I have studied biochemistry in Tübingen and now I am researching and teaching in the field of molecular biology and genetics. My research topics are very deep and important ones. It is life, aging and death. But the microorganism I am investigating is baker’s yeast. Although we are not really interested in how old baker’s yeast can become, we use it as a model for human beings and yeast has many advantages.

This century is the century of microbiology, the last one was the century of physics and chemistry. We run out of national resources and microbiology can provide these resources. In the future energy, plastic, gas or hydrogen gas and drugs will be produced by GMOs. Maybe even informatics tools will be driven by GMOs. Because they are self-renewing, we just need some ions and sugar or light and it works. Working with Biology, we have evolution on our site, we can modify the organisms in a way that they develop themselves better and otherwise, we try to somehow counteract evolution, thinking of antibiotic resistances for example.

Great and innovative, basic experiments are very straight forward. Looking forward to seeing how it will transfer to the informatic parts. There is a lot of potential in it. One chance I see, is microorganisms are normally not "bit-like", they are normally not reacting with a yes or no. And a big chance is on modified response. Like when our liver gets a hormone, which makes it produce some enzymes e.g. for digestion, not all cells react at the same time, some start earlier some start later, which is very important. I think there is a big chance that you can get temporary response in a way. Maybe there are some ideas on how to regulate the genes.

I do not see any risks in the way you planned your experiment. Just one general potential risk, that maybe you expect too much too fast. Especially in gene technology, thinking of gene therapy it was predicted we will win against all genetically diseases plus cancer. And it does take longer as expected. You need the power of endurance. Since some parts take longer than expected.

If you really want to switch on and off, I think it will be sugars or other switching drugs, which give maximum responses. But maybe you can also think about specified organisms, maybe oxygen in the air for aerobic organisms, so maybe you can produce sensors for that and get a graduated response, as I said before, that not all the bacteria in the culture switch at one moment.

It is a big problem. We are falling behind, since there is this mistrust in genes. If I see that things are labeled "gene free", it has created a very bad atmosphere towards such a promising technology. As I said before, I think the future lies in biotechnology and genetic modification. The funny thing is, that if you modify organisms blindly by radiation or cross two species that is nature and the result is good, but if a scientist takes a certain gene and puts it in it must be bad and it must be financed by Monsanto. Another important thing to think about is why are there just big companies like Monsanto, which have monopoles in this field, because the laws and the controls are so strict that a small company has no chance to afford that. I was quite shocked when the amflora potato, which was intended to be used just for the production of glue, was forbidden for Europe.

Established institute of molecular biotechnology at the Technical University of Graz, also involved in setting up the Austrian center for industrial biotechnology, at this stage already retired as a professor but still active in acib and still involved in projects of the Austrian center for industrial biotechnology

-Very well defined biological systems, in general very well characterized (sometimes in contrast to organisms, which have been derived by classical mutagenesis), good basis of understanding of these organisms, -We can generate really specific features of such organisms, we can define the biological capabilities of such organisms, we can design very specific biosystems - the genetically modified organisms have a very important role in modern biotechnology, most bioprocesses would not work economically and technologically feasible without the use of GMOs

In general, interesting topic, connecting biosystems with robotic systems, such ideas have been on the wave for a longer time, but this is a very specific project, which directly tries navigating a robot system by biological functions, so this is a very interesting line potential to learn about basic behavior in such interfaces, you would also learn how to trigger a biosystem to be exact enough to be able to provide signals for the robot system which are also well understood by the robot system

Not really see a potential risk, only if the biosystem directs the robot into a wall, but only for the robot itself (laughs).

There is already a very deep development in this area, I see a very big future for this combination, because we have already seen that the use of the features of biosystems/biological systems can be very important in many, many areas, to provide new solutions, which we might need in the future.

Safety guidelines are always an important issue, one of the main issues that during this time of about 40 years where genetically engineering is used no serious accident happened, where the use of gene technology was the reason for the accident. And the reason is that very early guidelines were developed for a safe use of the technology. If iGEM provides such technology, they also have to provide the rules on how to use it. Because with technology you also have the problem that you can also enter areas where there are some risks and this of course also the case with genetically engineering.

I think the iGEM guidelines support a safe working area very much. Because of course if students do not have a long experience, they do not know, which areas are risky and what areas can be handled in a safe manner. And such guidelines provide this information for the students. From this point of view I think it is a very good set up, but on the other hand it is important that young students learn to work with such techniques under safe conditions. So in combination with the proper guidelines there should not be a risk that the students would work with wrong things.

