Biotech at VDNH

Biotechnology in the museum

Elena Kleshchenko, PCR.news

Why do scientists organize exhibitions for schoolchildren and work as guides for them, from what age can we know about vaccine production technologies and what insects we will eat? The Center for Modern Biotechnologies and the Biotech Museum will soon open for visitors at VDNH.

Pavilion No. 30 is designed in the style of the Golden age of VDNH — with columns, stucco, carved pediment. And inside there is a dummy bioreactor in which multicolored cartoon bacteria "grow", a mountain of coronaviruses, an interactive explanation of the differences between whole-virion, subunit and vector vaccines. There is also a darkened room with velvet curtains. When the eyes get used to the darkness, you can see how the leaves and flowers of bioluminescent petunias created at the Moscow Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences glow. The bioluminescent complex is borrowed from fungi. Petunias are locked in a glass case, and other measures have been taken to protect the transgenic biomaterial. But someday glowing plants will appear in flower shops. And maybe on the streets of the city.

On May twenty-first, 2022, the head of the capital, Sergei Sobyanin, and the Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, Valery Falkov, opened the Center for Modern Biotechnologies and the Biotech Museum at VDNH. The exposition was created by the staff of the scientific center, familiar to PCR.NEWS — FITZ of Biotechnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The "trial run" was successful, soon the museum will work in a permanent mode.

Alina Osmakova, Deputy Director of the FITZ Biotechnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, curator and one of the main creators of the exhibition, begins with the main thing:

— Maybe one of the industry professionals will be interested in cooperating with the museum as an employer? Our team is not fully equipped yet. Suddenly, someone from the research staff or graduate students will be interested in working with us as guides, guides, lecturers. Now our employees are really on duty at the exhibition.

And how did this idea come about? Whose initiative is from above or from below, from you?

You know that VDNH has been in an active process of reorganization and renewal for more than 10 years. One of the key ideas is to return the pavilions to their historical significance, so that they do not have restaurants and shops, but specialized sites associated with the original specifics. And when the city started the reconstruction of Pavilion No. 30 — it was an initiative of the city — they launched a letter to ministries, agencies, industry unions: "We are restoring the pavilion, which has been the pavilion of the microbiological industry since 1964, and we are looking for a profile tenant." And we also received this letter as a technology platform "Biotech2030". We have been working as an industry association in the field of biotechnology for more than 11 years.

And so my colleague and I sit and watch: an adventure, of course, but it would be great. You know, VDNH is such a nostalgic platform. My parents and I came here, and VDNKh was like a big Cherkizovsky market — they sell sheepskin coats there, there are televisions… But nevertheless, the park was beautiful, always evoked warm feelings. And we imagined something for ourselves, it was winter, the snow was like this ... Imagine: a pavilion at VDNH, you can make a museum in it. Nobody understands, except our employees and colleagues, what we do. Someone heard something — beer, wine, bread, yeast… But what is industrial biotech, what is the "food of the future", what kind of grasshoppers do you want to feed people? But you can make a museum and explain something clearly!

It was December 2019, just before covid. Since the beginning of 2020, we have come to the leadership of VDNH with an initiative: we have all the competencies, we represent both the industry association and the profile institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, we know what to show. They made a concept, defended it before the leadership of Moscow — Sergunin, Sobyanin personally look at all these concepts. And we were given the go-ahead to rent.

And who worked on the concept? Your team?

This is not an easy story. As a deputy director at FITZ Biotechnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, I am responsible for strategic communications: communication with the media, with government agencies, to a significant extent with our industrial partners. Therefore, I have a staff of people who understand well how to talk to the general public. But when we started to deal with this topic more deeply, we realized that museumification is a very special process. It's one thing to know, to understand, and another thing is to figure out how to present it to people, how to make the dramaturgy of the museum.

We realized that in the modern world it is impossible to make a museum as an assembly of artifacts. This is no longer interesting to anyone, and this is not our case at all — what kind of artifacts do we have? Well, we'll put an old microscope, a fermenter, 25 test tubes with different samples, and that's it. How to translate this into an interactive format is the first task. There is a simple solution to this problem – hang screens, photos and that's it. Many people do this, including in major foreign museums. But I can discover the same thing on my tablet at home! That's not why you go to the museum. You go for another experience that will expand your boundaries of the understood world, then to immerse yourself in the community, to communicate with people whose eyes are burning from this topic.

Therefore, our first message was — we need to make the maximum number of objects that people can interact with. And it is necessary that there should always be professionals in the museum, because if our topic is simplified to the limit so that people without a guide can understand it, it will become uninteresting, quite primitive. So, we need a museum in which specialized specialists will be volunteers and guides.

Hence the idea that it is impossible to make the whole pavilion just a museum. We are creating a so—called Center for Modern Biotechnologies, with a hall for events, and with it a museum "Biotech".

