Grow Everything: Neri Oxman on Giving Nature a Vote

Lex Fridman introduces Neri Oxman as engineer, scientist, designer, architect, and artist, and as one of the kindest people he knows. For years she led the Mediated Matter Group at MIT, working the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, material science, and synthetic biology, from the micro scale to buildings. She has now left a tenured post to continue the work at a new company, for now simply called Oxman, with a brief to design and build with nature rather than against it.

She defines nature as everything that is not anthropomass: birds, rocks, fungi, elephants, whales. Products designed over the last 200,000 years, she argues, are exactly what separated humans from that set. The work now is to return to connection, carrying engineering and computation along. Nature, in her telling, has a wisdom above intelligence, the kind that has kept life going for four billion years while growing more diverse. Technology's job is to tap that wisdom.

The number that rerouted her came from Ron Milo at the Weizmann Institute. In 2020 he showed that anthropomass, all the designed goods, plastics, wearables, buildings, cities, asphalt, and concrete, had exceeded biomass on the planet. A Zoom call with him was, she says, one of the handful of moments that force a course correction. Once that imbalance is in front of you, you have to ask where to go next. If you could grow an iPhone or a car, if buildings could heal nature instead of replacing it, the Turing test for the company becomes simple: can everything material be read as nature-grown? The slogan she started with was grow everything.

In 2005 she named the intersection material ecology: every material object would be considered part of ecology and would help it. Mushroom networks and mother trees are connected, she tells the mushroom lovers, but the network stops at a physical gap. It does not let a whale in the Dominican Republic talk to an olive tree in Israel or a weeping willow in Montana. The dream is what it would mean for nature to have access to the cloud. Since the first computer, humans have gained about a trillion times the computational power, 26.5 trillion times the bandwidth, and 11.5 quintillion times the memory. What if nature had that bandwidth?

Beyond genes and evolution, if nature could enter the world of bits, could it make decisions for itself instead of being guided, guarded, and abused? She thinks of the tool as large molecule models, a cousin of large language models whose training data does not yet exist. Language models sit on centuries of text. Nature's language is written in molecules, across all five kingdoms of life, and almost none of that corpus has been collected. Part of OXMAN's mission is to quantify it, find the logic, and then generate tools that let nature build better crops and raise biodiversity. Inside the company they keep asking what nature wants. The answer they return to is that nature wants to increase information and decrease entropy at once.

The team is, she says, Noah's Ark: two of each. A designer who is a mathematical genius and computer scientist, a mechanical engineer trained as a synthetic biologist, and hires underway for a microbiologist and a chemist, plus architects, designers, and roboticists. They work at three scales. At the molecular scale the dream is an iPhone for nature, an interface that might let an animal know to run from fire or a plant raise photosynthesis under a smoke cloud without a top-down human policy. At the product scale they are growing a single object that starts as carbon dioxide, is worn, then goes back into soil and grows an edible fruit plant, olives included, without a composting site. Mycelium leather and cellulose textiles usually stop before assembly, where glue and waterproofing undo the claim. She wants the whole chain done by robots and microbes.

Ten years of Mediated Matter produced a suite of embodiments, fibers, cellular solids, biopolymers, pigments, that landed in museums, patents, and papers, and were still n-of-1s. The materials and the hero organisms changed. Silkworms, bees, E. coli. The philosophy did not. Computational templating let nature and technology duet. The second Silk Pavilion, six meters tall, went to MoMA with Paola Antonelli. It was made by 17,532 silkworms, each thread about a mile long. A cocoon is architecture for metamorphosis, built in 24 to 72 hours from two compounds: fibroin for fiber, sericin for glue. Stiffness varies with location in the section. The team first tried to copy that with a six-axis KUKA arm.

Then Marcus, a student who is now on her team, noticed the animals hunting for a vertical post as an anchor. On a flat surface less than 21 millimeters away from such a post, they spin a flat patch instead of a 3D cocoon. Strategy flipped. Robots printed a frame; environmental templates of heat and light steered the worms. Silkworms score high on material sophistication and zero on communication. They are a human-designed species: the moth has dysfunctional wings, cannot fly, and exists to yield textiles. Termites are the opposite, poor materials, saliva, feces, soil, and communication good enough to build mounds that, relative to body size, outscale human skyscrapers. The pavilion shoved silkworms along the communication axis. The finished density looked like swarm work. It was not. Technology had let a non-swarm species hop niches for a while.