Totally a great idea. On the one hand provides experience to young students, provides a lot of enthusiasm for the students and on the other hand, some ideas might also be suitable for further development in the future, e.g. for industrial approaches.

Future applications?

Combination of nanotechnology and biology, nano structes can also be put into biological systems Also, strong development in industrial technology, strong replacement of chemical processes by biological based processes, allows production of chemical products in a much let’s say cleaner way, environmentally friendly way, you can more precisely define the products

Well, my name is Karina Preis-Landl, I am an assistant professor at the Institute of Molecular Biosciences, biochemistry and I'm a microbiologist from training, but just since my second postdoc time at the Institute of Biochemistry.

Genetically modified microorganisms are an important tool. So not only in science, but also in biotechnology and industry. Partly controversial, but the new generations will certainly evoke a change of consciousness. With this crispr cas system there will certainly be a big change. Extremely big potential.

Yes, it was very exciting to read the project description, although I have never considered it from these points of view and it was actually the first point of contact that the processor can be practically replaced. It was above all an extension of the horizon for me. It was very exciting.

None, none at all. So from the point of view of biological safety, I see no risk whatsoever behind it and I mean the organisms that are bred in it are, so to speak, pets and according to certain measures it is handled accordingly. It is a closed system so I would not associate any risks

So as you have described it is a huge opportunity, because you could practically extremely expand the computing power through parallelism. That is a huge potential, when it works (laughs). Otherwise, I see a huge potential for microorganisms in connection with biotechnology or technology as a whole. If we remember that maybe we only know one percent of microorganisms that exist globally at the moment, there is still an inexhaustible potential. In my opinion, the greatest potential lies in the generation of alternative energies, since above all the conversion of solar energy, that is, the photosynthetically active microorganisms offer a very large potential, although there the development proceeds relatively slowly, but I think that has only something to do with investment. Too little investment in the field. And the second is that I believe that the problem of climate change will not be solved without microorganisms, without knowledge and without commitment. These are actually the two.

Yes, great possibility. If I were in your age once again, I would also use this possibility.

No problem. Especially at your project, what should go wrong? Nothing in my humble opinion.

No, I can answer that with a clear no. I can not believe it. I rather believe that this is a socio-political problem, that the world's hunger is related to the stabilization of economies and inequality in distribution, which, in my opinion, is still the main problem for hunger. What will be certain in the future, is due to the climate change that certain areas of cultivation may be restricted and that the genetic engineering provides the opportunity to produce crops that can be successfully used, for example, in dry areas. Here I already see potential and a possibility. But that it actually wipes the hunger from the world, the genetically modified plants certainly not. I also believe that new generations are coming through the CRISPR-Cas system and the genome editing and I believe that this new generation will be accepted differently and used differently. Nevertheless, the problem of the world remains open, since the use of genetically modified plants gives rise to monopoly. This is again a socio-political and economic-political problem. This has little to do with technology and science. One can not solve the other now. It needs a social dialogue that brings this together and regulates it.

My name is Gabriele Berg and I come from Germany, but I have been here for 12 years in the Austrian Chair for Environmental Biotechnology at Graz University of Technology. We are involved in our research with microbiomes, in a specific place or in a particular organism. We are investigating these things and on the other hand we are also trying to transfer new knowledge into application, like biotechnological applications make with the background of health, so either plants, humans or our environment to make healthier.

So if I am honest, then I would first think of: super for research, secondly quite difficult in the application and I would immediately encounter hurdles in the registry and as a third point I would gladly mention that it is of course an infinite natural diversity of micro-organisms that we have only really understood and analyzed a very small percentage so far, and in this respect from the 25 years of research experience, my conclusion is that the diversity is the most important and I would rather look at whether I would not also find the potential in this natural variety.

I find this really extremely exciting and innovative. We ourselves try to do so, we try to connect the technique with the microbiome, with the microbiology. I believe that there is really an unimaginable potential that we cannot imagine, so I find it very good that you are dealing with it, even if it is now, so to speak, the interaction between a robot and a microorganism, but I find that is a very good and exciting application.

In principle, it is so that all we do is to carry risks and, of course, also such a project, so in this respect it is always important to weigh which risks are bigger or which risks are dangerous and I see here, of course, the robot could somehow have a problem and the genetically modified MO might leak, genetically engineered MOs are not automatically dangerous. It depends strongly on which transgenes they carry, which promoters are in there, so that there is actually a much more detailed evaluation necessary to meet here any statements. And there are also very many who are little risky and it is always a major risk of transgenic organisms that the transgene migrates from one organism to the other, which nature makes permanent and what is perhaps a good example, are we all ourselves. We carry 2 kg of MOs in us, so it would be natural that the robot follows the holobionten concept and carries MOs in itself. However, I would argue here for more diversity.

