Behind the Mic — good ideas grow from other good ideas
Producing a podcast during times of COVID-19 is easier than you’d think. Whereas we’d once book interviews with people who happened to be in the same places our travels took us, we’re now booking interviews remotely. The result can still be a good interview, and a good episode. But you still hear a difference when the face-to-face meeting can happen, and it brings that extra spice to a conversation.
For the latest Discovery Matters episode — “The brewer, the baker, and the biotech maker,” we have a combination of in-person and telephone interviews. We started with a question: Where do you go for good ideas? How do good ideas…ahem…germinate?
Behind every “original” good idea is another good idea — perhaps from another context. As an industry, biotech has not shied away from learning from other industries. Nigel Darby, a longtime veteran of biotech and Cytiva associate, gave us the background of some of the industries biotech owes for its methods. Was it a baker or a brewer who first discovered the ‘magic’ of yeast? And why is yeast suddenly selling off the grocery shelves during this COVID-19 crisis? We were inspired by this National Geographic article to talk further about it in our podcast.
Our colleague Paul Goodwin dialed in from Seattle, Washington to add one more industry to the list of industries we owe a debt to — textiles. Did you ever realize that coloring fabrics inspired clinicians to put color into our bodies, to increase the contrast in scans? Textiles also led to paper-weaving methods, and that inspired James Whatman to open a mill and start producing paper for medical filters. Whatman was established as a company in 1733 and is now an important part of the Cytiva portfolio of biotech solutions. 1733 is when we at Cytiva start counting our journey in the biotech world.
Back to the episode. Taking the lead from Nigel, I went to visit a bakery and a brewery to find out if those professionals have ever thought about how they have influenced biotech. At the brewery, in the room full of vats, I could just as well have been in our manufacturing plant in Uppsala, Sweden. The sounds are the same, and the processes are very much the same. The result? Completely different.
Because one good idea leads to another, Conor has now gone chasing mushroom growers. Stay tuned for a future episode all about fungi.
What I learned in the baker, brewer, biotech maker episode is that the scientific method — hypothesize, test, re-write hypothesis, test again… is universally applicable. And that open eyes, and open ears, foster innovation.
A final anecdote: The leap from brewing to biotech doesn’t just happen in the manufacturing context. I met a journalist who used to write for a beer magazine and is now dedicated to biotech. Like many of us in baking, brewing, and biotech — it’s all about following the yeast, even at a distance.
