Part A: Open-Ended Questions

1. How many people should have the option of learning to read and write DNA (i.e., practice biotechnology)

• At a small scale, where the risk of effecting others is low, everyone who wishes to

2. Pick a country outside the United States of interest to you. How does or will its bio-economy differ culturally and practically from the US? How do or will these differences lead to differences in opportunities for specific biotechnology projects?

• Smaller countries, like Germany, which have less space available for farming are perhaps more pressured to farm efficiently

3. What is bio-scarer and does bio-scarer impact conversations about GMOs?

• The bio-scarer concept is about the concept that we never had a period in time where we had the opportunity to express fear of new bio-technologies
• It is normalized to say something like “I am afraid of height”, but when someone expresses fear of genetically modified organisms, a flock of Ph.D.’s will come and preach that there is nothing to be afraid of
• If we normalized the expression of fear towards biotechnologies, perhaps it would become more normal for people to want to face those fears because of the potential rewards that come with it

4. Assume that all of the molecular biology work you'd like to do could be automated, what sort of new biological questions would you ask, or what new types of products would you make?

• What are the functions of the unknown 94 out of 493 genes of the JCVI-syn3A cell?
• What is the mapping between bioelectrical stimulation (e.g. increasing Vmem) and cell outcomes (e.g. gene expression, or on a higher level, limp regeneration)? How do we control it?
• Extract quantified gene/transcription regulatory networks over time to be able to simulate them
• How do cells communicate? How can we interfere and control that communication?

5. If you could make metric tons of any protein, what would you make and what positive impact could you have?