Martin Kace is President of Empax, a non-profit design studio that focuses its efforts on issues of significant concern and influence. He is former CEO of Joe Boxer and Phat Farm. Martin and I discussed his latest initiative, the 9th Floor Project, which is developing a common identity for supporters of embryonic stem cell research.

What has motivated you to pursue this project?

The primary motivation is personal.

A little over 5 years ago I was up at my country house, we have some wooded land around it, a fellow was paring down some trees, mostly deadwood and parasitic sapplings. In this case he was cutting down a live tree. I was watching him do it, and he cut it in such a way that the tree struck me in the spine and the cranium. I was in a coma for a month, and it took a while to reassemble my personality and to really understand what had happened to me.

I had the usual…I don’t know if i can call it usual, but most people go about things this way…most people are angry for a while, and I was an angry person for a while. I was fairly well along my way of coming to terms with it when the [U.S.] President made his announcement about embryonic stem cell research and its future, in terms of the federal government.

What specifically was that announcement?

What he rendered was, what must have been in his own mind, a Solomonic decision. In the story of King Solomon two women that come to him claiming the same baby is their own. King Solomon said, “alright, want to split the baby in two? We’ll give half to you and half to you.” And of the women stepped forward and said, “don’t do that, give the baby to her.” And he knew the woman that said that was the mother.

A Solomonic decision, that’s usually associated with great wisdom, but in the case of stem cells, Bush’s Solomonic descision actually did split the baby in half. What it did is say, we’ve got 66 researchable stem cell lines in existence, we’re not going to allow any more to be created, and we’re going to limit ourselves to research on those 66. There are all kinds of technical problems with most of the 66 to begin with.

Once I got to understand what 66 stem cell lines meant, I was absolutely infuriated, because it was clear in short order, that this doesn’t take the research very far at all.

It had a profound affect on you.

I had never really felt a sense of mission in my life, but this just hit me like a ton of bricks. I had to do something. I was probably the perfect storm in that sort of way. My whole adult life having really regretted that I hadn’t committed myself to anything outside of business or what I was particularly working on.

This was it.

So that’s where this all got started. (more…)

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What happened in northeastern India in the summer of ‘92 and how did it affect the direction you took with your career?
There was an outbreak of a mutant strain of cholera in Bengal, which became known as “Bengal cholera.” Because the surface protein on this mutant strain was slightly different than what’s common, all the cholera vaccines were ineffective in protecting populations from this particular strain. So thousands of people contracted cholera within weeks. In one month alone, as the epidemic spread, some 10,000 people died from this cholera epidemic, in a single state in India. Soon after, this particular strain spread from India to Bangladesh and also turned up in Thailand. That’s when I decided to do something about it. I had to do something about it because I had been thinking about ultraviolet (UV) disinfection for quite some time as a potential way to disinfect drinking water inexpensively for poor communities in poor countries.

What is the scale of the global drinking water problem right now?
About two billion people, roughly one third of the global population, need to go outside their home to fetch water for daily use. Of those, 1.2 billion people don’t have access to safe drinking water; they are forced to rely on biologically contaminated water, in most cases. This leads to a large number of diseases and death, particularly for children below age five. Young children have low resistance to dehydration, which is the resultant condition of diarrheal diseases.

With all the advances in public health, technology and medicine today, why is it that still 20% of our world’s population is without access to safe drinking water?
Right, it is 20% if you exclude the residents of large metropolitan areas like Jakarta, Bombay, Cairo, and Mexico City; if you include them, then the number rises to about 30%. We already have the science and technology to address this problem. It is not anymore a scientifically inaccessible domain, intellectually. It’s something that we can do. It just hasn’t been done, for a variety of reasons, including inadequate investment in water infrastructure. There is also the mindset that in the developing countries we’ll just follow the model of what’s been done in the industrial countries, which is to pipe pressurized safe water 24-7 to everybody - and that requires a level of investment and a level of water availability that’s often just not supportable. There is also the problem of governance. In many developing countries, the political will to provide safe drinking water dissipates as soon as the politically most vocal and powerful segments of society have access to safe drinking water. Sadly, those who are relatively voiceless and politically weak are left to fend for themselves. (more…)

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As computer science and molecular biology intermingle, how does our view of the human body change?
The integration of molecular biology and computer science is a very interesting one. When we think about computers or the Internet or digital this and virtual that, we think about immaterial things, which are completely mutable and portable and exist in a strange non-space. It’s an abstract notion, yet the reality of computers is that they need hardware, cables, and infrastructure. When we think about biology, we think about the “stuff” of life, material, and things that are physical. It’s a tangible notion, yet there are whole strands of biological thinking that go beyond the physical. When computing and biology come together, you get all sorts of strange hybrid artifacts, like an online genome database, or a DNA chip, or lab-grown tissues and organs. In some instances, it means our notion of the body is becoming more immaterial or virtual. In other instances, it means the opposite: that, in fact, our notion of the biological and materiality is changing, and that biological materiality is being defined as informational. This means, rather than any kind of body anxiety or posthumanist fantasies of uploading your mind to a computer, there is an insistence that we can control and manipulate biological matter through the lens of informatics.

Is the body itself a biotechnology?
Yeah, sure. I would say that it is, but with the caveat that it has to be articulated as a technology. I wouldn’t say that this view is so all encompassing that the body’s mere existence means it’s a machine or a technology. But once it’s articulated or framed in such a way, then definitely it is a technology. That’s what I would argue for a definition of biotechnology, that you enframe a “naturally occurring” biological process, and in doing that you make it amenable to instrumentalization and to being used in all sorts of other contexts - and for ends that might not be biological at all, as with the field of DNA computing, which is a field of mathematics that uses DNA to perform computationally complex problems, whose application has nothing to do with biology; the application is mathematics.

How do you define biomedia?
Biomedia is a specific concept that’s meant to describe the informatic reframing of biological components and processes. Packed in that are a couple of ideas. One is the framing or articulating of the biological, as I just mentioned. The other is the way that we articulate biology as a technology, through the lens of informatics, information, and information technologies. This is where we get our common notions now of genetic code or the code script of life. But it’s really through the lens of informatics and information technology that you get this combination of the immaterial and material, or biology and technology. It’s about the process of identifying the biological, but looking at it through the lens of the informatic. (more…)

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Massive Change Radio was broadcast on the University of Toronto’s CIUT 89.5 FM from September 2003 to June 2004. Created and hosted by Jennifer Leonard, co-author with Bruce Mau of Massive Change (Phaidon Press, 2004) and former Institute without Boundaries team member, the entire season of multidisciplinary interviews is archived for download.