Hannah – Since it’s made from microbes, is the stuff you make compostable or biodegradable?)
Yeah. All right. Hannah wants to know, since it’s made from microbes, is the stuff you make compostable or biodegradable.
Dr. Trawick:
That’s a great question. And it’s something that it’s easy to get a little confused about because just because it’s natural or organic or made by us, doesn’t mean it’s compostable or biodegradable. That is just because of its chemistry. And so it could biologically made stuff like we make, might be biodegradable and compostable, like Novamont is making plastic bags in Italy that are, and they’re sold all over Europe. But other things may not be. And, it can go both ways. A lot of compostable plastics are still made from petroleum. And it really depends upon what you need the product to do, because chemistry is tricky. You can’t have a car dashboard, you know, degrade while you’re, you know, using the car. You want it to be pretty durable, but that means it’s very hard to ever get rid of it too.
Victoria:
Oh yeah. I’ve never thought about that, but yes, some things are made to last, but then what do you, what do you do with that?
Dr. Trawick:
That becomes a problem. Yeah. So you have to figure out ways to recycle it. And some of that has to involve chemistry. Some can involve biology. And that’s one of the things we’re interested in, but there are other companies that are interested in that too. There’s a lot of work in that area. We’re mainly making the chemicals, and others look at how to break down the plastics.
Victoria:
(Maddie – I didn’t know that oil was used for anything besides cars. What else is oil used for?)
That makes sense.
This question is from Maddie and you’ve touched on this a little bit, but if there’s anything you want to add to it. Maddie says, I didn’t know that oil was used for anything besides cars. What else is oil used for?
Dr. Trawick:
Almost everything that you don’t grow, or not made from metal, stone. You know, wood, you grow wood, you know, plants. But almost all of your plastics, a lot of your other chemicals, cosmetics, shampoos, car tires, the rubber, and those, some things can be naturally produced and but a lot of it comes from oil. And that we’re surrounded with things that are made from oil.
Victoria:
Yeah. It’s like looking at everything in my office right now, like plastic folder, like microfiber cloth, plastic, you know, computer monitor case, like just laptop case that’s a synthetic plastic, you know, I’ve got a Play-Doh here cause I teach geology. So I show a lot of demonstrations with Play-Doh like all of this stuff.
Dr. Trawick:
All of your clothes, except for things that are made from wool, cotton, linen, you know, flax, and if you know, a few other things, but most clothes are made from synthetic materials or have some synthetic materials in them. And that’s all ultimately from oil.
Victoria:
Oh, my gosh. I think everything I’m wearing right now, cause this is synthetic dress made to be extra warm. Yeah.
Dr. Trawick:
Yes.
Victoria:
(Joe – Can you make a plastic to be combustible without polluting so it can be used as fuel for power plants?)
Wow. All right, this next question is from Joe. Can you make a plastic to be combustible without polluting, so it can be used as fuel or for power plants?
Dr. Trawick:
That’s a good question. But the thing about it is that burning anything is going to make pollution. Cause it’s going to make carbon dioxide, right. And you can’t escape that. And so that’s why people want to do things as solar energy or other clean energy as much as possible because you can make less carbon dioxide. You can make plastics that maybe burn easier, but you don’t, you know, you don’t want clothes that’ll burn easily, for good reason, right?
So it’s a tough question. And, you know, it’s something that, yes, you want to make it easier to break down and use it easier either as a fuel or fertilizer, but you also need to make it safe and durable. And so that’s a compromise that the people who come up with these materials have to understand. And we don’t directly work on that. That takes other lot of chemistry.
Victoria:
(Joe – Are there bacteria that will “eat” plastic so that all the plastic “islands” in the ocean can be broken down and no longer cause any harm to sea life?)
All right. and another question from Joe. Are there bacteria that will eat plastic so that all the plastic islands in the ocean can be broken down and no longer caused harm to sea life?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, that’s a very good question. And it’s a great idea. There are people who are working on things like that. We don’t, but there are people who are. And they’re coming up with better ones all the time. You have to think about it. You don’t want to eat, you know, just everything, but on the other hand, it’d be nice to break it down. The trouble is plastic is very hard for a little tiny cell to get at that big hard piece of plastic. And so it goes very slowly. And so you have to gather it up. You have to stop throwing it into the ocean. And then you can break it up into things you need, but you can’t just throw it into the ocean because it’ll take hundreds and hundreds of years to break it down and that we just can’t do.
