Natalie Kuldell (00:03):
Hi, Julius. Good morning. I’m happy to see you. Thank you so much for joining. We have been friends for a long time, so it’s a real pleasure to have you in this conversation. Maybe you could start by just introducing who you are and where you work and a little bit about what you do.
Julius Lucks (00:21):
Yeah. So I’m Julius Lucks. I’m a synthetic biologist at Northwestern University, a part of the center for synthetic biology here and also the department of chemical and biological engineering. Uh, we work on a lot of cool topics – really interested in how microbes sense their environment around them and how they make decisions with that information, trying to uncover how they do that in nature, and then how we might engineer it for some of our own purposes and applications
Natalie Kuldell (00:51):
That is very smart. Microbes…they have a big tool kit.
Julius Lucks (00:57):
Anything you think of that’s cool, microbes have already done it.
Natalie Kuldell (00:59):
It’s true. Yep. Do you have a particular sense that you’re tapping into anything in particular trying to sense?
Julius Lucks (01:09):
Yeah, we got really interested for a while. Some of our research started out from really fundamental questions, you know, what are the molecular mechanisms that microbes use and literally, how do they make decisions? You know, they don’t have brains, but they do have genetic circuits. And how do those circuits combine to really process the information? It’s been an adventure as most research has been. We started with a really, a deep interest in RNA molecules and how they facilitate that process. And then actually in the process of moving to Northwestern. So I started my lab at Cornell and we moved here about five years ago, thought, well, maybe this is a good opportunity. We know enough of the fundamental stuff to start looking at a specific application. And it was actually my wife, who’s a professor at Northwestern as well, in the global health area, who really inspired us to look at water quality actually.
Julius Lucks (02:00):
So, she had been doing a lot of research about how many people across the globe, I think it’s estimated about 2 billion, so pretty big problem. Um, they don’t know how they’re going to get enough clean water for their daily uses. And part of the problem is a lot of the contaminants in water we can’t see or taste. And so you don’t really know if your water is contaminated and so you’re not going to do anything about it. And so we thought, Hey, wait, what if we could provide information to people, help inform some of their daily decisions, maybe even collect lots of data, maybe inform infrastructure projects and things like that, and started to look well, how, how can we do that? And, like I said, anything cool, you can think of microbes, have already done it. And it turns out they have evolved many, many natural biosensing mechanisms to detect some of the same contaminants in water that we care about.
Julius Lucks (02:54):
So, in the US you might have heard about lead pipes and so on and so forth. Turns out there is biosensors for lead. You might be worried about pesticides, overuse of pesticides, contaminating your water supply. There’s biosensors for pesticides. Um, there’s biosensors for medical products like drugs and things like that. People are concerned about too many pills being flushed down the drain. And really in the past few years have just started to harvest these biosensors from microbes, figure out how they work, use synthetic biology to rewire them. So the biosensors typically don’t make a green fluorescent protein in nature, but we can make them do it so that we can see the contaminants when they’re detected. Then doing a lot of cool stuff with these circuits and trying to use them to improve how these biosensing platforms work. So, total adventure.
Natalie Kuldell (03:47):
It’s amazing and what I love is how much in concert with nature you work, right? Like you are partnering with nature instead of trying to fight it or work around it or anything like that. It’s so smart. Nature will have lots of the answers.
Julius Lucks (04:04):
When I got into synthetic biology, I mean, I think it was one of the big themes of the field, you know, can we learn from nature, to live with nature better. You know, more sustainably and so on and so forth. And so, that’s definitely the philosophy. It’s not a technology just to make a technology for itself, but it’s a technology that helps people learn about the health of themselves and the environment. And hopefully it makes them make better decisions about the global environment.
Natalie Kuldell (04:32):
It’s a great mission. And, um, tell me about your lab. How many people work there? How do you recruit them? Who’s interested?
Julius Lucks (04:41):
Yeah. So we have right now, I think we have about 12 people in the lab. It goes anywhere from 10 to 15, we have a lot of graduate students, a lot of undergraduate students. Um, some postdocs recently went off to start their own academic labs. So we’re recruiting the next crop of postdocs here. And we draw from really anybody and everybody who’s interested in these topics. So we have, chemical engineers, we’ve got biomedical engineers, we’ve got biologists. Um, we’ve had computational biologists in the past. We’ve had physicists and chemists. And, um, it’s just kind of one of those things where you need a lot of different people to look creatively at these problems. And we try to embrace anybody who’s interested to come in.
