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TED Talks Daily

Why "biofabrication" is the next industrial revolution | Suzanne Lee

TED Talks Daily

TED

Creativity, Ted Podcast, Ted Talks Daily, Business, Design, Inspiration, Society & Culture, Science, Technology, Education, Tech Demo, Ted Talks, Ted, Entertainment, Tedtalks

4.111.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2020

⏱️ 12 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What if we could "grow" clothes from microbes, furniture from living organisms and buildings with exteriors like tree bark? TED Fellow Suzanne Lee shares exciting developments from the field of biofabrication and shows how it could help us replace major sources of waste, like plastic and cement, with sustainable and eco-friendly alternatives.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This TED Talk features designer and biofabrication pioneer Suzanne Lee, recorded live at TED Summit 2019.

0:11.0

I started life as a fashion designer, working closely with textile designers and fabric suppliers.

0:20.0

But today I can no longer see or talk to my new collaborators

0:24.5

because they're in the soil beneath our feet,

0:28.2

on the shelves of our supermarkets,

0:30.6

and in the beer I'm going to drink when I finish this talk.

0:35.2

I'm talking about microbes and designing with life.

0:40.3

Fifteen years ago, I completely changed both what I worked with and how I worked after a revelatory collaboration with a biologist.

0:50.3

Our project gave me a different perspective on life, introducing a whole new world

0:58.6

of possibility around how we can design and make things. I discovered a radical manufacturing

1:06.3

proposition, biofabrication, literally fabricating with biology. What does that mean? Well, instead of processing

1:18.7

plants, animals, or oil to make consumer materials, we might grow materials directly with living organisms.

1:30.3

In what many are terming the fourth industrial revolution,

1:34.5

we're thinking about the new factories as being living cells.

1:39.5

Bacteria, algae, fungi, yeast.

1:42.7

Our latest design tools include those of biotechnology. My own journey in

1:50.3

biofabrication started with a project called biocature. The provocation was that instead of growing a

1:58.0

plant like cotton in a field over several months,

2:01.6

we could use microbes to grow a similar cellulose material in a lab in a few days.

2:09.9

Using a certain species of bacteria in a nutrient-rich liquid,

2:14.6

we fermented threads of cellulose that self-organized into a sheet of fabric.

2:22.4

I dried the fabric I'd grown and cut and sewed it into a range of garments, shoes, and bags.

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