Revisiting Mood Hacking with Scents

Following on my post last spring about mood hacking, October brought more hints that behavior can be explicitly modified using scents.  A variety of news outlets picked up on a press release from BYU describing a forthcoming paper in Psychological Science that demonstrates, "that clean scents not only motivate clean behavior, but also promote virtuous behavior by increasing the tendency to reciprocate trust and to offer charitable help."  Here I am quoting from a pre-print, entitled "The Smell of Virtue", cached at the University of Toronto.  The paper describes two experiments in which citrus-scented window cleaner appeared to alter behavior.  I have to say that I found the references to Proust, saints, sinners god, and cleanliness (all that in 4 pages!) to be distractions from the main ideas, not to mention the data.

Here is the ScienceDaily reporting, and here is Time's take.

(Not everyone is happy with the methodology described in the paper, the conclusions, and the way it was written.)

What makes this interesting (to me) is that the researchers don't necessarily imply a direct biological mechanism.  The induced behavior may simply be the result of a learned association.  That is, there is no suggestion that anything about the scent that serves to flip a biological switch that leads to different behavior.  Rather the lead author, Katie Liljenquist of BYU, and her colleagues had  previously demonstrated a link between transgression and a desire for cleanliness (see "Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing", Science, 313(5792), 2006).  "Out, damned spots!" and all that.

The citrus scent may simply something that Prof. Liljenquist's test subjects (probably undergraduates at US universities) have learned to associate with cleanliness.  Would students at Asian universities have the same response to the same scent?  I suppose one way to quickly address this question is to see what sort of scents Asians prefer in their window cleaners.  Here is my point: even though there may be no innate molecular pathway exploited in this "behavior reprogramming", it may still be possible to exploit culturally defined (or perhaps "contextually constructed") neural pathways (from the receptors to the brain) for the purpose of mood hacking.

I am not particularly excited about the possibility of having my own mood hacked without my knowledge.  That this might be accomplished even in the absence of genetically identifiable response pathway should give one pause.  Any molecular pathway responsible for this effect (should it prove reproducible and engineerable) is unlikely to be well understood for many years to come.  But if the results from the citrus-scent study are to be believed, then it is already possible to manipulate behavior using scents, even though we have little idea how to defend against it other than by using more scents.  Perfume warfare.  Lovely.

Can't wait until the iGEM undergraduates get a hold of this.  They have already built bugs that smell like bananas and mint.  When will they start trying to influence the judges' decisions directly using synthetic scent pathways?

US Market Value of GM Crops is Approximately $70 Billion

I have a short letter in the November 2009 issue of Nature Biotechnology (subscription req.) correcting the record on US revenues from genetically modified crops.  Based on USDA data for corn, soy, and cotton, revenues from the GM versions of those crops were about US$ 65 billion in 2008, rather than the widely misreported ~$4 billion.  The latter figure is in fact just from GM seed revenue.  I would put the total from all GM crops and seeds at $75-85 billion, though it isn't yet clear where GM sugar beets are going to come in.  Assuming US revenues are representative of global averages, thentotal worldwide revenues are probably north of $150 billion for crops and seeds together.

Below is a figure showing US yearly revenues from the three big crops, as well as the US annual total.  Note that although the GM fraction of each crop continues to grow (see the ISAAA report from 2008), prices fluctuate sufficiently from year to year that total revenues declined from 2007 to 2008.  Food and crop prices have come off their 2007 highs -- which cannot last given increasing demand around the world.  I would expect revenues to resume their climb in 2010.

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iGEM 2009: Got Poo?

Here are a couple of snaps of the Scatalog from E. chromi, a spin-off of this year's Cambridge University iGEM project.

Cambridge has built a set of parts that allow generation of a rainbow of color pigments in E. coli.  Designers James King and Daisy Ginsberg got creative with the application of all the hues of engineered poo as biosensors for the human GI tract.  It's all nicely packaged up in a shiny briefcase, just you would see any any tech convention.

Bet that was fun coming through airport security.

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iGEM 2009: In the thick of it.

