Care is an unlimited resource
A conversation with Jasmine Lu about slime mold, large systems problems, and partnership
9 minute read
Jasmine Lu sits in the corner of a sun-drenched lab, tinkering with old computer parts. Her hands pick at glittering emerald jewels—pieces of old circuit board—with a mission to repurpose. Globs of molten solder flow over the wires snaking across her lap, cut and twisted, like gnarly vines.
Jasmine pauses before coaxing Physarum Polycephalum, an electric yellow slime mold, into the smartwatch she’s just finished building, seeding its many nuclei onto one side of a transparent channel. She gives it an oat to eat as if she’s a mother serving breakfast to a child, tenderly delivering it water via eyedropper a few times a day. As she tends it, it grows, crawling—no—creeping its way toward the other side of the channel.
It is pure agony. She can’t tell if the slime mold will ever complete the electrical circuit. It doesn’t look like it’s moving at all. In an effort to ward off her frustration, Jasmine focuses on disassembling old blackberries, flip phones, and stereos for the afternoon. Anything to not focus on the slime mold’s mercurial growth. However, when she does look down at her watch—more out of habit than insistence—her patience is rewarded. The slime mold has grown! 72 beats per minute, her heart rate appears on the screen. She feels her heart beating in her chest—Thump. Thump. Thump.—and sees the rate on the screen jump with excitement.
That’s how I like to imagine this eccentric dance anyway. Jasmine and her slime mold. The beat of two organisms working together in a relatively simple symbiosis.
For this particular project, Jasmine, an electrical and computer engineer by training, embedded slime mold into a smartwatch, creating an electronic device that can tell you both the time and your heart rate—but only if you take care of it. The slime mold serves as a living electrical connection that rewards the wearer for their time, patience, and thoughtfulness.
In Jasmine’s two-week experiment with the smartwatch, participants were tasked with caring for the slime mold until it grew a wire, connecting the heart rate sensor. After a few days of living with the functioning smartwatch, Jasmine challenged the participants to neglect the slime mold, letting it dry out and go dormant, severing both the electrical and, potentially, the emotional connection.
After reviewing the study results, Jasmine told me: “There’s a lot of things that people reflected on that were unique to working with a living thing that needs attention and care. One of them was that it was very variable. You can’t predict the slime mold. You can provide all the right environmental variables for it to thrive, but whether or not it chooses to grow is up to the organism. That's a very different mechanic than people are used to when working with devices or things you take care of like a Tamagotchi”
For context, Jasmine works in a field known as Human-computer interaction. Like tissue engineering, Human-computer interaction research spans a wide variety of disciplines and is often a little bit of science fiction and a little bit of science fact, mixing current engineering realities with grand visions of the ways technology can more cohesively “live” with humans and solve their problems. Practitioners in the field may be focused on designing devices that connect our bodies more seamlessly with computers, engineering systems to be more useful or joyful for individuals to use, or studying how best to communicate information across a plethora of digital interfaces. The field ranges from the very practical to the utmost speculative.
Jasmine explains that her work as a PhD student in the Human Computer Integration Lab is particularly focused on “how we can pursue sustainability in computing. Instead of imagining ourselves as just users discarding products after they’re no longer useful to us, I explore how we can become a caretaker of a device instead of just a user. Additionally, I have another project exploring how we can enter a role of recycler of our devices instead of just a user.”
Caretaker. Recycler. Jasmine talks about technology in terms of partnership, even companionship, between us and our devices as a way to solve large systems problems. Problems like the 53.6 million tons electronic waste produced every year as just one example.
Caretaker. Recycler. Jasmine talks about technology in terms of partnership, even companionship, between us and our devices.
That’s all very interesting and all—slime molds and Tamagotchis and smart devices that so many love wearing. But what does it have to do with tissue engineering? For me, it all comes back to partnership.
The most common partnerships we have with medical devices—although we don’t often hear them described as partnerships—are those between patients and their assistive medical implants. The millions of people who have pacemakers and insulin pumps, metal hips and plastic knees implanted every year.
To a computer engineer, these patients would be considered our “end users,” our “customers,” the people we need to be designing all engineering solutions to satisfy. The people for which we must be maximizing quality of life, whether that’s restoring a healthy heart rate or ensuring pain-free flexion of the knee.
But, to me, just including the patient as an end user doesn’t seem like enough to meet our goals. It doesn’t ensure we make implants that actually function the way we need them to. We must also take care of our surgeons and prioritize their needs alongside those of the patients. When designing tissue-engineered interventions, we need to understand what’s going to be easy for a surgeon to implant and what’s going to be difficult. What’s going to make the procedure successful and what’s going to help minimize recovery time. Thankfully, many surgeons are also clinician-scientists, with the ability and access to remind us of their wants and needs.
But I still don’t think that paints the whole picture. There’s a third stakeholder that needs to be taken care of, one that isn’t able to voice their needs so directly: the cells.