Victoria:
Yeah, definitely.
Dr. Trawick:
But it’s a great, because it’s people are working on this idea as we speak, and to try to have better ways of doing it. So you don’t pollute when you do it, but.
Victoria:
(Eric – Is there anything in the universe that replenishes faster than it is depleted?)
Yeah, that’s good. This is an interesting question that was submitted by a listener. Eric wants to know, is there anything in the universe that replenishes faster than it is depleted?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, I’d like something like that, especially my bank account, right. But you don’t get anything for nothing. As I said, when we make our chemicals, you design it, so let’s say you need four pounds of sugar to make two pounds of product. Well, obviously you can’t ever get more of your stuff out of it than, you know, you can get rid of the sugar, but nonetheless, it’s only so efficient. And, that’s what we live with in all aspects of our lives. Like you’d like your gas tank to fill up quicker than you burn it. Right? Yeah.
Victoria:
That’d be great.
Dr. Trawick:
It’s not going to happen.
Victoria:
Yeah. All right, switching gears a little bit. We’ll get into some more questions about you and your career.
Dr. Trawick:
Sure.
Victoria:
(Matthew – What is your favorite thing out of all your roles of working in the laboratory, running projects and writing proposals?)
Matthew wants to know what is your favorite thing out of all of your roles working in the laboratory, running projects and writing proposals?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, you know, that’s an interesting question and a good one. And I’ve done a lot of different things and I liked a lot of them. You know, one of the nice things about working in the laboratory has been that I’ve had a chance to teach people. I did teach university classes for a year once back in the 1990s. And so somebody senior, like I am, when you do work in the lab, you’re often trying to teach somebody. And that part is definitely fun.
Writing, you know, it takes a lot of work to do it, to think of how to put a sentence together. But nonetheless, I do a lot of that. So, you know, I’m having a good time doing that.
And I’ve done a lot of thing, different things over the years. So I started working in science in the 1970s, and I was, you know, a lot younger back then. And so you were expected to work, you know, all hours of the night and in the laboratory, and so on. And now, you know, I work at the computer, especially during the pandemic. I worked at home and that’s been an interesting experience.
Victoria:
(Sierra – How did you get into the biotechnology industry?)
(Jane – What got you interested in making a new plastic?)
Alright. We’ve got another pair of questions that go together. Sierra wants to know how did you get into the biotechnology industry? And Jane wants to know what got you interested in making new plastic.
Dr. Trawick:
Well, I got into biotechnology because it looked like it was a place I could get work. It’s very difficult sometimes as a scientist to get new work and. And biotechnology industry does a lot of fascinating things, finds new drugs and helps come up with the new treatments, we make chemicals. I’ve worked in both kinds of companies and, you know, it’s a way of helping people in a practical way. And it’s, you know, it’s nice to work in a laboratory at a university. I love that. But it’s also nice to do something where people are now using something that you helped make too. And however it helps them.
And what got us interested in plastics is, well, you look at the different types of chemicals you can make in a microbial cell. And there are people already making a lot of drugs and we’re probably well behind them. And fuels are hard to make and economically. So we chose plastics, partly because it’s just a good place to start and get this technology going. And as we already talked about, they’re everywhere, you’re going to need all kinds of plastic.
Victoria:
(Katie – Is this what you always wanted to do?)
Awesome. This is a fun question from Katie. Is this what you always wanted to do?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, I always wanted to be a scientist. And, ever since I was a little kid, I remember when I was in like kindergarten or first grade, I was totally fascinated with dinosaurs, which is really tough back then, because there weren’t all kinds of stuff about dinosaurs. And so I had to read my dad’s geology textbook from college as a kid to get the dinosaurs that I wanted.
And then I got interested in space because well, John Glenn and the moon, and, you know, he orbited the earth and we went to the moon and then Mars and things like that.
And, but then, you know, I went to college. I wanted to be a zoologist when I went to college, but then I took microbiology and I realized, you know, this is what I’m really interested in. And I’ve been working with cells ever since then.
Victoria:
(Jane – What was the most interesting thing you learned when working with antibiotics?)
Oh, that’s fun.
Jane wants to know what was the most interesting thing you learned when working with antibiotics?
