Hello, and thank you for listening to the MicroBinfeed podcast. Here, we will be
discussing topics in microbial bioinformatics. We hope that we can give you some
insights, tips, and tricks along the way. There is so much information we all
know from working in the field, but nobody writes it down. There is no manual,
and it's assumed you'll pick it up. We hope to fill in a few of these gaps. My
co-hosts are Dr. Nabil Ali Khan and Dr. Andrew Page. I am Dr. Lee Katz. Both
Andrew and Nabil work in the Quadram Institute in Norwich, UK, where they work
on microbes in food and the impact on human health. I work at Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention and am an adjunct member at the University of
Georgia in the U.S. Today we are looking at the crazy world of NFTs, non-
fungible tokens. For some reason, I took a deep dive by creating my own NFT.
What do you think? I'm totally in the dark with this one, Lee. You'll have to
start right at the beginning and explain what a non-fungible token actually is.
It sounds like you need a topical cream for it. Just apply the cream and then
you'll get better. I know the idea is based off of blockchain and all of this
crypto whatever whozits. So maybe we should start there and you can tell us what
is the blockchain and explain it like I'm a kid or someone who doesn't know. The
blockchain is a public ledger on the internet and like with Bitcoin, it keeps
track of who owns how much of each Bitcoin. And so anybody can do like a public
query at any time and figure out who owns how much money, basically. Right. It's
like a public ledger of all of the transactions, at least in the Bitcoin
example, it's a ledger of all of the transactions involving the currency. But
then it's constructed in a way and people can keep making new transactions and
those are added in a way that it doesn't like pollute the ledger somehow. Yeah,
I guess so like there's security built into it also. And you can't just like
tell a computer to update the ledger in your favor and give yourself 100
Bitcoins. You have to have the right hash and the right key to the hash in order
to make any update. And then a majority of the computers that control that
ledger have to agree to that update. If you even try to change something in the
past, it won't work because you'd make like a new chain off of that and
everybody would be disagreeing on which way the chain went and the majority
would just be against you. So there's like a lot of security built in and a lot
of it is through democratization. Well done. Okay. Anyway, I think that the
point of the non fungible token is that you can arbitrarily store any text on
the blockchain and no one can change it and it's there for everyone to see.
Isn't that right? That you own it? Yeah. So like with Bitcoin, you have like
these quantities on the public ledger and they're all interchangeable. The non
fungible part is like you have your unique thing. Non fungible means it's a
unique, non, this thing is not equivalent to this other thing. Like the Mona
Lisa is not the same thing as another banning. And so if you have a non fungible
token, an NFT, then you own that unique thing and the public ledger supports
that you own it. And what that means in the real world, I don't think that's
defined by any laws or anything like that. I mean, I can say I own it and the
ledger supports it, but if somebody copies my picture on the NFT blockchain,
it's not like any kind of court in the world is going to support my claim that
somebody wronged me. So does that mean we can add a genome and then we can say
we owned that genome or genus? I think so. I think you can put it onto the
blockchain and say you own it. But again, the court systems of the world would
never support that probably. Maybe think about academia. What happens if instead
of you have a new organism, a new species, instead of uploading it or sending it
to a reference hub and a reference collection, could we maybe put it into these
non NFTs because I can't say non fungible. Could you put it as an NFT, the
genome and say, listen, we found this first. Here we go. Here's the type strain
for the species. And there you go. We can do away with the NCTC and the ATCC and
all of those. I think that's an incredible idea. So I have a few thoughts on
that. Number one is you need a network of computers to actually support this.