Yes, very strong. In the last few years we have noticed that microbiomes are severely impoverished in their diversity, both in humans and in the high-performance animals and plants, so that a future field is surely the microbiome engineering and we also need the technology

Yes, I think it is great and I would like every student to participate. The study is often very tedious and you have to learn very much and is far from its later field of application, namely the right research and the sooner you get in touch with this research, the better it is to estimate whether you have selected the right one, gaining experience and seeing achievements, so I think that's a great thing.

Everyone is grown up, we teach that, so we also teach the risks and I think that everyone has to take on some responsibility in the course of his studies, at the latest with his Master's thesis and not just say that these are my results and they are statistically significant or not. So, there are always risks but I also think it's important to gain experience

The ultimate solution is certainly not, because there is no black and white here. I would imagine that it makes sense to travel far away in different regions or for different plants, but overall it is really important to preserve the diversity of our crops. We have a lot of cultivar adapted to the specific development conditions on the ground and personally I am worried that the developing countries in particular have the right seeds from the corresponding crops. For example, we have a project with Africa. It's all about healthy vegetables and you cannot imagine how difficult it was to organize vegetable seeds at all. We have other problems as well. Genetically modified MOs must always be considered in detail, who will use them, which property will be transferred Of course, much of this is herbicide tolerance now. So a detailed look is necessary. It certainly is not the ultimate solution.

I am professor of Microbiology at the Karl Franzens University. Work at the Institute of Molecular Biosciences. Participated in research and teaching. As chairman of the Curricula Commission also responsible for studies. The scientific field at the moment is working on HTG on how molecular genes are transmitted through so-called bacterial conjugation. Plays a role in the medical field, in the transmission of antibiotic resistance genes. Also examine molecular regulatory mechanisms bacterial population. Here also heterogeneity, not all organisms of a population also express DNA transfer genes. On the other hand, working together with the Institute of Applied Geosciences, are investigating the phenomenon that in concrete structures, within a few years, concrete construction is eaten by bacteria that settle there and thereby destroy the sewage system. Since this is very costly, wanting are looking for new materials which are not attackable by the bacteria.

- great potential in the field of the MOs, whereby I believe that we do not know for a long time which variety of bacteria and archaea is present and what possibilities we have to use this variety, e.g. in biotechnological processes. To identify genes that are suitable for the production of certain substances. It would also have to genetically modulate MO's to take full advantage of the existing potential. - Bioremediation - environmental detoxification by MO's. On poisonous waste dumps are found bacteria and MOs which can degrade these substances. It is also about recognizing what is there and then trying to use these organisms also purposefully.

I think that your experiment is very exciting. And that a linkage here can make a lot of sense, since certain sensor systems are present in some Mo's, on the one hand very sensitive and on the other hand, one can directly couple much change in the organism, such as e.g. in her case with movement. What also stands in the foreground is the work in the laboratory, and the attempt to really implement this idea and then you see how difficult it is to implement ideas that you have.

I do not see any risks with this experiment now. Neither the microorganisms used nor the machines controlled by them. As long as the MO's are not released also no danger of HGT.

Not at the moment. But the possibility to connect a biological system with a purely technical system is very exciting. I think, however, that the knowledge which can be gained from it is very well applied to others, e.g. the control of prostheses. Especially in the medical field, where there is also a biological system with a technique to connect it could bounce.

To this must be said regulatory mechanisms in bacteria are very diverse. It is often thought that bacteria are very simple creatures, but it must be said that highly complex regulation mechanisms are also present here, only if one thinks of the quorum sensing, they perceive how many of their species are around in their environment or where there is food, they record temperature changes and many other special signal paths are available here. For example, a quorum sensing system to control a process. In addition, there is heterogeneity within a population. There are also some sort of work splitting within populations, where some cells take on certain functions, making the whole complex and complicated.

The legal basis is sufficient in my opinion and would also allow the release of genetically modified plants that would be useful in agriculture. As far as I know, there has never been a release attempt in Austria. While the legal basis is clear, it does not seem politically feasible for research to be conducted in this direction in Austria either. Mainly the dangers are placed in the foreground. In my opinion, the existing potential is very large, but it is actually broke. But at least in medicine, genetic engineering is gaining greater acceptance, presumably because of the hope for a longer and healthier life. The actual greater danger is actually e.g. the addition of antibiotics in food. The risk of genetically modified plants overestimated in comparison.

