Week 1 HW: Principles and Practices

Week One Homework

Brie Dreams of Science

Q1

First, describe a biological engineering application or tool you want to develop and why.

For the purposes of the How To Grow (Almost) Anything course, I am interested in exploring wetware. Meaning, I’m interested in exploring how plants and biomatter can be included in - or replace - traditional hardware elements. The scale and scope of this exploration will be ascertained through the class itself. For now, I am imagining someone small scale, such as replacing a conductive element in a circuit board with a plant or biomatter.

The intent is explorative and speculative. Could trees be electricity conductors? Unlikely, but I’d like to start with explorative speculation and work backwards from that, pushing the limits of my own knowledge and scientific understanding as far as I can.

The why here is that I intend to incorporate my learnings, eventually, into my art and design practice. I am an installation artist and designer, and I’d like to explore new ways the boundaries between “natural” and “technological” systems can break down.

Q2

Goals, sub-goals and related actions

Goal One: Non-pathogenic materials choices

• Sub goal: Use materials that would be safely and normally found in every day use, including plants and bio-matter.
• Related action: Make a short-list of viable materials. Cross-check them against standard risk classification and common uses.

• Sub goal: Avoid any materials requiring special licensing or bio-material high safety protocols.
• Related action: Stick to ‘BSL-1’ or similarly low-risk materials.

• Sub goal: Pick materials that won’t grow aggressively on their own.
• Related action: Don’t use fast-spreading molds or similar materials.

Goal Two: Closed-growth system with no environmental release

• Sub goal: Make sure the project is ‘physically a closed system’.
• Related action: Use sealed containers for any growth materials. Follow strict lab safety protocols. Monitor the growth regularly. Use ‘secondary containers’ when needed, such as when I’m handling materials and things might get messy.

• Sub goal: Plan for safe disposable of materials when the project ends.
• Related action: Plan a clear and well-documented end system. Work with GenSpace technicians from the start fo the project to plan for getting rid of materials. Use proper sterilization protocols at every project step.

Goal Three: Building towards an open system

• Sub goal: Make the project repeatable.
• Related action: Document every step, in great detail. Practice my documentation steps to make sure I could replicate my steps based on how I’ve documented them.

• Sub goal: Make learnings open and accessible.
• Related action: Use legible, easy to understand documentation framing. Host it in an open-source way.

Prompt citation

Brie. (2026, February 10). User prompt to ChatGPT: “I am taking a science class through MIT and Harvard called ‘How to Grow Almost Anything’…” [Large language model prompt]. OpenAI ChatGPT.

Q3

Related governance actions

Governance action one: Safety tiering system for materials used

Purpose: A large part of my proposed project is using plant and biomaterials in place of traditional hardware elements in computing technology. This will likely evolve over time, but that is where I’m at currently. The purpose of this governance action is to create safety-focused guardrails and limitations around the biomaterials I will experiment with during this project. A tiering system - either relying on existing tiering systems, which I will research, or creating a new one - will do this. For example, I will not use toxic materials.

Design: A safety tiering system for ‘wetware’ materials that categorizes potential wetware materials into categories based on safety criteria such as being self-generating, difficult to safely contain, respiratory toxicity, toxicity to skin, difficulty of safe end of project disposal, and so on.

Assumptions: An assumption I am making is a that a tiering system - or open information needed to create a tiering system for the purposes of this project - exists and is readily available. A second assumption is that the project timeline allows space and capacity for creating a tiering system while also working on the project itself.

Risks of failure: Miscategorizing materials or misunderstanding safety indicators. If used at scale, could be a “box check” safety measure without active impact. Could slow down experimentation unecessarily if too strict.

Governance action two: End-of-project safety and sterilization plan

Purpose: A large part of this project centers on experimenting with various bio and plant materials, for wetware use. Even if materials are contained safely within the lab during project and experimentation, at the end of the project, I will need to be able to safely dispose of materials in a way that does not distribute them unsafely into the broader environment. Potentially, this end of life project plan for materials could become a mandatory governance structure for comparable wetware projects.

Design: A mandatory checklist of end-of-project disposal, documentation and sterilization processes for wetware experimentation and build projects. A checklsit and documentation structure.