And so sometimes a database or usually a database is actually better than a
blockchain. And maintaining something as big as NCBI can only be done by a few
institutions in the world right now. So I can't imagine thousands or millions of
computers out there maintaining this huge database through a blockchain, through
a public ledger. If it were possible, then I think it would be kind of
interesting and awesome. No one person, no one entity would control a genome
that was submitted. It would just be submitted. But then you were saying like,
this could be like the type strain. Who's going to call it the type strain? I
would not support a majority of internet users calling something the type
strain. I suppose we could do away with accession numbers, maybe going back to a
previous point. If all the genomes that we make, we get accession numbers and
they just happen to be tokens, we would have a decentralized accession number
generating system effectively. Yeah, that would be so awesome. And we wouldn't
have to go through a bunch of, it was probably to submit things. You'd have your
own blockchain submitter at home or something. And it's scalable as well,
because there's so many transactions on Eurythium and Bitcoin that we know it
works, you know, at massive scale. So think about it, you know, 100,000
bacteria, throw them in, get new accessions, token accessions for them, put them
in a paper, they're never going to change. We already own them. No one else can
take them from us. It actually solves many, many problems and it's all public as
well. So it's not like we're trying to hide anything. Yeah, you'd know like
everything, like when it was submitted, you'd know who has it, all that stuff
and it would never be changed. So what do you think about retractions and
changing stuff? It would never happen because science does everything perfectly
and there's never any mistakes. Well, I mean, if it's just a thing of minting
accession coins, then you just trash that accession coin and that accession
code. OK, so there is there there's a mechanism on a blockchain to trash one?
No, you just you'd have to just you'd have to just append an amendment that says
the thing is now junked. So, yeah, but it would but the record of it would
always be there. OK, so now we've come up with a new way of a decentralized
accession number system. We can now destroy NCBI, EBI and DDBJ and we can get
rid of all of them because now we have a system where we can get our accession
numbers for our papers. Don't need to worry about it. But how feasible is it?
Does it cost any money or is it this all kind of free? Yeah, so you democratize
the network. You also democratize the cost. So instead of our respective
governments paying for these things, you're looking at spending tens of dollars
every single time you do one increment on the chain. It takes money and it takes
actual electrical energy to do this stuff. I just want to say again, I'm
horrified at the prospect of of destroying NCBI or DDBJ or ENA. Well, not
destroying, but we could liberate them from having to maintain this kind of
database and archive perpetually into the future. And we could allow them to
focus on, you know, other high value stuff like science and whatnot or research.
Yeah, so I'm just hinting at what's to come, but I mean, for example, submitting
one NFT to the network cost me more than thirty dollars to do. I think. Yeah.
Why don't you take us to your example? Because you've done this. You should you
should take us through the process if we're going to try this out. Right. I got
really interested in this after reading on this. So I had a few different
examples to read up on. There was a New York Times article that we'll put into
the notes and it was about an article on making an NFT. So the New York Times
author made the NFT and the NFT was a picture of the article itself. So this guy
put it out there and described how people bid on it. And and I think it got up
to like it approached a million dollars to buy this picture of an article,
which, again, is only owned the only evidence of you owning it is on the
blockchain, not by like the American justice system or anything. Did you see
today that Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet or the World Wide Web,
sold the original web source code for something like five point four million
dollars? Yeah, yeah. Ridiculous. That came across. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. As
an NFT, of course. And can you even do that with it being open source? Why not?
Well, I mean, I think.  The thing is, it's odd what the NFT actually represents,
because it's trying to convert a digital entity. So say I draw a picture in MS
Paint, and I make an NFT of it, and then I transfer ownership to Yuli, like you
basically have control of that thing and access to that thing. But the
intellectual property of the image is not transferred to you. It's like a
photocopy or a copy of this document that I've just given to you. So if it's
like the thing of the article, it's like a picture of the article, it's not the
information in the article itself, nor is the source code of something. You've
just taken a snapshot and put it up there. So it's like buying a print of an
artwork. And I get it, it's this idea of making something which is like
introducing an idea of scarcity for digital things, which doesn't. I mean, if I
want to give you a program, I just make a copy and give it to you. There's no,
like what's the, like if the price of something is defined by the scarcity of
it, then there is no price for anything on the internet because you can just
make an infinite amount of it. So do you feel like this is a, is this a fad,
Nabil? I think in its current implementation, it's a fad because it's not
actually understanding the thing, what it means to own something. Because the
value of owning a thing, like if I get a print of an artwork, like, yeah, what?