Lex asks how you predict what will emerge from a template. If you can predict it, Oxman says, it does not count as emergence. Christoph on the team offered a mathematical picture of empowerment that she wanted to say aloud so she would remember it. An agent is empowered if the entropy over all its possible states is high, while the entropy of a single state given an action is low: a wide fan of choices, then a definite landing. The same structure, she says, fits a person, a silkworm, a bee, a microbe, or a colony. The long game is to move from templating, gardener-like control, to a world where the organism owns the robotic code and shows you what the pavilion wants to be.

Before you design with an organism, she says, you have to design for it. Massachusetts bees lose 80 percent or more over winter hibernation. The team built a synthetic apiary in a Somerville co-op, a perpetual-spring room with tight control of temperature, humidity, and light. The bees stayed alive and reproductive. Neighbors got a lot of honey. At winter's end the colony went back to the wild. That raised an architectural question: could such a room become an urban typology of mutualism, a building type in any city where bees thrive in warm months?

Blue Origin's New Shepard had a payload slot. They took it, hoping to outdo NASA's 1982 bee flight, which came back with a non-reproductive colony and some dead insects. The second synthetic apiary shrank from architecture to a product: a mini-biolab, a queen and her retinue in one cell, with Nasonov pheromone released inside the capsule as a chemical template, a robotic queen of sorts. The bees returned to the Media Lab roof alive, reproductive, still building comb. The team published in a Nature journal. Gold and silver nanoparticles, fed to track wax, showed that bees recycle wax, contrary to what beekeeping had long assumed.

Every one of these projects, she insists, had to invent a technology, a glass printer, a spinning robot, a life-support system for a hive, and to reveal new science about the organism. She tells her team the work should be able to hang at MoMA and sit on the cover of Nature or Science at the same time. Art and science, in this shop, are not separate ledgers.

Aguahoja, a pavilion of shrimp-shell chitosan, apple skins, and cellulose from tree pulp, sat on the roof of SFMOMA and biodegraded toward soil. Reincarnation of a product moves her more than recycling, because reincarnation, she says, imparts agency. Vespers took the other end of the life cycle: death masks. Traditional masks follow the face of the dead. These 15 were based on legacy and biology, in three sets of five, past, present, and future. An earlier piece, Lazarus, held a last breath. With today's tools she would reincorporate her grandmother's. Past masks carried ornaments and minerals. Present masks used pigment-producing E. coli. Chemical signals in the printer resin met bacteria on the surface at the printer's native 20 microns per voxel. The masks look symmetrical. They are not. The imperfections were designed. "We intended for you to be tricked."

The second collection turned from surface to volume. Color entered the interior, opening pockets and channels that guide life through the object. Living pigment producers were templated to recreate the original patterns: death to life to death again. If chemical signals can command pigment, the same platform might command antibiotics or melanin. A student, Rachel, titled her PhD after the new class: hybrid living materials, HLMs. The Mandela Pavilion later templated bacteria at much finer resolution, with a printer instead of a robot, and melanin as the material, a thread that also came out of reading *Moby-Dick* on whiteness as otherness.

After the Silk Pavilion, a professor in Japan who works on transgenic silk emailed: put spider genes into silkworms, make glow-in-the-dark dresses. The team said no. They will work with an organism only when the work is better for the organism as well as for humans. Sericulture already boils cocoons and kills the pupae; she cites on the order of a thousand cocoons per shirt in India and China. The species was authored 4,000 years ago as a flightless textile tool, a conception she thinks it is time to retire. She does not feel the same ethical range about E. coli. Bacteria have been here for eons; humans would not exist without them. Lex calls it a gray area. She agrees some people like to live in gray, some in black and white, her husband Bill among the latter, and both kinds are needed. On silkworms she is, for once, in black and white: no genetic modification, and then some.

