Darlene Solomon - CTO at Agilent Technologies

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Jacob just identified and recognized a valuable action taken by another team member and spread the word to create a culture that rewards quality work and positive contributions. This statement is an example of an action value statement from the Leaderbit Challenge titled Giving Credit. In our leadership program, every week your leaders take action to develop and grow in their role as a leader. We have over 70 of these action-based micro challenges that bring value to you and your company. Now get excited because today we are talking to Darlene, the CTO of Agilent Technologies, and we discuss the acceleration of innovation happening in biology, how to keep your skills sharp by surrounding yourself with A players, and the next generation of breakthrough biotechnology Agilent is developing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Darlene at 00:01:09) Hello. Hey, Joel. This is Darlene.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) Darlene, I'm so excited. Are you excited?

(Darlene at 00:01:15) I'm excited. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:16) This is going to be the best talk ever.

(Darlene at 00:01:19) You know, I know you say that every time, and it's actually possible that that could be true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:25) Well, every day is a new day, and so I'm alive, I'm healthy, and for me it's the best day of my life today.

(Darlene at 00:01:32) There you go. There you go. That healthy is awfully important. At your young age, not everyone necessarily takes that one as the top of the list.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:41) Yeah. Well, you know what? It was having a kid that put me over the edge with it.

(Darlene at 00:01:46) Yeah. How old's your kid?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:48) She is 13 months old, so a year and a month.

(Darlene at 00:01:51) Oh, wow. Very special time indeed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:54) Yeah. And then we have a boy coming in April, so it will be back to back.

(Darlene at 00:01:59) Very, very nice. Yeah. So they'll be just about, not quite two years apart.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:04) Yeah. A little less than two.

(Darlene at 00:02:06) Yeah. Nice. Although, yeah, I've been there. It's all great, but it's a lot of work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:13) It is a lot. How many did you have?

(Darlene at 00:02:15) I have two. I have an older son, younger daughter. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:18) Oh, okay. So you got the boy-girl thing too?

(Darlene at 00:02:20) Yep. Yep. It made it really easy to stop at two, but that's not necessarily suggesting anything. But for us, that was about all we could handle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:27) That's the conversation I was having with my wife when we were doing laundry the other night. We were always talking about three, but I'm like, I'm feeling pretty good about two right now.

(Darlene at 00:02:37) Yeah. Yeah. You hear the stories about being outnumbered, and then of course there's always that possibility the third one could be twins, and then you're really in trouble.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:44) I actually wanted that. I wanted twins the first time, twins the second time. I was hoping for it. So if I do go third, it will be in the hopes of it being twins.

(Darlene at 00:02:54) Okay. You're on a safe track then. I don't know why...

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) I like the twins.

(Darlene at 00:02:58) I haven't started a professional interview with such a pleasant, let's say, life balance conversation. So that's really cool, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:06) All right. This is the show, by the way. The whole time we record, we just clip it together to sound good afterwards.

(Darlene at 00:03:13) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:14) Yeah. Good. So where are you calling in from today?

(Darlene at 00:03:18) So I'm at Agilent's headquarters, which is where I work in Santa Clara, California, and just in a conference room here so we can chat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:27) Oh, does it have a cool name, the conference room?

(Darlene at 00:03:30) Yeah. Actually, not so... We have a very large site with lots of conference rooms, but each one is named after somebody that we think is important in science and technology. So this is the Sanger Conference Room.

(Darlene at 00:03:45) And you may be familiar with Sanger sequencing, which is kind of the original of what we call first generation DNA sequencing, which is very important globally and also relevant to our conversation today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:58) No, that's... I thought it was going to be, what was his name, Carl? Who did the first Cosmos? What was his name?

(Darlene at 00:04:06) Oh, yeah. Sagan.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:07) Carl Sagan. Okay. So not Sagan.

(Darlene at 00:04:09) So the rooms are alphabetical across the site.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:12) Oh, okay.