Natalie Kuldell (05:26):
Wow. I mean, I think it sounds like a very open invitation and you probably are getting a lot of talent because of that.
Julius Lucks (05:32):
Come on down!
Natalie Kuldell (05:34):
Come on down. Exactly, exactly. So you’ve called yourself a synthetic biologist. I love that. Synthetic biology was probably not a thing when you were starting out in science. So do you want to say a little bit about what got you interested in science?
Julius Lucks (05:53):
Yeah, little bit of an origin story – love these. So, I’ll start at the beginning and you can cut me off if I’m going too long, but I grew up on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. It’s a little island chain. There’s not a lot of science there. I have no idea why I gravitated towards science. I’m the only scientist in my family, but it’s one of those things, I grew up there and eventually made my way in North Carolina. You know, I was really into math actually as a high school student and North Carolina has a school called the North Carolina School for Science and Mathematics. And I went there, um, kind of two people from every county get to go there and I was going there to be a mathematician and it was going to be great and, you know, life is grand.
Julius Lucks (06:38):
But when I got there, I realized, I thought I was pretty good at math, but some people are really good at math. And, these are early teenage years where you’re searching for your identity and all these things. And, it was pretty hard, not only for myself, but many people kind of put all in the same location. And, um, I will admit this, but I was looking through my identity and, you know, trying to be unique. And it turned out that nobody in my cohort was really interested in chemistry. So I said, okay, I’ll be the chemistry person. I think that I plowed into chemistry, I convinced myself that was interesting and it is, don’t get me wrong, it’s paid off. Um, but it was a big lesson for me that, the world’s a big place and, to find your uniqueness, you gotta to explore different things.
Julius Lucks (07:32):
And so that was an important lesson. When I wanted the other kind of important thing about this experience is that everybody that went to that school wants to go to MIT for undergrad, everyone, right. Obviously because it’s an amazing place. And, you know, but not everybody gets in, actually very few do. And so I had my hopes pegged on MIT. I did not get in, in fact, I didn’t get into hardly any colleges that I wanted to. And so I went to the University North Carolina Chapel Hill, which is kind of like the fallback school. It’s wonderful school. Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t give it up for anything, but it was very disappointing. And I had a choice of either taking the disappointment and just kind of going down with it and be like, well, I’ll never do anything. Or just be like, hey, you know what, I’ll tell them.
Julius Lucks (08:19):
So I spent my undergrad years just plowing into research and chemistry. And I went from organic chemistry to more theoretical chemistry because it’s more math-y. And I was bound and determined not to make the same mistake at grad school. So from there though, I feel like I really had a scientific adventure. I kinda got into chemistry for maybe not the best reasons, but I explored it a lot and got really interested in it. I went to Cambridge to do a year of master’s degree, more in theoretical chemistry. And then I eventually found myself back at Harvard for grad school thinking I would do theoretical chemistry, but realizing, Hey, it’s based on physics. So maybe I should learn physics. And so I went more towards the physics direction. And again, for kind of the second time in my career trajectory, I feel like I was on top of my game, but then kind of entering the Harvard physics program where there’s great people in the program and kind of going back down to the bottom.
Julius Lucks (09:21):
But with this resolve of having done it once before, knowing what it feels like, it wasn’t easy. I will say I almost dropped out of grad school that first year for sure. It was just too much. And I was like, I’m making horrible decisions, but I had a professor that was like, I basically went into his office to say like, okay, this is enough. And he’s like, you look really confused. And I said, I am really confused. And he says, that’s perfect because you’re really pushing yourself to where you need to go and grow. And I was like, okay, I’ll believe you for a sec. I’ll just, I’ll trust you. I don’t really believe you, but I’ll trust you. Anyway, I did the physics thing for a while. Fortunately I worked in biophysics and so I was beginning to explore things like how molecules fold mostly from physics, not for biology, but it was pretty interesting.
