Biohacking Hollywood

Kiki Sanford (drkiki), David Hewlett (dhewlett)

https://twitter.com/kanzure/status/1167960244909006848

KS: You're wearing a nerdy t-shirt. You have started this tech terrors group for kids. People may know your work from acting and shows like Stargate. But have you always been nerdy? Did it come from the scifi work that you've done?

DH: It's very nice of you to ask. Yes, I have always been nerdy. It started for me with Doctor Who. That was my first. That's what got me excited about this stuff. The only way you could watch Doctor Who in Canada was on public television, which had an educational mandate. So what they would do is have a half hour true half hour show, and then they had to make up this extra chunk of time. They did that by bring in scifi writers and scientists to talk about these sometimes tenuous links between the science happening in Doctor Who and reality. For me, it inextricably bound these two things together. I spent every minute I had trying to build sonic screwdrivers and figure out this whole time travel thing. It was only later on that somebody told me that you can't actually be a timelord, but you can pretend to be one on television. It was a bit of a disappointment for me that I would have to pretend and not actually do it.

KS: Playing a scientist on TV, but now working with kids, do you find you're at a disadvantage?

DH: Yes and no. One of the things I have found is that there are these pillars of education you have. There's silos where things have been separated and as an actor coming into at as someone who is passionate about science and arts and math, I think the advantage of being able to be a generalist is becoming more and more important. The fact that my interest isn't in a specific area, has really helped me both in the presenting of stuff from the actor side of things, but for presenting it to kids as well.

KS: Like when a kid comes and asks you a question about how something works, you go "oh, I don't know, let's find out" and you can go thorugh that exploratory process and help building curiosity with a child.

DH: Absolutely. Ignorance is an amazing thing to use with kids. Ignorance is great because you can always learn something. Getting things wrong, I think it's heartening to kids to see a grown-up stumbling around with this stuff. There's a tendency for parents or teachers to get in there and fix things and show how things are done. The hands in pockets approach is important, where you sit back and let them do it. I was amazed at how many times I suddenly went, wow that's actually a really interesting way to go with it. A perfect example for me was that there was a plant drive at school and they wanted people to be able to bring in plants. Nobody did, though. It was a complete disaster. I think there was one ugly plant that showed up, which someone had already basically killed. I thought, well, I have that tech terrors. We started taking espresso pods, ripping their tops off, and putting in cuttings or seeds. I said, we're going to do this, but they keep falling down. I kept knocking these things over, and so I said, let's design sonmething--- let's do something where we canp ut these things in. I was amazed, because I expected them to come up with something simple. But they wanted to 3d print a tree. They were very specific. They said, get the wood filament. They 3d printed this thing, and it was for them to put their espresso pods in. Someone said, how do we water it, and now we have to build a cloud. Well how do we build the cloud? Now we're sitting here and I'm trying to buy pumps and playing with this sutff. It was amazing to see how this childlike approach to this stuff starts bringing in things from all over the place. When you're not trying to do top-down education, then you can do this, and that for me is incredibly exciting. I think it's just an excuse-- I say I work with kids, but really it's the kids that are allowing me to play with this stuff. It's science playtime for me.

KS: There is this trend in the "just so" aspect of life. You get handed a piece of technology, and it just works, and we go through education and we learn scientific facts in a "just so" way, or at least that's how it has been taught for the majority of the educational system for science in the US whereas exploration is often a better way to dig into things. Do you think giving kids the opportunity to break things, explore, and learn how to hack, to learn that the world is modifiable and manipulatable in all the ways, that it will lead to a different way for them to look at science and at technology and at all of these things as they move into adulthood?

DH: Absolutely. You're born a hacker. That's the funny thing. The first thing that we do as kids is use things the wrong way. I remember when DVD players first came out. There were kids putting peanut butter on them and putting them into the DVD player. We are innate hackers, and it's taught out of us.

KS: Your iphone is too expensive.

DH: Taking iphones apart drives parents crazy. I have to check to make sure the phone is ours, because the kids come in with their parents' stuff. I should step back for a second. The whole idea that science is a blackbox, that's what got me into this. I had my own little biohacking project, a child. He wanted to do videogames. He wanted to do PC gaming. I said, great, well we're not going to buy a PC, we're going to build one. I figured what a great thing. And he rolled his eyes and said, oh man dad is teaching me again. But his friends, suddenly people were showing up at our door and saying wow this kid is building his own computer. It was an epiphany to them, and that terrified me because when I was his age I was building computers and taking the TV apart. I thought the point of garbage night was for me to find things to take apart, not collecting garbage to throw out.

KS: My 8 year old, he said "no mommy, that's my miscellaneous junk that I need later".

DH: Our basement is full of old printers. There's little pumps, little motors, and kids love taking these apart, because ink gets everywhere. The mess making. You have to make a mess. Don't be afraid of the mess, you can clean it up later.

KS: What does this conversation about kids and tech terrors-- how does this relate to Hollywood and biohacking?

DH: I think it's almost like my apology; I feel like everything I have done in my paying work, has been to basically undermine everything that you guys are doing.

KS: So you're a bad, bad scientist on television.

DH: All the science fiction and action-adventure stuff out there, relates to the negative side of science. There are no positive movies about biotech. They are all negative. Gattacca, that's like the doomsday story for this stuff.

KS: Everyone goes back to it. When we can genetically manipulate our children, it's going to be great.

DH: "We're all going to dress in grey and be really miserable". I'm someone who has always loved science, and yet the science I was portraying on film and television was so negative. I was stopping a woman from being with the fish she loved. I was ending humans reign on earth, in Planet of the Apes, and we were doing alien genocide on Stargate like it was no big deal. I feel like I need to give back to some extent. What have I contributed? I have people come up and say, I'm an astrophysicist because of Stargate. But I haven't seen someone say, I'm in bioengineering because of Stargate. It's portrayed at a 1960s level of technology. When I talk about DNA, I ask my son, what does it mean to you? He says Spider-man. But Spider-man was invented in 1960s. That's the wrinkled tights level of technology. We're educating our kids with these movies.

KS: So they haven't gotten to Evangelion yet.

DH: Exactly. Like early batman things. That's the level of understanding that we're applying to our Hollywood films. It's no wonder that we're struggling to find acceptance for this stuff. One of the reasons why I got in touch with Josiah was because of another project I was working on, assistive technologies which are moving into the bio side of stuff. I was so taken with what was going on with his stuff; I really want to start bringing this in for the kids as well. There's an innate distrust for this stuff.

KS: So there's two sides here. There's the positive aspect of using Hollywood and big blockbuster films as this doorway into the education and entertainment, and begetting potential curiosity.

DH: Kids love Venom.

KS: Right, and that leads to symbiotes.

DH: We had symbiotes too, in Stargate.

KS: So you're saying this negative aspect of how biotech and biohacking is being portrayed in media itself. So potentially there's a role that the biohacking community has to fill to try and help create better representations. There's a group called the Science and Entertainment Exchange. They link scientists with writers, producers, you can be a science consultant on a television show or a movie.

DH: I had a lot of technobabble in Stargate. I just went through it as fast as possible under the theory that it was polite to people who didn't want to hear it, but for those who did, they could go back and watch it again.

KS: People today in other panels have been mentioning that media is there to entertain. It's also there to make money. So you have to sell a certain number of seats, or ad time if it's television shows. So the priorities are different.

DH: I think trying to change that is going to be like banging your head against a wall. I think there will be films that cover it. I think the documentary film side that is interesting, but there's still a necessity of entertainment. So they still look to make the biohackers look like "biohackers".