(Darlene at 00:04:13) Actually, if we weren't on a headphone right now, I could move to the Sagan Conference Room if you prefer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:21) You're building such a large image in my head. Give me an example of size. Like, how large is the organization?

(Darlene at 00:04:26) Well, Agilent as a whole is about 14,500 people these days. Here at our Santa Clara site, we've got maybe 1,800 people roughly. It's a large site, but we're a very global company and have multiple sites in multiple countries.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:45) And what's your core business? Like, what value do you bring to the market?

(Darlene at 00:04:49) So Agilent is a global leader in the life sciences, instrumentation, chemical analysis, and diagnostics markets. So life sciences is like life science research, pharmaceutical industry. Diagnostics is clinical diagnostics, especially genomics-led, and pathology. And then when we say applied markets, not everyone knows kind of what that is, but it's applied chemicals. So it's areas like food safety, environmental monitoring, and supporting advancements in the chemical and energy industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:28) That's amazing. I really like that. So my stepmom and my brother are both physicians, and then I've got the engineering background, and my sister is actually a physics middle school science teacher.

(Darlene at 00:05:42) So we've got you covered. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:44) Yeah. Yeah.

(Darlene at 00:05:45) My guess is I don't know if you were familiar with Agilent. Many people know us in one particular area, but not necessarily the breadth of areas that we span.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:54) Yeah. Well, it's a cool name. It's got a cool ring to it.

(Darlene at 00:05:58) Glad you like it. They spent a lot of time figuring that out when we spun out of Hewlett Packard back in 1999.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:04) How long were you with Hewlett Packard before that?

(Darlene at 00:06:07) About 15 years. I started right after my PhD from MIT in bioinorganic chemistry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:16) That's amazing. That sounds so cool. And I like it because while a lot of the people I do talk to are in the software product space... Well, we actually get across the board, but everybody seems to have to be involved with software and product to some degree. Like, even when we're talking Williams-Sonoma, who's based in San Francisco, they're doing stuff in AR and some M&A activity there. But yeah, it's so cool when I get to speak to somebody that's doing other stuff. Like, I'm a big nerd outside of just technology like coding. I'm always... The other night I was researching carbon fiber nanotubes just because I was like, oh, that sounds like the future.

(Darlene at 00:06:58) Well, I have to balance it with a very significant of our R&D investment is also in software and informatics. It's a really important part of all of those markets in terms of the upfront design and also being able to take the data that you generate off of our platforms and actually get meaningful, actionable information. It's all about the informatics. And these days, of course, digital is huge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:26) Oh, yeah. I was reading something a couple months ago, and they were talking about the way... And it was in organic-style sciences. They were saying that the number of combinations that you can put together, the chemical structures, I think that's where I was. It was in pharmaceuticals maybe. Chemical structures and pharmaceuticals combining the elements differently. There's so many options that we actually were somewhat limited by our power to process all the available options and combinations really fast. And so that's something that we're catching up to with our advancements in AI and processing. Is that sound true?

(Darlene at 00:08:02) Very true. Very true. As well as the whole area of modeling and prediction and very much based on the computational capability that is increasingly amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:14) It's so weird because we go about our everyday lives and it's getting so much faster. And the basic things we do, like posting photos or sending messages or beaming video across the United States in real time, it's become so common to us that when we go to... We actually have this bottleneck over here where we can't compute fast enough. It's almost odd to think about.

(Darlene at 00:08:36) Yeah. I mean, it's not just about how fast you can compute, but it's really about being able to bring together all the metadata and information to really know what to do with the structures that you would generate, for example, in the case that you gave. But what you just said about our lives as consumers is actually a very important trend in the analytical and ultimately in the clinical laboratory as well, where these capabilities that we find ubiquitous, more and more, the, I'm going to say, the traditional laboratory is also going through a digital transformation. You know, I like to think about smarter instruments, smarter workflows, and smarter laboratories, and it's all about that abundant computation and connectivity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:25) I love it. So what does the average day look like for you?