I am a university professor, BSL Safety Officer / research project leader. I am on the board of the ÖGMBT and FWF (member of the board of trustees of the Science Fund of Science Funding). I am also working on questions of infection biology (e.g. cholerae and invasive infections e.g. meningitis / pneumonia)

Jonathan Beckwith (cloned / isolated 1969 the first gene from E. coli and warned already in the seventies before misuse by gene manipulation); What comes next? Keywords (euthanasia, racephilosophy / phenotype / genotype manipulations and selectivity);

Clever in construction, eg. short half-life of the fluorescent dyes by TEV proteolysis, also Riboswitch control I liked. Consistent in the concept, if should however autonomously be equated with uncontrolled then rather bad prospects. You should remember to install firewalls. If in the long-run the application on humans would be very interesting: connection of neurons and CPUs!

In the present case, I see no risks as long as the bugs do not control a tank autonomously. Otherwise, this concept (carry over to humans) will influence evolution, meaning that it will have an immense influence by concept.

Unprecedented will open up, the long overdue bio-revolution, according to the nuclear, chemical and IT revolution. Whether it will have good or bad impact remains questionable. I think it could contribute to a quantum leap in human development.

Two-component systems (transcription) coupled with post-translational modifications (glycosylation etc) coupled to proteolysis regulation (fast disposal), all in a network regulation (forward-positive / negative-feedback, loops).

Petunias (ornamental flowers) can be bought everywhere for forty years, e.g. in super- and hardware stores worldwide! Recently, it has been shown that genetically modified petunias have "collapsed" within these plant species. You do not know where these come from. Therefore, I consider very much of legal regulation! Nowhere in the world is this regulation as strictly handled as in Austria and EU, so quite so! And as a consumer, everyone should have the right to know if he / she will become a test rabbit.

My name is Daniel and I am a student of molecular-microbiology at Karl-Franzens University in Graz and I am also a member of the Openbiolab Graz Austria. It’s a free time lab, an open biolab and a biohacking makerspace so we are doing some genetically engineered stuff so we are pleased to have you here

Open Biolab is the first biohacking laboratory in Europe, which was allowed to work with genetically engineered organisms. Of course, it was a hard way to achieve this, because we were a group of students of molecular biology who shared the idea to have an own laboratory, to work on our own ideas, to work on creative ideas and we are not restricted with some bureaucracy or financial problems, which can be at the universities. And that is why we said we want our own space, to work on our own ideas and create what we think it would be right for us. So, we searched for different people and people who are interested in this idea and we created this laboratory on our own. We had no funders and do everything by our own. Now we are in the same place with the Hackerspace so technology and biology is in this facility and is connected at some point and this laboratory is open for everybody who is interested in molecular or microbiology, of course also biochemistry and chemistry and also everybody who is interested in science is welcomed to come.

Well, when I think about genetically modified microorganism I am thinking about the words responsibility, creativity and sustainably

Well, it is a nice idea to connect biology and technology and it has a great potential. Biology and technology as separate things are not new but the connection of both of them can create a lot of possibilities, so I think it could be a great project.

There are a lot of potential risks in genetically engineering itself, so yes somebody can try to do some bad things with this kind of technology but it is your responsibility to take care of it

It is a wide field of technologies but for example technologies for environmental signaling processes, so you can check for environmental changes in a habitat or when there is some pollution in the environment, so this could be a nice idea for the future.

There are many regulators in a bacteria system and I am not really an expert in this thing, but I think something which is not harmful like gfp regulated lacZ Operon, its ok because it is a basic system which work in any kind of bacteria so I would start with this.

Yes, I think it is a good idea to do that, but you have to check the habitat around it, the free space, the creative space and well iGEM could be a space like this, but this is a competition so I am not sure if all of the members would feel like they could work on their own or maybe they have some restrictions like financial problems or something like that.

Of course, somebody can do something stupid, but who does not? So of course, you need some advisors to guide you just a little bit and help you if something goes wrong, but I think that is not such a big risk or problem.

It is really a very controversial topic and personally I think it would be better if we can make regulations that are based on real facts and not on some “emotional” opinions. It would be good if we have some real experts in the positions which introduce the regulations and these regulations should not restrict any kind of scientists who want to work with them but it should make clear that genetically modified organism are used for a scientific fact and not just for a company’s profit

I am the CEO of BriefcaseBiotec. This is a Startup that works with Kilobaser. Kilobaser is the first personal DNA printer. I studied molecular biology, but it became very soon very boring to me. Then I established the OpenBiolab in Graz and the first Biohacker Space in the German-Speaking area and from that on the company was formed.

technical progress, cure and future.