I am sitting in the Stata Center at MIT taking a breather from serving as a judge at International Genetically Engineered Machines 2009 Jamboree.  There are 110 teams here, with over 1200 students from around the world showing off their projects with great enthusiasm.  As we have a full day left to go before the deliberations begin I won't divulge yet how specific teams are doing.  But I have to say I am pleased.

iGEM is, at its core, an experiment.  As the wiki says, the teams will "all specify, design, build, and test simple biological systems made from standard, interchangeable biological parts."  Of course, as there aren't yet any standard, interchangeable biological parts, the students are inventing as they go.  And inventing is slow, arduous work.

The most impressive talks I have seen this year do not represent giant leaps forward in new biological technologies (though some of the projects are real steps forward in that regard).  Rather, I have been pleasantly surprised that many teams took up the challenge of improving or better characterizing parts that were already in the registry.  Many of those parts don't work as advertized, or do not have enough data in the registry to know how they really work.  That will slowly get fixed.

That it will take time to get all this working can make the differences between the annual Jamborees appear slight.  Thin film semiconductors themselves took decades to get working, and even then those systems were built on top of a good century and a half of practical experience with electricity and then basic electronics.  iGEM is attempting to squeeze all that effort into just a few years.

I am put in mind of W. Brian Arthur's work on the dependence of innovation on the availability of components.  Here is a recent review of his book, The Nature of Technology. Historically, and theoretically, the complexity of technological artefacts tends to increase in leaps and bounds as components are combined in new ways, and then combinations then serve as components for the next generation of innovation.  But first you have to have functioning components. 

Drew Endy asked me yesterday if I thought we were stuck in a rut.  Nope.  Just stuck in reality.

The LavaAmp (prototype) is Alive!

This week Biodesic shipped an engineering prototype of the LavaAmp PCR thermocycler to Gahaga Biosciences.  Joseph Jackson and Guido Nunez-Mujica will be showing it off on a road trip through California this week, starting this weekend at BilPil.  The intended initial customers are hobbyists and schools.  The price point for new LavaAmps should be well underneath the several thousand dollars charged for educational thermocyclers that use heater blocks powered by peltier chips.

The LavaAmp is based on the convective PCR thermocycler demonstrated by Agrawal et al, which has been licensed from Texas A&M University to Gahaga.  Under contract from Gahaga, Biodesic reduced the material costs and power consumption of the device.  We started by switching from the aluminum block heaters in the original device (expensive) to thin film heaters printed on plastic.  A photo of the engineering prototype is below (inset shows a cell phone for scale).  PCR reagents, as in the original demonstration, are contained in a PFTE loop slid over the heater core.  Only one loop is shown for demonstration purposes, though clearly the capacity is much larger.

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The existing prototype has three independently controllable heating zones that can reach 100C.  The device can be powered either by a USB connection or an AC adapter (or batteries, if desired).  The USB connection is primarily used for power, but is also used to program the temperature setpoints for each zone.  The design is intended to accommodate additional measurement capability such as real-time fluorescence monitoring.

We searched hard for the right materials to form the heaters and thin film conductive inks are a definite win.  They heat very quickly and have almost zero thermal mass.  The prototype, for example, uses approximately 2W whereas the battery-operated device in the original publication used around 6W.

What we have produced is an engineering prototype to demonstrate materials and controls -- the form factor will certainly be different in production.  It may look something like a soda can, though I think we could probably fit the whole thing inside a 100ml centrifuge tube.

The prototype necessarily looks a bit rough around the edges as some parts were worked by hand where they would normally be done by machine (I never have liked working with polycarbonate).  We have worked hard to make sure that the LavaAmp can be transitioned relatively seamlessly from prototype quantities, to small lot productions, to high-volume production.  The electronic hardware is designed to easily transition to fabrication as a single IC, all the plastic bits can be injection molded, and the heater core can be printed using a variety of high-throughput electronicss fabrication methods.

Next up will be field trials with a selected group of labs, as well as more work on refining the loading of the loops.

WWF Endorses Industrial Biotech for Climate Solutions

A fortnight ago the World Wildlife Fund released a report pushing industrial biotech as a way to increase efficiency and reduce carbon emissions.  Interesting.  Of course, industrial biotech doesn't necessarily require direct genetic modification, but the WWF must know that is an inevitable consequence of heading down this road.  More on this after I get a chance to read the report.