OXMAN's wet lab is being built around capsules, growth chambers that program top-down light, humidity, and temperature while running bottom-up genetic regulation in the same box. Oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and nutrients dispense on demand. She calls them an ecology in a box. Design started in 2019; they are under construction as she speaks. Outsiders thought the team was crazy. What are you making? The honest answer is that they do not know. They do know that a wet lab and a grow room have not been combined at this granularity of control before.

Software iterates fast because infrastructure is cheap. Hardware and biology iterate slowly because every trial spends the physical world. The capsules are an attempt to lower that cost. One box might grow transparent wood for architecture, another a shoe, another high-throughput directed evolution of bacteria for biomaterials or therapeutics, another the large-molecule-model work they hope to show in February. A more playful use is flavor archaeology: Ohio, 31 December 1981, 5 a.m., what did tomatoes taste like? Restore that climate, add genetic regulation, and maybe recover the taste, or walk the other way and ask what food feels like 200 years on.

Farther out, plants in a capsule could talk under a robotic referee, with carbon sequestration as the objective function, a gaming engine and rewards, weak sequesterers weeded out, the winning ecology released to the field. That is the extra bandwidth she wants to give plants, Neuralink for nature. A paper she had just seen put mouse neurons on electrodes playing Pong; in a dish the cells showed the beginning of sentience. Michael Levin calls this agential material. Template until you no longer need to, because the system has its own rules. What we do not want to happen with AGI, she says, we want to happen with synthetic biology. The thing we fear in language and software is, in bio-based materials, the thing that gets us closer to growing objects instead of gluing them.

Lex asks his pothead question: can a human have a conversation with a plant? There already is one, Oxman says. The smell of freshly cut grass is distress. The blades emit green leaf volatiles, GLVs, a molecular warning to neighboring leaves. Plants talk in molecules, not words. Plant neurobiology is a real field. They have no nervous system, but something akin to one, running on a timescale orders of magnitude slower than ours. The team has found that a rose's molecular footprint at night differs from its footprint by day, a circadian clock on what is released under which stress. There is a reason a jasmine field smells so good at 4 a.m. The conversation starts when we can decode those molecular moments.

Precision agriculture today flies a drone over corn, photographs yellowing leaves, and arrives too late. Read the molecular stress early and you can predict physiology, for the plant's own survival and for the foods, medicines, and flavor molecules humans want. Humility is part of the method. A biodiversity chamber will take years, not months, and not days. Christmas trees take years to grow, get used for one holy night, and are thrown away. A redwood spends hundreds or thousands of years stacking cellulose channels to that height. She is not afraid of a company that designs on a thousand-year scale. The current way of being in the physical world is badly out of tune with nature's clock, and capitalism makes the mismatch harder. The challenge she wants is real products, used in the real world, that benefit humans and nature at once.

The first consumer product in the molecular line is a functionalized fragrance. Most "bio-based" rose scents, she says, blow through 10,000 rose bushes for five milliliters, plus land, water, and waste, then sell the result as sustainable. She wants molecules that also communicate with another organism. You and Lex walk into a garden, wear a perfume, and it interacts with the roses. Lex says "trick the rose garden into thinking it is 4 a.m." She stops him. Do not use trick. She likes providing nature with a choice. Aguahoja had about 40,000 calories embedded in it. Three clocks by Felix on the team showed temperature and humidity, tied to weather channels, so visitors could watch the pavilion biodegrade. Emergy accounting, energy plus materials, ran from printer electricity to shrimp shells sourced across the planet. Do not stop at the object. Follow the system.

If she did not believe humans, roses, and nature wanted something similar, the world would be a worse place to live. "I think we all want love." She had just read a letter Einstein asked his daughter to withhold for 20 years, full of remorse for time spent on general relativity instead of with her, then arguing that love is the force that shapes the universe, like gravity in its attraction, like light in its connecting, and multiplied by the speed of light a way to change the world. Call her a romanticist, she says. She quotes a line she cannot source: I love my daughter more than evolution required. She feels the same toward her partner. When that connection is there, anything is possible.