Julius Lucks (10:18):
I was also really interested in computer programming. So just like learning all these computer programming languages and stuff, these are kind of all just swimming around in my head. I was really interested in kind of alternative ways to do science. So I was part of the OpenWetWare group. Met all the, you know, Jason Kelley and Barry Canton and Reshma and Austin, all these famous people these days. But I had no idea what they did. I was in OpenWetWare just because it was a really interesting thing. Then after grad school, I was really faced with a little bit of a conundrum. I wasn’t super interested in physics. I was more interested in biology, but I was like, ah, just research for me. I don’t know. Maybe I should do a startup company, but I got this wonderful opportunity to go to Berkeley and work with Adam Arkin.
Julius Lucks (11:12):
Not really knowing that he was in synthetic biology at all. It was like there, and I could spend three years and kind of play around with some ideas and so on and so forth. And I had a little bit of gap. I took a computer programming job at this place called archive.org, which is one of the early preprint servers. So I was like writing their APIs and just thinking about science. And I was like, hey, I really like biology. I really like computer programming. What if you could program biology? And here I am like decades late to the idea of synthetic biology. It was my own aha moment in my own little vacuum, very naive at the time. And what was amazing is during my programming job, I could work from nine to five, go home and just think of ideas and Adam Arkin being just this amazing person – I would send him the wildest ideas. Like, what about this? What about this? And he’d be like, oh, that’s so cool. That’s so cool. Let’s do that.
Julius Lucks (12:08):
So I got to Berkeley at the same time. I was like, you know what, I can’t really attack these problems, theoretically, like I gotta build something. I’ve got to get in there and understand it. So I kind of committed to being a wet lab biologist at that point. Adam sent me to John Dueber to train me on how to clone and stuff. So that’s where I learned that. And, after about few days working with John, I realized that all of my ideas were horribly naive and were never going to work in any sort of timeframe. So I started to ask Adam, you know, what are some of the things that you’ve been thinking about? And of course he thought about everything. So that was a fairly lengthy meeting, but he said something at the end about programming cells with RNA molecules. And I was like, oh, I know something about those. That’s the only thing you’ve said I know anything about. And he was like, yeah, all these RNA biologists, they won’t bite on this project. Cause it’s like, they think it’s too complicated. And I was like, well, I don’t know the difference.
Julius Lucks (13:08):
The rest is history. You know, it’s been blessed with meeting amazing people like yourself on the way of being part of this thing called SynBERC and you know, Stanley Qi was a rotation student in Adam’s lab and we cooked up early together. And then I managed to work in Jennifer Doudna’s lab. And just, you know, once my mind was opened to this new area of like, can you engineer biology? It was like a kid in a candy store. And it’s been amazing ever since.
Natalie Kuldell (13:36):
There is so much to sort of take away from that trajectory. And I think what I hear most is to just, you know, people will say follow your passion, but I think that’s a little bit hard for people when they don’t know what their passion really is or where it goes. But I think the notion of following good ideas or following things that are of tremendous interest, they do come together in ways that are unique to you as an individual. And then you have a special value add when you come to places. I think also being around really good people makes such a difference, right? People who are open.
Julius Lucks (14:13):
Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. I think, um, scientists are also experts a little bit at revisionist history in a way they all want to tell these stories of, oh, you know, when I was five, I built my first RNA molecule or something and I have never felt like that. And in many times actually it felt a little bit lonely, not really having an academic home because I’ve explored all these places, but, I guess kind of early on decided, you know, science and life more broadly as kind of an adventure. So, you put yourself out there and ride the waves a little bit. That’s my outer bank upbringing, I guess. And, it’ll come together. Like you’ll be able to put it together. Like you said, you can, like, well, I’ve done a little bit of this and done a little of that and you know, let’s just make another thing out of it and provide some unique vantage points.
Natalie Kuldell (15:04):
I think that’s fantastic. What a lot of wisdom and you’ve landed in such a great place now to continue to thrive and to continue to put things together in special ways and unique ways.
Julius Lucks (15:16):
Sure and there’s been a lot of luck along the way. A lot of things that didn’t work starting with that MIT rejection, it’s just one of those, you know, something good will come out of it. You just got to keep going for it.
Natalie Kuldell (15:31):
You just got to keep going for it. Absolutely. Well, well, I’m excited to see where it all goes. I’m so fortunate to be sort of in this sphere with you and to be able to follow along and, um, yeah. Thank you for all you do with teaching also. And, thinking about the way to prepare the next generation for this adventure, as you say.
Julius Lucks (15:55):
Well, the feeling is mutual. This is really a great experience to get to work with them. Yeah.