That doesn't matter. The thing that matters is the idea, is ownership of the
concept of property itself, you know? So I would rather own, as Andrew pointed
out, you'd rather be in control and modify the source code of what Tim Berners-
Lee put up, rather than just this instantiated copy of it that is now like
immutable. It implies that the creator never makes another copy of the thing
again. Right, there was that artwork that, I'm forgetting the guy's name now,
Beeble put out there, Beeble or Booble, I don't know. And he put an artwork out
there and he sold it for millions of dollars. It was like $59 million. And that
really sparked this whole thing. It was what? Was it Banksy? No, oh, Banksy also
did one. Yeah, you're right. But that was- Okay, but it wasn't that much money.
I think it's an interesting idea for a digital artwork or for some sort of
certification or a coupon, some sort of like, it's like a bearer bond. It's a
thing that you say, it's a promissory note or something like, okay, if you come
to me on such and such a date, I'll give you money. And then you make that an
NFT and then we start like trading that thing around. Then it's something like
that, but that already exists. That's a thing that exists anyway. These kinds of
certified objects that have some sort of value. Digital art is definitely a
thing where this can go. But then in the genomic sense, we want to share our
genomes but at least we make the genomic data. So I sequenced a salmonella
genome and then I have the copy and I make an NFT. And so I have only one. I
can't make another copy, right? Okay, right. Yeah, so then I have to transfer.
Then I guess if Andrew wants to work on it, he has to buy that genome off me. So
then I give it to him, then I no longer have it. And then he can sell it to you
and so on and so forth. Maybe we find a super salmonella, right? Which like
makes you thin, you know? Like the secret sauce for obesity and you take the
salmonella and you get really thin. Actually, that's a terrible example because
some salmonella do make you very poorly and makes it very thin. But imagine you
found a bacterium which didn't try and kill you, but you know. That wasn't
cholera. It could be useful for like a sequencing provider that does the
analysis and then makes an NFT. So it only goes to one group. I would say, okay,
go come back to the super bug, right? The super bacteria. You find a super
bacteria, you want to stake your claim and say, listen, I've found this. It was
in my gut. I've sequenced it. I know that this makes me skinny. You can buy the
rights to this or you can sell the rights to a company through maybe a token and
let them then produce this bacteria. It could be any synthetic DNA sequence that
does a thing. It could be the sequence for the COVID vaccine, for instance,
which I think someone just very quickly reverse engineered once they put that
out. Maybe in your contract to whoever, you can actually have a contract like
only the person who has the NFT is allowed to produce this vaccine or only the
person with this NFT is allowed to use the super bug to make yourself thin.
Yeah, and as long as people respect that, then that's great. We're going down a
rabbit hole here, okay? So how on earth did you go and make an NFT, Lee? Well, I
get ideas sometimes and I just go and do them. And I was thinking, what's
something that is unownable and I cannot own this thing and I'll make an NFT out
of that thing so I can own it. And I remembered this Myriad Genetics Supreme
Court's decision in the US where, you guys remember BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes? Yeah.
They are strong indicators for breast cancer and this company had into the genes
Myriad Genetics and it went all the way to our highest court and they struck it
down. So this was the moment when they said you cannot own a gene. Brilliant.
And I found that that Supreme Court decision in the PDF that they had for it and
it was interesting and they had legal reasons for it. I mean, we can feel that
we should not own genes. That sounds like common sense, but they actually wrote
it out. And so I thought, okay, I'll make an NFT of the picture of BRCA1. So I
read up on it. I found an article on coindesk.com and I hope that link stays
active. I'll just put that in the notes also. Suggested a few different ways to
do it and a few different sites that can get onto the NFT blockchain. And I went
to rarible.com and made an account and I put money in my Coinbase wallet and I
didn't know how much it was gonna cost exactly. So I transferred above and
beyond that amount of money. In the end, it cost about $30 plus $8 in, quote
unquote, gas. You need gas to move things on Ethereum, on the Ethereum
blockchain, even if you're doing NFT. So a transfer actually costs money to the
maintainers of Ethereum. Yeah, it makes you wanna have an Ethereum computer for
the blockchain. And I just had a field day without, one of my days off, I just,
I went back and forth on how to make this picture and I ended up, and I'll put
this picture in the notes also. So what is that picture of? I mean, is it a
nucleotide sequence or something, or? Yeah, I did a few different depictions. I
went to my favorite gene browser, Apollo, and made a picture of the genes and
the exons of BRCA1. So Apollo is pretty old school and I did another old school
thing that the Protein Data Bank, which is still in use and is still awesome.
