Deep tech is having a moment (deep) in Yellowstone
How fungi-based proteins, PCR testing and autonomous vehicles are shining in the world's first national park
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Last month NASA landed yet another rover on the surface of Mars, Perseverance — putting humans one step closer to inhabiting a second planet in our solar system. It’s hard to fathom, but scientists may have a better understanding of a rock 135 million miles away than they do of some locales here on earth. But thanks to science and our national parks, research being done in a remote corner of Wyoming has helped influence modern day explorers reach the surface of our celestial neighbor and ultimately, the next frontier of deep technology.
To the untrained eye, Yellowstone National Park and Mars have little in common. But to those in the know, a new world is living just out of sight to its four million annual visitors. In fact, if you ask a loyalist to describe the park’s unique features to the uninitiated, you will most certainly hear adjectives like: otherworldly, supernatural, and even alien.
And while the park itself (which just celebrated its 149th birthday) is an icon to the environmental movement, full of natural beauty, majestic landscapes and wildlife, it also holds a unique code to the advancement and discovery of deep technologies — deep below the surface of Yellowstone.
I can only imagine what Jim Bridger, or [insert any A.B Guthrie protagonist] would have thought as they made their way westward, happening upon the ethereal landscapes of Yellowstone. Much like these heralded “American explorers”, modern day scientists have been on similar journeys. Only these daring travelers are going to the frontier of discovery deep beneath the earth’s crust. Delving, quite literally, where no one has gone before and with full confidence in their theories and scientific methods. Like the “mountain men and women” of the 1800’s and indigenous peoples well before them, who packed their horses and planned their routes with only the primitive resources afforded to them at the time, these individuals are setting off down paths with potentially no expectation of return (albeit financially), with technologies that may never come to bear any fruit of progress or profit (personal, societal, or otherwise).
Deep tech explainer
So just what is the widely held definition of “Deep Tech” — what exactly is it, who is doing it, how is it funded and why is it so important?
It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the answers to these questions are still very much an evolution for how this technology is being explained -- and its seemingly uncharted territory, if you will, for investors and the mainstream media. Which brought me to more questions like, how do venture funds put a value on deep tech startups -- when the very product, service, or societal problem it may be solving is yet to be fully understood? The short answer: they can’t -- and yet, companies like SpaceX, and Impossible Foods, among many others, are extremely well funded and (seemingly) thriving.
This excerpt from a Boston Consulting Group paper on deep tech trends was what I landed on:
Deep technologies are novel and offer significant advances over technologies currently in use. They require substantial R&D to develop practical business or consumer applications and bring them from the lab to the market. Many of these technologies address big societal and environmental challenges and will likely shape the way we solve some of the most pressing global problems. These technologies have the power to create their own markets or disrupt existing industries. The underlying IP is either hard to reproduce or well protected, so they often have a valuable competitive advantage or barrier to entry.
In short, deep tech is deep in risk, and deep in reward.
And so, these are a few stories of technological discovery, all from within the boundaries of the world’s first national park. Each one, plotting a course to save our planet, through science.
Deep tech is having a moment, deep in Yellowstone.
Indeed, NASA has known the potential of Yellowstone for quite some time. Funding a plethora of studies within the depths of its thermal features and hot springs over the last 50+ years. There, they’ve found building blocks for breakthrough technologies and analogs for the uninhabitable condition of Mars, as they prepare for their missions to the red planet.
This abstract from a 2006 conference paper authored by David DesMarais explains the motivation for NASA to explore Yellowstone in preparation for its Mars projects.
Yellowstone's hydrothermal features and their associated communities of thermophiles are studied by scientists who are searching for evidence of life on other planets. The connection is extreme environments. If life originated in the extreme conditions thought to have been widespread on ancient Earth, it may well have developed on other planets and it might still exist today. The chemosynthetic microbes that thrive in some of Yellowstone’s hot springs do so by metabolizing inorganic chemicals, a source of energy that does not require sunlight. Such chemical energy sources provide the most likely habitable niches for life on Mars or on the moons of Jupiter-Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto — where uninhabitable surface conditions preclude photosynthesis. Chemical energy sources, along with extensive groundwater systems (such as on Mars) or oceans beneath icy crusts (such as Jupiter's moons) could provide habitats for life. The study of stromatolites on Earth may also be applied to the search for life on other planets. If stromatolites are eventually found in the rocks of Mars or on other planets, we will have proven that life once existed elsewhere in the universe. Yellowstone National Park will continue to be an important site for studies at the physical and chemical limits of survival. These studies will give scientists a better understanding of the conditions that give rise to and support life, and they will learn how to recognize signatures of life in ancient rocks and on distant planets.
For some, the literal and figurative, deep research in the park has been a long time coming. But as any astute observer in the world of “deep” or “frontier” tech will tell you. This is just one of many milestones that will ultimately be a banner decade for the sector.
beginning with…
Fusarium strain flavolapis
Feeding the world is already a massive problem. But doing it efficiently, with reduced (and ideally) zero carbon emissions, is an entirely different beast. Some researchers and climate prognosticators contend that the only way to solve our climate crisis is through our reliance on energy derived from fossil fuels (which I wrote about here, spoiler: we need more nuclear energy) and our agricultural systems and food supply chain. Turns out, the two are inextricably linked.
Lumping the entire food category into one “catch-all” bucket of climate impacts can be hard to measure. Researchers are now focusing at the building block level, such as the proteins that make up the foods and nutrients we know, love, need and consume. We know that traditional agriculture, specifically the meat-based/livestock variety, is a resource intensive endeavor. It takes a lot of land and energy to produce the end product before it reaches our table.