We (or at least I) have been trained to think of cells as machinery, as workers in a factory that will produce the right proteins, the right matrix, the right tissue if given the correct orders. However, we’ve all seen enough RNA-seq plots to know that cell populations, even within a single tissue, are heterogeneous—that the cells, even within a single cell type, want to do lots of different things at any given moment. And to make things more complicated, that cellular heterogeneity sometimes does and sometimes does not have any clear functional impacts.
Recently that heterogeneity has raised a lot of questions for me. Although homogeneity is easier to engineer, it’s rarely nature’s solution. If we want to embrace this collaboration as a partnership between engineer and a diverse community of organisms, how do we embrace heterogeneity over homogeneity? How do we truly cater to the needs of a community of cells so we can properly treat a community of patients?
I ask these questions not just as a thought experiment but as a way of reassessing our values as a field. In 2020 alone there were 20,000 unique academic papers published related to tissue engineering, and yet we have very few tissue-engineered therapies in the clinic. And though this disconnect is driven by a multitude of factors, at least some of them can be traced back to this idea of a failed partnership between researchers and our cells.
Although Jasmine is admittedly not a tissue engineer, she has some fantastic insight on partnering with living organisms. I asked Jasmine to reflect on the unpredictability that often comes with collaborating with living organisms: “Do you think that heterogeneity can be designed into a technology and corrected for, or is that lack of predictability just part of the package? Can we work overcome it, or do we need to work with it?”
“I think this is where there’s tension with the goals of what you’re trying to do. Probably a lot of your discipline and your training—my training too—has conditioned us to want to find the most efficient path to our goal, but doing so precludes us from designing for things that might by chance not work immediately or might take time to develop. Might do things that don’t necessarily align with the central tenets of product design, such as easy, fast to use, or super responsive,” Jasmine responded.
“I think this is where there’s tension with the goals of what you’re trying to do. Probably a lot of your discipline and your training—my training too—has conditioned us to want to find the most efficient path to our goal, but doing so precludes us from designing for things that might by chance not work immediately or might take time to develop. Might do things that don’t necessarily align with the central tenets of product design, such as easy, fast to use, super responsive,” Jasmine responded.
Our manufacturing and health systems often prioritize speed and efficiency above all other needs. For computer engineering, that has historically resulted in a system in which companies are more financially ready to manufacture brand new devices instead of investing in infrastructure for reuse and recycle. For tissue engineering, those engineering needs pressure researchers to constantly accelerate tissue maturation because the process needs to minimize cost, minimize complexity, and minimize recovery time. All so we can, very rightfully, better take care of the patient.
At what point though do we balance this engineering need for speed with a perspective that more realistically gives our cells the time and space to do what they do best? What I’m really trying to say is that we often look for quick, simple solutions to growing large, complex tissues. We all want to unlock the secret that will allow us to bypass the cascades which typically take years during development and adolescence to form functioning organs. Often there’s a dichotomy between making something that reaches function quickly and something that functions well. And by prioritizing treatments that grow tissues quickly instead of growing tissues well, we may never make tissue-engineered products that function the way we need them to.
I asked Jasmine a tough question about her smartwatch, about the culture and engineering systems it pushes against—those of speed and indifference towards all but a single end user. “At the end of the day, is caring for our devices—caring for these cellular organisms that might be embedded in them—just a bunch of fluff? Is it just a bunch of stuff that's never going to make an impact?”
“That’s totally fair, and to be honest, some days I feel like there’s no way these futures will materialize. I don’t think a company is going to want to invest in trying to realize [a slime mold-powered smartwatch]. I don’t think it would be profitable! I do feel like caring and the act of caring, even if it’s not something that’s super valued or well-prioritized in our lives, it’s something that brings us a lot of joy. It’s a human thing that we all do. I also don’t think that there’s a limit to caring. I like to believe caring is an ethic we can extend to lots of things in our lives and not get exhausted.”
Often there’s a dichotomy between making something that reaches function quickly and something that functions well. And by prioritizing treatments that grow tissues quickly instead of growing tissues well, we may never make tissue-engineered products that function the way we need them to.
Caretaking as a solution to large systems problems is at the heart of Jasmine’s work. Caretaking for other organisms. Caretaking for our environments, as ways of caretaking for ourselves and our communities, our patients. Building infrastructure that supports these systems of care and making the right engineering design decisions that support caretaking and don’t undercut it.
Today’s post certainly raises more questions than answers, but I wanted to write it as a primer for what this blog is all about. I care a lot about the planet and the many wonderful people that live on it with me. And I know you do to. So I’m challenging myself and all of you to think more deeply about the decisions we make in the lab. How can we more appropriately care for the needs of all our partners—patients, surgeons, and cells—to truly make tissue engineering successful? Fortunately, as Jasmine reminds us, caring isn’t a limited resource.