You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. There are scientists dedicated to programming living cells and writing DNA in the same way we can write programs for computers.

Christina Agapacchis is one of them. In her TED 2020 talk, the biological designer explores how the

intersection of biology and technology leads us to the big questions about who we are and who we're

becoming, how the possibilities of engineering living things can make us, our bodies, that is,

and the future of humanity more expansive.

A briefcase full of poop changed my life.

Ten years ago, I was a graduate student, and I was helping judge a genetic engineering competition for undergrads. There, I met a British artisan designer named Alexander

Daisy Ginsburg. She was wearing the white

embroidered polo shirt of the University of Cambridge team and holding a silver briefcase,

like the kind that you would imagine is handcuffed to your wrist. She gestured over from a

quiet corner and asked me if I wanted to see something. With a sneaky look, she opened up the

suitcase and inside were six glorious, multicolored turds.

The Cambridge team, she explained, had spent their summer engineering the bacteria E. coli

to be able to sense different things in your environment and produce a rainbow of different colors in response.

Arsenic in your drinking water? This strain would turn green.

She and her collaborator, the designer James King,

worked with the students and imagined different possible scenarios

of how you might use these bacteria.

What if they asked, you could use them

as a living probiotic drink and health monitor all in one.

You could drink the bacteria

and it would live in your gut,

...