Basically, definitely. I think computers or silicon-based systems have their maximum intelligence that might be possible. In the field of sensors are bacteria or microorganisms in many areas ahead, perhaps always will stay. In that sense, it is certainly a field that has a future.

I don’t really see any risks.

That's a good question. It certainly has its applications, if this is so easy to handle with , will always be a question. In the industry, things always have to work, or work long and always consistent, and that's a big challenge, and there are so many research projects that looked good, but in practice, it was not good enough.

Well classic, for example, with light

I think it's very good. I think this strongly promotes the idea that you/students can touch, learn and applicate new things by themselves, because the universities have unfortunately not so much space for creativity. Therefore iGEM is in this case a very good exercise to progress, learn and perhaps also start a company. I believe that iGEM has definitely built something and it is a very big and important publicity for synthetic biology and genetic engineering . I think it's great that you get so many challenges at iGEM I see something critical, that many teams start a project and never finish it and this is then going to be forgotten next year. But if you say the way is the destination then that is great. But I think iGEM is a great thing

No. Our society has become much too anxious about many things. On the one hand, people complain about the fact that all children just play with their computers, and on the other hand, you are not given the chance to gain experience or do anything by yourself what is interesting in chemistry, biotechnology or biology. But I believe that the fears are much higher than the actual risks.

My great hope is, if I am properly informed, there is a directional decision by the EU concerning CRISPR / Cas next March, that it is going to be liberalized

My name is Thomas Schmickl. I am biologist by training, but I have a high affinity to computers and programming so I try to use that in my biological study. This is why my labs name is „The artificial life lab” and we try to use bio robots there and also swarm robotics but always in order to understand nature better and understand life in itself better.

In my training I have no means to tell if this is too dangerous or not. I was not dealing in my studies with ethics and I can not calculate the risks in any numerical way. What I know is that living systems are always self-organized systems so you have a lot of microscopic processes going on inside of a live form and then you will see emerging phenomenon arising from that and they are basically unpredictable beforehand and if you play around with the genetic code of organisms there is a danger that you change those microscopic processes and that something you did not expect will appear. How likely this is now dangerous or not is not something that I can answer to but it is definitely something that you should be aware of. yes, it is our job as scientists to push the door wide open and gather all knowledge we can gather. it is then the job of regulators and politicians to create frameworks in order to prevent potential risks to happen or spread.

So, what I said in my previous answer was that it is very difficult to predict the emerging phenomena. They might be surprisingly welcome or they might be surprisingly dangerous. Both of them is possible and I personally lack that data which is more likely than the other but there will be surprises and this can be on the good site or will fall on the bad site. Concerning technology assessment, following the same line this is a very very bad idea to even believe that something like that is possible and useful. If I build a bomb or if I build a killer virus definitely I don’t need to study technology assessment to tell that this is not a good idea and that this is dangerous so whenever it is obvious I can easily tell so the only interesting part is when it is not obvious and how should I tell if a technology becomes dangerous in future when it is cross effected by other technologies that are not know today which will be known in 10 years, 50 years, 100 years and my classical example is the invention of the telephone which by the way lead to suicide of taxi drivers because without the invention of the telephone there would be no smartphone, without the smartphone there would be no uber company and without the uber company some taxi drivers would not have committed suicide but it would be ridiculous to blame the invention of the telephone hundreds something years ago for the suicides of taxi drivers today. You can in principle not predict what will come from a technology that is invented today. It is an in principle impossible accept in some very very obvious cases where you we don’t need technology assessments that’s like common knowledge and some basic thinking that can give you an answer.

Different technology fields, well genetically modified organisms are probably a little bit more dangerous than classical mechatronic devices because there is this additional feature of reproduction that every living organism has and in reproduction there is potential spread and in potential spread there is potential danger so I would rank them always one level higher in the danger level then mechatronic or electronic developments.

