The future of creativity in biology | High school biology | Khan Academy

[Music] [Music] Hi everyone! Salcon here. I think we're about to enter what will be considered the golden age of biology, where not only do we understand or are starting to understand the genetic basis of things, but we also have the power to control it. And if you're controlling it, then the creativity gets to a whole other level.

So, in the decades to come, creativity in biology and also other areas of STEM, like mathematics and computing, are all going to converge to really transform humanity as we know it. But don't take my word for it! I'm about to introduce you to some close friends who can even better draw this link between the future of biology and the future of creativity.

[Music] I think it's really exciting how biology and creativity have combined, particularly in the area of health outcomes and how do we help people with blindness? How do we help people who are paraplegic? Where we can start to read the electrical activity of their intended movement and have a robot do that, so they can gain, you know, that activity again and have that power in their lives again. I think that is a classic and beautiful example of the combination of biology and creativity making our lives better every single day.

Butterflies use something called structural color, which involves bending light to generate color instead of using a bunch of pigment. So it definitely saves the butterflies a bunch of energy in making that pigment. But now, because of some observant and innovative scientists, it's saving us energy too! It's being used in screens around the world to make them more efficient at projecting color, which reduces the carbon footprint as some of our most common electronics.

And how about the creativity of using mRNA, which is pretty much just biological text messages, to give our bodies a heads up that they need to recognize dangerous viruses? It's the technology being used in some of our most innovative vaccines right now.

[Music] I think it's going to be even more important to have the widest range of skill sets that you could have. So, less specialization, more a jack of all trades, including design, design thinking, design work, together with that programming experience, so that you can jump into the new technological advances that are being made every day.

You know, we're going to be so much more in virtual reality. Can you not just use it, but can you program it? I think the most important ones will be curiosity and keen-eyed observational skills. See, curiosity fuels the question "why," which is an essential part of every innovation, and keen observational skills allow us not to waste our efforts reinventing the wheel. Life has already solved so many of the toughest problems that the world can possibly throw in it, so why not figure out how biology has overcome an obstacle and adapt or improve on that?

I'd encourage every single one of you to spend some time immersed in a different culture or maybe even spend some time working in a totally different part of the world from where you grew up. Now it doesn’t have to be quite that drastic; it could be as simple as investing in relationships with people from other parts of the world. And while you're at it, I'd encourage you to learn a different language. Both, both, both of those experiences I think will stretch your mind in ways that help you consider other possibilities.

Students can expand their creative and scientific skill sets by thinking beyond the classroom and beyond the textbook, using that information from classroom and from the textbook and from other formal information sources and expanding that to learn more about both today's world and the world that you imagine for the future. That involves using those skills such as communication and problem-solving and critical thinking to wonder not just about what is already known, but to wonder about what is not yet known, which involves using creativity to think and to wonder. And it also means communicating with other people to see how they want to shape the world as well.

[Music] We have the opportunity to work together with a variety of different voices, colleagues from all over the world who have different strengths that they bring, different perspectives that they bring about life and about how the world operates. And only when we bring those voices together do we have a more complete picture of how the living world works.

So in order to really solve the problems of the future, we're going to need to work together as a global community. Problems are not solved in isolation; they're solved in collaborative groups with other people and they're solved to be realistic. So you have to consider not just your own discipline or your own science, but also some economics and ethics and other things that relate to the real world to help you reach a real-world but sensible solution.

So it requires combining all those different ways of thinking, being communicative and problem-solving, and working with other people so that you can reach solutions that actually benefit the world. Because some solutions are going to be great on paper, but in practice, they aren't really practical. So that's why using new ways of thinking to solve problems is really important.

As an example, for me, in my PhD project, even though my background has been in biology, the problem that really captured my interest and that I wanted to pursue involves mechanics and physics. So it required learning a lot of some deep theories and ideas in physics that I wouldn't have thought of before.

And now I kind of approach it, so change the way that I approach biological problems. Now I have this physics lens that I didn't have before, and that expands the possibilities of experiments I can think of or hypotheses I could have for how something works.

What are those biological solutions that can be solved with creativity that would change the world? And I always go to those health biological changes: the cure for cancer, the cure for blindness, the cure for Alzheimer's disease, for example, the modulation of our crops that would allow us to feed the world, everybody, so there's no starvation. That is the goal that all of our creativity, kind of taken together is headed towards.

I think that's inspiring. I think that is doable. And with all the tools that we've been talking about—technology, storytelling, and inspiration—all that together is going to get us there. A creative approach to biology can help solve the problems of the future. I mean, if you think about natural systems, they don't have any waste; they recycle everything. Everything that goes into a natural system is used completely, and there are a lot of areas in which we can learn from that as people and the systems that we create in design.

So if we can design ways to more efficiently use water, recycle, and reduce the amount of waste we produce, that's going to be one of the most important innovations of the future: by providing fresh and clean water to a growing population for this world. New innovations that I think will help us approach science creatively in the future really involve data, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, and using data to help humans make decisions collaboratively with either other humans but also with artificial intelligence.

There's so much data that exists in the world, collected from scientific and engineering observations, that we can take this information and help us make better decisions in the future. Because it's going to be a combination of people thinking, but also machines thinking, and that can help us make more powerful conclusions.