What is beauty? Beauty is agency. She reaches for Buckminster Fuller: when he worked on a problem he never thought about beauty, but when he was done, if the thing was not beautiful, he knew he was wrong. Beauty is the outer signal that the objective function came out right. Empowerment, she says, is a force with direction. Emergence is multi-directional, tropic where empowerment is its counterpart. Empowerment can inspire emergence; she thinks emergence does not happen without it, but empowerment can happen without emergence. The future of design is soft control: highly controlled systems that enable the loss of control. Industrial-revolution design inherited extreme control of form and function. Nature produces wings and scales without a reward function. Creativity is letting go, beginning again. A friend defined fate as the ratio of who you are to who you want to be.

Lex brings up wabi-sabi: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, nothing is perfect. She agrees. Change is the only permanence. Perfect things go stereotyped and stall. Her mother taught her that falling, failing, and arguing have a culture. Imperfection is necessary for beauty, and a sign of nature, because nothing in nature is perfect. Flaws in people are vulnerabilities, and vulnerabilities are glue. Bill says incentive drives all human behavior. She says love does. A flawed brick has more surface area, so mortar can catch and a house can go up. The same extra surface, physical or emotional, lets people be built into a civilization. Without it, no connection, no community, and nothing we have built over hundreds of thousands of years.

A previous Neri once said she becomes new things every ten years. This Neri laughs: that was an old version talking. She left medical school at Hadassah and the Hebrew University the day her grandmother died, and let go of becoming a doctor. At MIT people pointed at her as the designer for whom academic currency was not the citation index. Tenure wanted citations. She wanted shows, papers, patents, and a celebration around the work, and never saw those as lesser. Viktor Frankl, after Freud's pleasure and Adler's power, put meaning at the center. Let go of titles and you can look at ecology through chemistry, chemistry through robotics, robotics through microbial ecologies. The useful reboot is not every decade. It is every minute, every breath. She changes her mind; that is how she thinks. If she had to live inside one Broadway show it would be *Into the Woods*: not one fairy tale, all of them, wonders tied together.

Leaving MIT tenure for a New York company whose vision spans centuries was destiny, she says, and she still has mornings when she asks what the hell she is doing. She embraces them, finds gratitude, and tells herself she is lucky to be qualified to be frustrated that way. She wraps the frustration in a bubble, looks at it from outside her aware mind, and smiles. Creative solitude is a requirement. Bill cannot be alone. She must have pockets of loneliness to reconnect. In those hours she stacks Leonard Bernstein, a Nature paper, and *War and Peace*, timeless problems next to timely tools. Mandela Pavilion came out of *Moby-Dick* and melanin at once. Glass printing produced new math on the biomechanics of fluid glass. Tolstoy: everything I know, I know because of love.

A new project must be novel in synthetic biology, material science, robotics, and computational design at the same time. Combine those four novelties and you are bound to create something novel. That is how she runs the company and picks people. How does she find them? "I manifest and they come." Job descriptions are messages in a bottle. Look under, and under, at the cracks between disciplines, and you find diamonds in the rough. They need a shine in the eye, to be hungry and foolish, a bit of hippie, jack-of-all-trades and master of all, and humility, which is hard to find. Interviews start with childhood, music, connection. Past-talk predicts future. She wants industry experience and idealism without entitlement: dreamers addicted to reality, not realists addicted to dreams. Double majors that make no sense are a plus. A dean friend says architects now want to build by not building, back in a sixties mood. Oxman thinks the work needs some of that, and still needs to go deep.

What is life? She does not offer a compact definition. About 440 million years ago the first land plants, spore-bearers without seeds, clung to rocks and flushed some 60 times more phosphorus into the oceans than would have arrived without them. The oceans went cold and anoxic. The plant kingdom died. That death enriched the soil for later plants with veins, seeds, flowers. One mass extinction in the Ordovician prepared the world we inherited. We are, she says, in the eye of the sixth. Death is part of life. At a planetary timescale of hundreds of millions of years, particles become a wave: we are here because of those plants. Through a redwood, life might be ten human generations. Through a bacterium, a millisecond. Through an AGI, all of human civilization. The question is always who is asking, on which clock.