A relative one to other technologies that I say this one is more likely to become dangerous than another one - yes - but not in a way like it is normally understood. Can I tell today whether I should invest time into this invention yes or no because there might be something dangerous coming out of it. That is strictly not foreseeable. So you suggest just to explore all new technologies to a certain point and then think about the implications or to which point to go, for example in GMO is it a good idea to do the studies behind closed doors so that we try that nothing modified gets out? Definitely having secure laboratories is a prerequisite but i think this is how it is done every where in the world and there are standards and of course these standards are important. For me the question is more should I really deeply understand those organism should i understand them so deeply that i can reprogram them? And this is the tricky question because if I fully understand them of course I can unlock a lot of potential but I will also can unlock a lot of harm and this is the old question in this discussion, should I then seek for this understanding or should I not seek? It is not about lab standards or stuff like that. I think this is out of dispute. But maybe this lab standards and maybe even what you now say that you should or that you, that this unlocks potential danger or maybe potential chances this already, i mean, this questions are countered by technology assessments that is the solution that people found.What you say is they are unnecessary, what would be an alternative to them?

But you already do that to sume extend when you say that there is a potential risks when something is able to self replicate and spread. Why isn’t that already some sort of technology assessment?

Yea maybe but it is still.. Every horror movie has kill it before it lays eggs. (laughter) Or something like I mean this is trivial and i think this is what farmers did since centurys when they were encountering some I don’t know some investigation with some parasites or some diseases in their animals that they try to separate and prevent the spreading and so. I hope for me, this is trivial for me the real question is should we open the door and look inside or should we not? This is the really tricky question and this is an ethical philosophical question that can not be countered by lab doors i think. It is a start with the idea with an idea of a new technology. Yes probably yes, that is why i am in favor of opening the door because we scientists we should seek for knowledge and this is the higher gain and then we should have regulations and politics around that and forbid any abuse of that and try to prevent most of the abuse of it and this is our job as scientists that we gather knowledge and we are aware that this is a dangerous thing that we are doing.

So I like the concept of understand life in itself, what makes a living thing different from a non-living thing and one way to approach this is to try to create as a farfetched goal to create something which is lifelike or living from scratch, because the basic idea is if you can build it you have understood it. And so having this far fetched goal which we probably will never achieve in our lifetime we search for the building blocks to build such an artificial life form. These building blocks they contain understanding in order to get those building blocks we have to understand it bit by bit how life works, how it functions, what life is. And this is why I like this overhaul goal of artificial life. Sometimes it is worded also in a different way that we seek for life not how it is, but how it can be so we are searching for alternative forms of life. Also this is a very interesting goal because it brings you to a different perspective where you see the more general principles of life. If you are too much focused on the life that we see on our earth than we can be maybe overfocused and general enough and this might prevent a more general understanding of life in itself.

It is called artificial life. It is definitely not seeking for an answer to the question how life can be in all of its variants. It is very much focused on the life that we know on the earth. It is build from this knowledge that was gained. I don’t know how much we will learn from that. Maybe it is of practical interest for not only genetically modified organisms, but also for morphologically and physiologically modified organism maybe it is the next step of that, practical applications might exist but i doubt that we will learn much new things about life in general. If I compare it to building a house for example it’s like I have a house to build from concrete and wood and some glass windows and I remove them and then I go somewhere and bring new glass windows, new concrete and new wooden parts and would build this house again. I build this house from scratch. What I am interested more is how could I build a house from water for example, what would I have to do so it is still a house? And by doing so I learn more about the house in itself. What makes a house a house and not just like rebuilding what is already known.

As i said it’s a very open field, there can be any form that fulfil some basic requirements of life what is a discussion in itself, which I won’t start here but for example reproduction, inheritance, evolution over time are important features over there, self sustainability of these organisms are important, self repair and so on and so on. And it can come in farious forms and the most likely form that we will encounter is of course robots, because we see a quantum leap in robotics today, ranging from autonomous cars over legged robots, very small robot swarms so robotics is a booming field and in addition to that we see artificial intelligence, adaptive algorithms but also software is having sort of a quantum leap and maybe even material science will have a quantum leap soon with this graveen project and so on. Batteries will have a quantum leap and computation in itself maybe with quantum computers we will have a real quantum leap. So bringing all this things together it is very likely that in ten twenty years we will have machines which are indiscriminable from humans for example and definitely we are live forms and machines that are not discriminable from ourselves will be also life forms or not?

It is artificial life that these people are doing. The question is how interesting it is and how much we will learn from that, that we couldn't learn in another way? For me another important step is these are all unicellular organism, they might be interesting but they can not do much. So real work is not achieved by unicellular organisms. They produce substances, maybe they can even change their colour or emit light or something like that. But for example if I compare this to a robot, there is no work that can be done by these organisms, classical application for a robot is to wash my dishes and clean my house, vacuum my house and another one would be maybe to safeguard my house against thieves or something like that and none by these features can be done by unicellular organisms not even billions of unicellular organism will never bring my dishes from the table to the dishwasher and put them in the cupboard afterwards. That’s basically not impossible, so when we look at life I think we have to discriminate between green slime and what we usually comprehend as life which are higher plants and higher animals and there is a huge difference in the work they can actually do and artificial life maybe can be seen also along this lines so we have to one branch which maybe can produce maybe insulin very cheaply or very efficiently and we have another line of artificial life mostly mimicking multicellular higher animals, sometimes also plants. And they can achieve real work and do maybe much more interesting and helpful things for humans except building chemical substances.