Dr. Trawick:
That’s a good question. one is how difficult it is to find something that will cure disease and not hurt you at the same time. There are only a few things, and that’s why people are still concerned about antibiotics, because it’s been difficult to find new antibiotics. We try to, we found a new class, but one that won’t actually work. And there’s lots of cases of that. So that’s probably the most interesting thing is that biology is always several steps ahead of us. And so we have to learn from biology. We don’t teach it, and that’s what we do. And that’s the thing I would guess, is how to learn from the microorganism you work with.
Victoria:
Working with microorganisms sounds like a lifelong learning endeavor.
Dr. Trawick:
It always is. I think anything you do should be.
Victoria:
(Anthony – How is what you are doing now different than what you started doing at the beginning of your career?)
Definitely. And speaking of lifelong learning, Anthony wants to know how is what you are doing now different than what you started doing at the beginning of your career?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, I was, at the beginning of my career, I was somebody who the professor said, go do this and go do that. Okay. So I was a student learning. I’m still learning, of course, and you have to, but now I’ve had a chance to actually teach, and help people learn themselves. And so that part is different. You know, I had to learn a lot to, to get to that point where you, then you share, and that’s definitely a change.
Victoria:
(Sheamus – What is the best part of your career and why?)
And speaking of your career, Sheamus wants to know what is the best part of your career and why?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, Sheamus, I think the best part of my careers right now, I hope. Because what I’ve learned is, and I’m trying to, I know more than I did two years ago or 20 years ago, and that’s why, and you know, you’re always, you always should look forward. Whatever you do is, is, you know, what you want to do is look forward and what’s the next step you can take. What’s going to be, what can you do to grow more? And even though, you know, I’ve been around for a while, I’m still trying to grow and cause that makes it fun. And that keeps you good too.
Victoria:
(Erica – what do you do outside of work?)
Yeah. All right. And then this is our very last question. This is a fun question also from Erica. What do you do outside of work?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, I, you know, my, one. My wife and I have raised two children who are grown up and on doing things of their own. That’s a big deal. I like photography. I take pictures. It’s been tough with the pandemic, because I haven’t been able to travel, but there are areas near our house, or even in your backyard, you can take pictures. I do a lot of reading, a lot of it, some of it’s for work and a lot of it is to teach me more about the rest of the world. And you know, enjoy sports. Like I like watching baseball, especially. And women’s soccer. My daughter was a great soccer player for 15 years.
Victoria:
Sounds like a lot of fun.
Dr. Trawick:
I watched the women’s team. Us women’s team.
Victoria:
Oh, cool. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t follow soccer too much, but I did watch clips on YouTube from some of their big games.
Yeah. Well, that is all of our questions. Do you have any questions of your own for the listeners?
Dr. Trawick:
Well, I don’t know if I have questions, so much as you know, the questions you should ask or what are you interested in? What gets you excited? And then how can you use that to learn more and you know, it just because you’re excited now, it may not become your career, but it may help lead you into something that’ll be a career. So if you’re interested in dinosaurs while you, you know, somebody might tell you, well, there’s not much to do. And that, you know, cause there’s already a lot of our paleontologists. But nonetheless, you know, you might get interested, in anatomy and physiology and how bio mechanics work from that, because trying to understand how dinosaurs lived. A lot of it is understanding physiology and biomechanics and how they just walked or flew or swam and the other things that they did. So that’s the thing I would say is look at what do you, what are you interested in, and how does that bring up new questions for you and open your avenues.
Victoria:
Yeah. Always ask questions and then wonder.
Dr. Trawick:
Yeah. So I, you know, that’s what I would say is, you know, learn that, learn to ask the questions and don’t be afraid either. That was one of the biggest things I had to learn was, was not be afraid of asking questions. Don’t feel embarrassed in front of people. I had to learn to ask questions in front of professors who had lots of experience. One of them had won a Nobel prize and things like that. And you, you know, you realize I’m going to sound dumb when I asked this, but sometimes, you know, you don’t and then sometimes they don’t sound as smart as you do. And you learn from that, you learn from asking the questions.
Victoria:
That is such good advice. So true.
Well, thank you so much.
Dr. Trawick:
Thank you for this opportunity, Victoria. This is, very interesting, and I’m sure these students are, you know, I hope they’re listening and fascinated by this.
Victoria:
I hope they are too. I know I am. I was clinging on your, every word.
Dr. Trawick:
Those are great questions that they asked.
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