Enter the ever growing, and ever changing “plant-based protein” movement. But fusarium strain flavolapis isn’t what’s cooking at your grandfather’s impossible BBQ, but rather a unique approach to protein production at the microscopic level, using a fungi-based strain found deep in the once thought to be “uninhabitable” depths of a Yellowstone hot spring.
Traditional protein production is also a very inefficient way to invest our limited resources, wasting vast amounts of energy and land, relative to output, as the following chart shows:
So how can we ‘make’ proteins more efficiently, with less impact on the environment, and in a desirable (read scrumptious) format? The team at Nature’s Fynd, through NASA funded research at Yellowstone have found their solution in Fusarium strain flavolapis.
As described by Kristin Toussaint in Fast Company
The crux of Nature’s Fynd—which was founded in 2012 and has so far raised a collective $158 million to create its fermentation technology that turns the fungi into protein—is what it’s named Fy, the fungi-protein derived from a microbe called Fusarium strain flavolapis. Mark Kozubal, the company’s chief science officer and cofounder, discovered that microbe on a research trip to Yellowstone, where he was looking for extremophiles (microorganisms that can survive extreme conditions that would be inhospitable to other life-forms) as part of work supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA.
Thermus Aquaticus
And how could we talk about deep discovery in Yellowstone without the historic research that started it all at Mushroom Spring. Here, Thomas Brock, along with his own NASA funded team, discovered the existence of what we now know as “extremophiles”, and specifically thermus aquaticus, the heat-loving bacteria that helped pioneer DNA testing, from revolutionizing criminal investigations to PCR testing, our strongest tool (until vaccines) against the world-changing COVID-19 pandemic.
A fascinating discovery that has been widely reported on, such as this excerpt from Lina Zeldovich in her November 2020 JSTOR Daily piece,
Brock and his students were intrigued by the novel organism and its features, but the real significance of their research was yet to come. They had discovered something that would come to revolutionize medical science. About two decades later, T. aquaticus’ heat-resistant enzyme proved key to developing the Polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR method— molecular reactions necessary for identifying the presence of an organism’s DNA or RNA in a small sample. It is also used in DNA sequencing, genetic engineering and paternity testing. It works by replicating the original DNA string over and over—or “amplifying” it to make the detection possible.
Interestingly, as I wrote about in a previous post, one of my favorite pieces of 2020 included the story of the scientist and inventor behind the PCR and DNA testing breakthrough who turned out to be a rather enigmatic character, in Kary Mullis.
From Wudan Yan’s Elemental piece:
The moment of discovery, as Mullis described it in his memoir, seemed psychedelic. “Lurid blue and pink images of electric molecules injected themselves somewhere between the mountain road and my eyes,” he wrote. Later on, in a BBC interview, Mullis wondered, if not for LSD, would he have been creative enough to have invented PCR? “I don’t know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it,” he said.
It’s not all under the surface
It wouldn’t feel right to not acknowledge the many game changing and well published scientific breakthroughs at Yellowstone before this -- like the reintroduction of wolves and rescuing the iconic American Bison from the brink of extinction. Two unimaginable feats at the time that are now household names.
But, in addition to these well publicized achievements and the lesser known and otherworldly discoveries found deep below the surface, there are other cutting edge technologies on the cusp of mainstream attention.
Autonomous, electric vehicle shuttles
While the wildlife of Yellowstone are thoroughly studied and observed, the four million annual human visitors may be the least studied mammal within the boundary of the park. However, this is changing, as researchers have increasingly begun to study the visitor experience, employing traffic and congestion studies, attitude surveys, and mobility data. One thing that is clear in Yellowstone and all national parks, is their increasing popularity. Simply put, more people are enjoying their public lands and this brings challenges to providing an enjoyable experience to as many people as possible with aging infrastructure and dwindling resources.
According to the national park service, the most popular areas in Yellowstone are over-capacity by about 30% during peak visitation. To help solve these challenges, the park is looking to develop deep technology in the form of autonomous shuttles to alleviate traffic and improve the experience for the next generation of park visitors. They have selected Beep, a Florida-based autonomous Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) provider. Per their press release, they will deploy the first autonomous shuttles at Yellowstone National Park with the National Parks Service (NPS) in May 2021. The pilot program will test multi-passenger, electric automated vehicle platforms to provide visitors a safe, innovative and eco-friendly transportation alternative while exploring Yellowstone.
If no one is around to see (or invest) in deep tech, does it really exist?
When researching the origins of deep tech and other famous explorations into the unknown, I kept thinking about the famous thought experiment, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
The famous physicists Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr argued about this during their own famous exploration into what is now known as (deep tech) quantum mechanics. It is said that Einstein posed a similar question to another fellow physicist, Albert Pais on one of their famous walks, “Do you really believe that the moon only exists if you look at it?”
Pais famously answered,
The twentieth century physicist does not, of course, claim to have the definitive answer to this question.
Indicating that existence in the absence of an observer is at best a conjecture.1
These historic conversations over the years, along with others, between philosophers and scientists have led to countless discoveries and advances in our relatively short time here on earth. It has led to modern medicine, understanding the origins of our planet and of course space exploration itself. In most cases these breakthroughs happened, in the beginning, as theory, absence of observation. Which is to say, we didn’t really know if a vaccine would work, until it was tested, or if that rocket would fly us to the moon until the candle was lit.
And thankfully, due to the age of enlightenment, we have people that have made these discoveries, and investors and governments that funded these original deep tech ‘bets’. Without question, saving many lives, feeding the world and reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.
Who is investing in Deep Tech, climate edition
From the great substack newsletter (that I highly encourage you to follow) Climate Tech VC -- Here is a running list of venture capital firms with a specific focus in deep tech, which they describe as: unproven technology.
Did you like this? I’d love to hear from you. If you have suggestions for articles or topics drop a comment or DM on twitter. What are some of your ideas for advancing deep tech?
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