I think it is a robotic idea that we also once had but it never made it into a proposal or something like that. It is rather obvious what you want to have there is a sort of autonomous robot and if you go to the very end of the line of an autonomous robot you have an artificial animal and such an autonomous robot should collect plastic, rebuild itself because it is built from plastic so that it can collect more plastic and then of course collect even more plastic so this is the way how you would approach that. Definitely yes so you can probably take concepts of cell replication and so on but if it really should achieve work it needs muscles, it needs a nervous system it needs the ability to create, it needs a sort of skeleton and joints to be really able to apply force so growth alone is probably not enough for achieving any of those tasks.

I think for them it was first important, especially for my students which are biology students mostly, that they get a little bit closer back to biology because in the time in my lab they had to programm a lot and work with engineering questions a lot, what brought them maybe a little bit away from biology and by now integrating those organisms into their artificial life forms that they are partially creating they have to deal again with physiological aspects of unicellular organisms for example. What I think was a very important part, so that they work in the lab and their studies are now closer together again. The second thing is that they got some insight in how the scientific community works or how life as a scientist looks like that you have to find an interesting topic that you can work on. On the one hand you have to find maybe financial support for doing this and you have to involve the public whom you have to tell in the end. I mean in most cases they pay, it's mostly taxpayer money that we use and we have to explain the public what we are using their money for and why we use it this way and not in a different way and all those components are all part of this iGEM program or iGEM strategy which is I think a very interesting part of learning how to do science and this is what I hope what my students learned.

Should we change that? Isn’t the job of university to teach knowledge and because many people go through a university which don’t end up as scientists, I don’t have numbers but i guess 90% of the people will do something else than science after their studies so is it really the job of a university to teach also the life as a scientist? I think for this, such projects like iGEM would be, I think, a better solution.

No skills? I don’t say no skills, but what you are referring to are social skills and of course social skills are important, but how to finance for example how to gather financing for a specific study, something that in most cases scientists need, as soon as you go to a company you probably don’t have to search for that because development will be paid by your company for example and if you and become a teacher then of course you don’t have that and so on and so on and you have to look at the spectrum of things that people have know. I would be afraid to bring universities too much into that field where you just train for your job that you are going to do. This is what we have in Austria, so called Fachhochschule, and this is what they do and I think universities should not become like that. University is a place for thinking and for most people university is a time in their life where they spend on thinking in a way they will never do it again. It is a very special time period of your life on a very special place and this is how it should be. You can get your soft skills anywhere out there, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any soft skills trained at university but the main aspect of university should be thinking and promoting thinking, critical thinking, like rethinking what has been thought before and discussing and all of that there is little place in your work life for that and has nothing to do with soft skills. It is a really special place and time in your life.

My full name is Joshua Cherian Varughese, I am an electrical engineer by basic trait and I did my masters in mechatronics, so I got involved in robotics, came to the Artificial Life Lab in Graz to work on a project called SubCultron. We are making a swarm of robots to deploy in the Laguna of Venice to do some environmental monitoring and measurements which hopefully will lead to some more ecological policy changes.

I think it is really cool that an organism can interface or even control a robot. I think we will see massive changes of how a robot will look like. I think it’s a starting point and will hopefully end in a robot that becomes a useful robot in our day-to- day life.

Definitely, definitely, so right now in our robots we have space occupied for computational hardware, so I would imagine a microorganism to be micro, so it occupies less space and I would imagine a robot with a microorganism based controller to be much smaller than robots that we have today. So yes, I would definitely see potential applications.

I don’t really see a risk a such, but I see a challenge. We would have to change the way we think about controlling, programming, paradigms that we have laid down for sequential processing. Until now we use CPUs and maybe when we talk about parallel processing we use GPUs but we are still working very sequential.

Definitely! If I look at how architectures are changing, and we are slowly moving towards this more parallel processing structures. GPUs already have a more parallel processing structure, but this might be a paradigm shift where we cross the threshold to some kind of completely different architecture, if it is successfully implemented as a computer.