Assumptions: Assumes that materials will need special disposal processes. Assumes there is a safe way to dispose of all wetware experimentation materials. Assumes normal sterilization and disposal processes for the lab space would not be sufficient.

Risk of failutre: Cost and complexity could prevent small-scale or artistic experimentation. Complexity and documentation adds time. May need to differentiate between ongoing disposal (for example, trying a material, it doesn’t work, and moving on) and end of project disposal (full shut-down) - if doing both, could add too much complexity and paperwork.

Governance action three: Open systems

Purpose: Keepoing learnings open and available. Avoiding information hoarding. Avoiding use for non-ethical means.

Design: An open-source platform where people can share and gather learnings about wetware experimentation and learning. A documentation plan and guidelines that promotes consistent documentation patterns, language and styles, so knowledge can be easily shared and learnings replicated.

Assumptions: That open source sharing would be collectively used and desired. That open source sharing would help avoid non-ethical use or private monetization of ideas.

Risk of failure: No one uses it! Documentation guidelines are insufficient, or learnings over time create new documentation style needs that don’t match the original documentation structures.

Q5

Governance choices

Based on my thinking, writing and numbered options, I would prioritize governance idea 3 - working towards open source learnings with accessible, consistent documentation. This is because lab safety and materials safety measures exist that could be employed to cover governance concwerns one and two, i.e. ensuring only ‘safe’ materials are used, and ensuring safe and documented disposal practices at end-of-project.

Governance action three focuses, instead, on making sure _learnings are available to everyone*. As environmental conservation is an implicit intent of this project (as it focuses on using biomaterials for hardware), any positive learnings should be made reproducable and repeatable for scientists wanting to build on the learnings, and should be shared openly so that learnings can’t become privately monetized.

Relavent audiences - Scientists. Hardware companies. Designers. Engineers. Architects.

Reflecting on what you learned and did in class this week, outline any ethical concerns that arose, especially any that were new to you. Then propose any governance actions you think might be appropriate to address those issues. This should be included on your class page for this week.

Honestly - no ethical concerns have come up thus far that I haven’t addressed in my answers above.

Homework Continued

Week 2 Lecture Prep

Homework Questions from Professor Jacobson:

Q: Nature’s machinery for copying DNA is called polymerase. What is the error rate of polymerase? How does this compare to the length of the human genome. How does biology deal with that discrepancy?

A: Based on the lecture slides, the error rate of polymerase is 1x10⁶. I’m going to be honest and say that I can’t tell just from reading the slides how it compares to the length of the human genome - I don’t have a science background, so need to attend the week’s lecture to understand how to parse that information from the slides. I really want to learn, so I’m going to be honest and say I don’t know the answer here.

Homework Questions from Dr. LeProust:

Q: What’s the most commonly used method for oligo synthesis currently?

A: A mix of high-throughput oligo synthesizer by Illuma and electrochemical-based micro-array.

Q: Why is it difficult to make oligos longer than 200nt via direct synthesis?

A: Problems with uniformity. Expensive.

Q: Why can’t you make a 2000bp gene via direct oligo synthesis?

A: You need a cloned oligo pool.

Homework Question from George Church:

Q: What are the 10 essential amino acids in all animals and how does this affect your view of the “Lysine Contingency”?

A: The ten essential amino acids in animals are histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, valine, and (in many animals and developmental contexts) arginine. These are called “essential” because animals cannot synthesize them in sufficient quantities and must obtain them from their diet.

This list reframes the idea of the “Lysine Contingency.” Lysine is not uniquely special in being essential—rather, it is one of a broader set of amino acids that animals fundamentally depend on external sources to obtain. What makes lysine interesting is not that life hinges on it alone, but that multiple core building blocks of proteins are metabolically unavailable to animals and must come from ecological or industrial supply chains (plants, microbes, or synthetic production). From this perspective, the “Lysine Contingency” is better understood as part of a more general nutritional and biochemical contingency: animal life is structurally dependent on a network of externally produced amino acids, with lysine being a prominent but not singular example.

Prompt citation: Brie. (2026, February 10). Question to ChatGPT about essential amino acids and the “Lysine Contingency” based on course slides [Large language model query]. OpenAI ChatGPT.