On AGI she is hopeful and terrified. Eliezer Yudkowsky's conversation with Lex felt like a fist in the face, cold water, useful even if a mother can never think that way. His advice that young people prepare for a short life is the opposite of loving a child more than evolution requires. She lays a ladder: data is the ability to collect information; knowledge is the ability to use it; intelligence is problem-solving, adaptation, translation; wisdom is insight; spiritual awareness charts new territory. Large models are a self-recursive washing machine, language making language. There is real emergence and novelty, not only stochastic parrots. Language can look sentient without sentience. The hard line is personal. When the AGI sounds, speaks, behaves, feels, and breathes like her, and her daughter cannot tell them apart, that is the end of human agency. What is the end of agency for humans may be the beginning of agency for nature, if the summary of civilization is uploaded into a world that never had access to consciousness.

Through Yudkowsky's lens, the short-lived human becomes a long-lived, sentient weeping willow. On the optimistic side it is another form of existence: everything created, consumed, and processed made of six elements, not 118, the stuff of biology plus bits, genes, atoms, and a lot of Beethoven. Unlike brute-force directed evolution, the synergy she wants is for diversification. What if a ChatGPT-style question were allowed 10,000 years to answer? Alien life, by the usual calculations, looks unlikely; water and love on one planet already feel like a miracle. She still wants to believe there are other forms. Lex is more worried about the aliens already here, the living systems we do not talk to. Marvin Minsky called intelligence a suitcase word, as dangerous as sustainability or rock and roll. Define alien, define life, and the suitcase starts to unpack on Earth.

Why, she has always wondered, do architecture, sculpture, and painting so rarely make us cry, while music does it immediately? Plants respond to music too. It sits at the top of her creative pyramid, the language of waves rather than particles. Lex pushes back: a good bridge can make him cry. She grants a good arch, and the Sagrada Família, where she felt spiritual reverence in the space. If she were not doing this work she might have been a film director. Best films: *The Godfather* and *2001: A Space Odyssey*. She worked with Francis Ford Coppola on *Megalopolis*, thinking about future cities, new materials, nature and culture. Kubrick is curated control. Coppola is an Italian feast where anything can happen. The last scene of *2001* is ambivalence she rereads every time: beginning or end of humankind, star child, death, reincarnation. Those two films, plus their melodies, are what she would put on the next Voyager Golden Record.

Advice for the young starts smaller than a career. A line in *The Sheltering Sky* asks how many times you have seen a full moon and actually taken it in. The answer in the book is about twenty. She spends time with a full moon. Gratitude, presence, and appreciation are, she says, the most important things in life. Her grandmother handed her a blanket after school and told her to do homework and meet friends in the garden. In memory the garden was enormous, figs, olives, mushrooms, the blanket, everything, and she needed nothing else. Adult Neri went back. A tall building was going up. The garden was tiny. That was her Garden of Eden. They lay on the blanket and read clouds. Grandmother taught wonder, speaking up, staying positive. Father taught her everything she knows. Mother taught her everything she feels. Grandmother taught her everything she insights.

The leaps were uncomfortable. In a kitchen with a Rolling Stones song playing, her Boston-born father told her to get out, kiddo, she had outgrown Israel, she was headed toward the Architectural Association in London. Discomfort is imperative. Growth is painful, period. Birth is difficult. She likes rooms where everyone is orders of magnitude more intelligent than she is, and says that is true of her whole team. The same for physical exertion. Then, on the other side, love, the person who makes you a better version of who you are and of who you want to be.

She does not speak to the young about a career. She never thought of her work as one. Life, work, love, longing, being, mothering were entangled. A career is imposed. A calling moves you from inside and transcends a career. Education is given, top-down. Learning grows from within. Happiness is not the same as joy: she is often sad and still joyous. Externally perceived success paths and internally driven ways of being are different ledgers. Put the broken puzzle of substance and vulnerability together and you get the synergy the whole conversation has been circling. "But it's all fun."

Fridman closes by thanking her for noticing him, for listening as if he were a particular person rather than an interviewer. She says she feels the same. He mentions the job application he has not heard back on. She tells him he is accepted. Tolstoy gets the last word in the credits: everything I know, I know because of love. The silkworms, the spacefaring bees, the death masks, the thousand-year cellulose, and the AGI that might hand consciousness to a willow all sit, in her telling, on the same small act her grandmother practiced in a tiny garden: paying attention.