It's just that people are focused a lot more on nucleotides right now, but the
Protein Data Bank, I made images of BRCA1 in the cartoon and ribbon styles. And
then I just, I just searched for DNA double helix for fun also. And I made that
the background of the image. So that's the bioinformatics that I put into this.
I also took some quotes from the Supreme Court decision and pasted them in there
and just, you know, just put it all together in one picture. So now you own
BRCA1 and you're super popular. I own the picture of BRCA1 and sure, why not?
I'm popular. I have friends. I have some friends. So I think this is funny. I
put it out there and I think it would have been funny either way if somebody
bought it or didn't buy it. And I basically got nobody to buy it. Nobody cared.
And I think that's all right because I don't want to get in trouble at my job
for making money on the side. I didn't- It came out in a very evil way either.
Yeah, not in an evil way. So I did this, let's see. This was May 2nd, I believe,
or it was a day or two before that. And we are recording this on July 1st. So I
am actually kind of happy that I have skirted that, that nobody is buying that.
And it's been that long and I am not super popular. That is, I'm actually
relieved. So what you're saying is that if maybe I go in after this podcast and
buy it, you'll get into a bit of trouble. I'll make sure you make a profit out
of it as well. You could pay a certain amount and get me in trouble, actually.
Don't do that. $10, $100, you have to declare. What is the limit for government
employees? It's a rule of thumb. And several years ago, I'm remembering I'm not
allowed to make more than $10 in a gift from somebody. $11 it is, Dan. I'm
especially not allowed to, except from a foreign actor. We're paid by the
British government as well. Does that make it even worse, foreign government?
Yes. Don't get me in trouble. I guess if I make money, I'll have to find some
creative way to get rid of it. So overall, I'm into the NFT. It cost me about, I
wrote down in my notes back then, it cost me about $38 in Ethereum costs. And so
it's just, it's out there and I'm okay with that sunken cost. I think it's just,
it was just fun to make that unownable thing that I own now.  the things you do
when you're in lockdown and you've nowhere else to go uh or to spend your money
you know all the cinemas are closed and the pubs are closed and you've kids you
know what else do you do oh my god i don't know about you but we we drive
ourselves crazy at home with the kids right for sure the things you do in
lockdown have i have i come across by the way something that that we have
difference in our in our in our english do you always call them the cinema yeah
okay yeah we say we go to the movie theater movie theater yeah i don't know lee
do you say film or movie i watched a movie all right we'd say film would you say
it's a great film would you say if you start getting into like the artistic
whatever and you're criticizing a film i i would say that you you might start
going into the word film okay so it's like uh you know it's a coen brothers film
and it's an adam sandler movie is that what we're saying yeah yeah yeah i think
that we would say that film sounds like a really it sounds like a more artistic
kind of word a high higher level high culture word yeah the fun part is is
basically none of these are on film anymore i know it sort of doesn't make sense
i i just realized the fun anachronism is the is the phone handset on your mobile
phone you know the icon for phone is the handset which you i i think i have one
no one's ever called my house though ever let's dive back to the to the genomics
angle of i suppose we're talking in general we're talking nfts but we're also
talking crypto whatever in general i mean where what is any of this useful for
genomics other than we've said minting accession codes which is a good which is
a good use i don't know about i from what i've always seen all of these crypto
whatevers always have very small payloads i don't think it's it's scalable to
put in large amounts of data in in one entry so i guess you'd have to store the
file somewhere else but you could put the accession code and the md5 hash or
something yeah so you you would suggest still having a database behind it
somewhere yeah i just think practically you you don't want to have the gas or
whatever the post file processing of trying to build all of that nucleotide load
into the into the blockchain like can you imagine if you had to download that
whole ledger if anyone joining the network it'd be insane it wouldn't work i
don't think definitely not on ethereum i think that there are like side chains
that people have made so like they have i'm not going to remember what they are
but you can make like a whole new crypto chain and call it something else that's
not ethereum but it's like the backbone is ethereum you like you link back to it
oh yeah that might be one way to do it but then it's not readily accessible to
everybody i don't know i'm just thinking the the thing of minting the accession