So, if we look at the past few years and look at which areas have benefited from the increasing parallel processing, I would say there are two main areas that come quickly to my mind: There is natural language processing and more widely known is computer vision or image processing. So I would expect that these fields would massively benefit from parallel processing. And talking about microorganism that can be used as computers – they might become +, for example, very, very good in understanding sounds: We are able to use google translate today because of convolutional neural networks that has gotten really good in understanding what we are speaking and any massively parallel system could implement a CNN to do the same things. So, I would expect these two fields to massively benefit from any massively parallel system.

Yes, if we can dream: If I have a very small, strong computer I can have an implant in my ear with a microphone and a speaker. If you then talk to me in German that processing unit can change that input signal into the language I understand and then I can speak back. That would be an application I could think of. If I want to do that today, I probably need a huge computer, at least in comparison to a microorganism based computer.

Yes, I guess the controversy comes from the term modified, people want to remain the way they are they don’t want anything modified. I do not think that we should stop progressing because of fears: I’m going to take the philosophical point of few that we have to improve, we have to develop things and hope that the right people be at the right places at the right time to take the right decisions. Of course we will need controls and do whatever is needed so it doesn’t end up in the wrong hands, but that doesn’t mean that we stop progressing in this direction.

When we heard about microwaves heating our food there were a lot of people going crazy saying that we will all die of cancer. But when we were actually starting using it, we actually saw that this is fine. That would be my approach, just do things that help people and then the society is going to understand. We always have, and we always have been growing over our natural inhibitions. And I think that genetically modified organism will make a huge difference and people are going to see it.

I’m a zoologist. I’m working here in the artificial life lab on the topics of bionics, bioinspired algorithms, interaction of artificial life forms e.g. robots and life forms e.g. honey bees. But also with fish and in the Colibot project also with micororganisms.

• Big potential for society, for industry to produce things, actually many GMO’s are already in use to produce substances in industrial areas
• Big discussion in public about GMO’s, if they are dangerous or not
• On the one hand, there is a big industry working with GMO’s on the other hand we do not fully understand what could happen, this is a field where I think that still research should be done,
• While working on the Colibot project I found out, that there are still open fields for GMO’S, where they can be used, this is what we at the moment do researching
• there should be an open discussion about GMO’S based on research/facts done by independent researchers

The general idea to use GMO’s to control technical entities opens new doors. The idea to control technical devises with GMO’S has from my point of view a lot of potential. But we are still at the beginning off finding out what this potential is. GMO’s are used for a lot of things now a days (to produce things….) but as far as I know, they are rarely used to communicate. This is a thing we would like to change. We would like to show that GMO’s are capable to communicate with other entities. We want to improve the existing way that GMO’S are used for communication. The idea behind is that we don’t only use GMO’s for production, we use them also for communication, e.g. tell a user about the status or tell a machine what to do, to solve problems with usually can only be solved in very expensive ways by classical entities. GMO’s have abilities that we miss in classical robots. E.g. they are very cheap to produce and reproduce, also regarding sensing they are able to detect substances and situations that are hardly detectable by detecting devices. We want to show that we can use GMO’s for more things than just production.

There is no new technology or no new machine you produce that is completely without risks. First of all, what we use here is a life form, even if they are very small, and life forms don’t react in a perfect determined way, they sometimes react different than you expect. The thing is if you need a perfectly determined system, that reacts in a perfect way, still the classical silicon chip is the better solution, but if you gave tolerance, than these kinds of processes are usable for you. The other thing discussed regarding MO’s is what happens if they get into the environment. The question is can these modifications jump from one life form to another and what happens if they jump. I wouldn’t expect that the MO’s do any harm if they get into the environment. I can imagine that they lose their abilities pretty fast if released. But therefore, we have restrictions we should keep to.

As mentioned before GMO’s as life forms have sensors for chemical substances, that go far beyond the technical sensors we use today. They are far better in detecting substances, the question is if we can manage an interface between GMO’s and machines that allows us to use e.g. E. Coli as a sensor for something. We can also use GMOs as controller devices, however a big problem is the speed of the reaction. Usually people say there is no chance that you can use bacteria as processing devices, as they have comparatively long cycle lengths. We would need new algorithms that can run on a CPU where thousands of single devices communicate to each other and calculate things. The real advantage might only show when we combine different kinds of bacteria and create a smart ecosystem of different GMOs. They might have different tasks, some might for example support or organize the others.

I don’t think that a microorganism based computer can replace our day-to-day computers. They are already established and proved themselves useful. But there are special operation areas where we would massive parallel systems.