About Speculative Biology and Our Biotech Future

When British polymath Freeman Dyson wrote "Our Biotech Future" in 2007, he did not know that within 6 years a scientific breakthrough was about to happen: CRISPR Cas9 gene scissors. The Nobel prize in Chemistry went to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2020, for their contribution to the field which accelerated the speed at which Dyson's vision would become an everyday reality. In this talk, I will look at the history of biotech and its near future. Also known as the Biotech Revolution, I will show why advances in biology plays a significant role in defining our response to wicked problems, such as global warming, mass extinction, pandemics, endemics and such.

About the Speaker

Dr. Pinar Yoldas is an award-winning infradisciplinary architect and an Associate Professor at UC San Diego. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, MacDowell Fellow (2x), Hellman Fellow and a Creative Capital Grantee. Yoldas holds degrees from Duke (PhD), UCLA (MFA), ITU (MS), METU (BArch) and Istanbul Bilgi University (MA). She runs the Speculative Ecology and Bioarch Unit and is the principal investigator at Yoldas Lab.

About Resilience In A Changing World

The near future is clarifying itself. Over the coming decades, life will change as we know it on planet Earth. From climate instability to culture change, plagues of misinformation to global pandemics, human society faces more threats than at any other time in our history. At the same time, humanity is newly equipped to adapt, with emerging tools like artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and social innovation that have the power to reverse the narrative of impending global disruption. The time is now for us to integrate these powerful new methods - to intentionally design a more Just and Resilient future together.

The Resilience In A Changing World series will invite speakers to speculate on how we get from here to there, from our current inflection point to habitable futures where both our people and planet thrive amidst increasing uncertainty and change.