Are the events already taking place?

We will launch in a permanent mode, if not from the middle of summer, then from September for sure. Seminars, master classes, specialized popular science lectures will be held. I hope this will allow us to create an ecosystem to attract interested people.

That is, there will be several levels of difficulty, for the general public and for the pros?

Yes. Returning to your question about the development of the concept: we talked to a lot of museum staff in Moscow, both from the natural science field and from the more humanitarian block. And we realized one thing – no one will come up with meanings for us! As a result, we attracted the 3D Lab company, which became our guide to the material world of installations and live exhibits. We came up with a concept together with them, and then the guys visualized (first on paper, and then in the material) our most abstract ideas. When the production and installation were completed, I couldn't believe that we had succeeded!

Of course, we also attracted specialists who are engaged in popular science work. For example, Sasha Punchin: he has extensive experience working with a wide audience, he brilliantly popularizes biotechnology, understands what topics people react to, what questions they ask. Which topics are the most striking for the public, it is not always obvious. It seems to us that one thing is interesting, and people are interested in another.

Here is the next question: the subject of the museum requires at least knowledge of what DNA is, and many people here do not even remember biology in the volume of a school course. How do you work with this gap?

We have worked only the fourth day so far, very tightly. The whole team took turns working in the pavilion to understand what the visitors needed. You know, the gap is not very scary. We planned that our audience would be more of a seventh grade class, they have already taught biology a little at school and distinguish lower organisms from higher ones. But by and large, if you know, understand and love your topic, you will explain it to a five-year-old child. At the level where he needs to know.

Have the opponents of biotechnology already come to you? No GMOs, no vaccines and no new food?

Oddly enough, we have not encountered any tough anti-vaxxer. Of course, they ask us questions about food all the time: "What, do you mean that we will have to eat meat from a test tube? Seriously, do you want to feed our children with insect protein?" You know, when you start telling, it almost always turns out to convince or at least make people doubt the correctness of their judgments. If people lack knowledge in our field, it's not their fault, but rather ours - then we need to pay more attention to popular science work.

As the director of Falanster Boris Kupriyanov has just said: "We have been educating each other all this time." They enlightened only those who already wanted to study.

Here! This is very true. We have no one to nod at that "they have not finalized". If someone has not finalized it, then we ourselves. As the leading institute of the country in terms of industrial biotechnologies, we have to talk to people. And how else?

Are you serious about insect protein? How soon will we start eating it?

I don't know about you, I already eat sometimes. I have colleagues who make protein bars with the addition of insect protein.

What kind of insects?

Grasshoppers, crickets, locusts, the larva of the "black soldier" fly. Many people in the world are already doing this. There are both feed products and highly refined food products. Insect protein in terms of amino acid profile and digestibility is much closer to the protein of mammals and birds than vegetable protein. Enriching sports nutrition or protein bars with it is quite reasonable from the consumer's point of view. The larvae that are processed for food purposes do not grow on some garbage, but on standardized raw materials that undergo quality control at the entrance and exit - we are not talking about the kulibins, who do something on their knees. I don't see a problem here. If we have quality control and safety assessment at a high level, then in principle it is not so important what is made of what.

Colleagues asked, if there is a store here, to bring them a bar with insect protein.

Unfortunately, there is no store yet for technical reasons, but we are coming up with options. Of course, we will distribute products here that are made by both our conscientious startups and large companies — many of our global manufacturers have already gone into these innovative directions.

Surely there will be buyers. Someone is against eating insects, and someone is interested.

You know, food is one of the most conservative spheres of human life. It is much easier for us to imagine that our phone will bend in our hands or that we will fill cars with banana peel than to imagine that we will somehow eat differently. But we do not eat at all like our grandmothers and great-grandmothers! And at the same time, the quality of life has not fallen so much. Our food is now more balanced — although this is my personal opinion, many people argue with me on this topic. Changes are slow, it is difficult for us adults to imagine that we will have mushroom cheese, but if a child eats it from kindergarten, he will eat it all his life. I often bring something home when companies come with their projects and samples, and my son tries everything, tells me whether it's delicious or not. We tried all vegetable cutlets with him, which appeared on the market from Russian manufacturers. And these bars. By the way, the Chinese take away from my colleagues who are engaged in the production of protein from insects, everything is clean, it is for the production of sports nutrition.

It seems to me that the idea that only traditional food grown within a radius of 10 km around his place of residence is useful to a person is a myth. People are omnivorous and cosmopolitan animals, that's why they are strong.

Sure. Yes, it could be good, but it's unrealistic if we want to continue living in such large agglomerations. Anyway, the share of the urban population is increasing. And even the story of the coronavirus, when everyone was isolated and left, did not break the trend for global urbanization. Either we will have nothing to eat, or we will find some alternatives. We will have to do this in order to survive without losing the quality of life.

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