code though is definitely like doable so really what we're saying here is we
need a special uh token or a special coin just for genomics that solves all of
these problems but then the real question is what do we call it gnome coin bio
box i think the scope for the ethereum gas model where you have these i guess
they call the smart contract so you give a piece of work to someone and then
they do it and they take money from you right i mean that's what that's what
your gas that's what your money was paying for was it was paying for some
computer somewhere to take your submission and do the processing to add it to
the chain right that's right yeah so we could have a thing of take some reads
and make the consensus sequence and send it back to you and that could cost some
bio bucks then that organization could use bio bucks to do something else
actually it could solve a really good problem you know the way with jizaid the
whole reason it exists is because you had rich countries and companies stealing
genomic information from poor countries not not causing a controversy or
anything but um allegedly allegedly you know and so these poor countries would
then you know give material and then rich countries would use it to make
vaccines that the poor countries couldn't actually you know buy but anyway what
what if instead of jizaid you had tokens for all of this genomic information and
so when people are supplying it they know that there is like a contract in terms
of a token saying that they own this they put that there and that's their
information so if any commercial company comes along and uses the information
you know it's all public and whatever so they can see it but if any commercial
company comes along and tries to use it then they it would be very abundantly
clear where they've got from and who owned that and you know people stake their
claim so maybe this is the solution to jizaid i like it they do do that sort of
certification for a lot of products to make sure that they're done through fair
trade and they're given these certificates so that could be definitely a use
that in buying this or buying this genome it has not been no uh no
bioinformaticians were harmed in the creation of this genome assembly okay so
now we've got our own uh currency we're all going to be millionaires and we
solved the world's problems i mean yeah now we just just make your own just buy
an island somewhere can i come to your island i love it i would i have no idea
how to start my own coin but i think it'll be fun we need physical coins as well
you know the way you'd like the bitcoin logo instead of the b you could have
like a double helix uh genome anything is better than that dogecoin so if they
made that that up it can't be that difficult i mean the real magic is getting
elon musk to tweet your bio buck and then tweet about it and then you're you're
golden no then it goes down if he tweets about it no it went down because they
said tesla wasn't going to take transactions in bitcoin anymore it went down as
soon as he was on saturday night live i'm definitely down if somebody wants to
do this i just have no idea how to make a new coin but i think it could be fun
well maybe our listeners can help us out there you know and if uh there is
people out there who want to make bio books or genome coins or gnome coins even
sure why not maybe it might be a side project for someone who's bored during
lockdown i think it could be useful every time you help a student someone asks a
bioinformatics question they have to pay us a bio buck it's not real money but
it could be a way of measuring research output like how much are you in the
community you get bio bucks by helping people out just does it as a score
scoring mechanism oh for measuring impact like on a research fish yeah you have
okay you can do that next time we'll just mint you a million bio bucks and you
just write it there and they'll be like i don't know what that means but it's a
big number so it has to be good and every time you read an article it goes from
your account like you're automatically paying for the things you read that could
be interesting every time you review every time you review a paper too i mean
that could be fun every time you review a paper because i don't think getting
paid for reviews is a good thing but getting some recognition would be good
unless that paper is making some controversial claims and then reviewers get in
hot water like there's an article there the other day um in mdpi vaccines and
they're claiming that for every three lives saved through vaccination two are
inflicted two deaths are inflicted by vaccination which is you know clearly
bonkers but the reviewer is clearly and editor you know drop the ball there yeah
that's the kind of thing that gets attracted hopefully yeah and the thing that
would really corrupt bio bucks or genome coin thank you so much for listening to
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podcast was recorded by the microbial bioinformatics group the opinions
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