(Darlene at 00:09:30) So, let's see. There's probably no quite average day. You'd have to average over a lot of days to get that, but every day is different, which is really part of what I love about my role. I think there's a big slice which is the internally focused and then another which is more the external for me. So, internally, it's all about and actually setting and enabling Agilent's technology strategy. And so internally, those are the meetings with our CEO, Mike McMullen, and our executive staff, and then all the... Within my own organization, more down the company, helping to keep us moving forward in terms of setting priorities and executing. So that's the internal piece. The external, a lot of that I do here in Santa Clara, but I also spend a lot of time on the road meeting with research collaborators, customers, academic leaders, startup companies, giving presentations, as well as advisory boards and committees and things. So there's lots of different things each day within those two big buckets.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:46) That's awesome. So this past week, I got to meet the CTO of NASA. And, yeah, he came on the show, amazing Douglas Terrier. But he was talking about all the advancements that they make and the different things that they have to do with the public-private sector and the organics and everything from filtration to food and all this. Have you guys gotten to do anything space-related at all?

(Darlene at 00:11:11) Space-related. So we don't do a lot with space-related, but from time to time... Actually, well, let me premise with actually one of the... I had an opportunity actually to give a keynote down at JPL, Jet Propulsion Labs, a couple years ago. And a lot of that was around the dual use of their technology towards, I'm going to say more, being able to take some of the capabilities they've developed in space and seeing about how those could actually create improvements in quality of life across our current planet. And in terms of Agilent's technologies in space, there are missions that require, for example, chemical composition analysis and more and more biological studies, and so there have been some opportunities where some components of our capabilities have ended up in space. But for the most part, it's really an extension of our academic and government research market, but most of that is universities here on Earth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:21) That's amazing. You know, I learned a new term this week when I was talking to Douglas. It's called tech transfers, is the term that they use when they're talking about it going back and forth between the public-private sector. I thought that was so cool.

(Darlene at 00:12:35) Yeah. We actually use it the same way, but we also use it internally. And one of my key responsibilities is leading our research laboratories, which is our longer range research within Agilent. We invest a greater proportion of revenue back into R&D compared to the average of our peers and competitors. So that's all of the R&D within our existing businesses, but also this additional R&D, which is much more looking around the corner and further out. So we talk about tech transfer as being able to take a technology that the research labs has potentially worked on for several years and transfer that to the R&D and marketing within our business partners who then commercialize the product. And so tech transfers is a really important phrase here too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:24) That's so exciting. I have a feeling when my daughter gets older, it's going to be me transferring her money. Is that about right? Is that what I should expect?

(Darlene at 00:13:33) It's about right. I could give you a sidebar story that's pretty amusing, but...

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:40) Please do. I do.

(Darlene at 00:13:41) So I was just going to say that when my... My husband's on the faculty at Stanford and when our daughter ended up, much to our surprise, deciding to go to Stanford, just because growing up here in the Bay Area, she used to come by and bring my husband a cappuccino in the morning, and he would give her a 20 in return. And I'm not sure that it was all driven, I think, about whether she needed cash that day. So, the ATM is somewhat real.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:11) That is amazing. Oh, so you're a great leader. You're the CTO. You're at this large organization. I'm curious about some of your leadership tips. Like, one thing I'd like to know about is, like, how do you keep your skills sharp? Is it conferences? Like, do you just read a lot?

(Darlene at 00:14:32) Yeah. So keeping sharp, I do try to read a lot. Almost everything I read is technical and nonfiction, but I very much look to my teams of very top level scientists and engineers that we have here in Agilent to often leave me a paper or send something that they've read that they think I should be aware of. So that's a wonderful filter for me. And when they bring me stuff, I know that that's time well spent. But I also do spend a lot of time externally. And in those visits, I often go out with our field and sales teams. And from an Agilent perspective, those visits open doors, for example, with university and industrial leaders that are important to helping them get to know Agilent better. But I also greatly value the opportunities to meet some truly amazing individuals who are all with their priorities in terms of investments in the future. And that's all part of what I integrate into doing, hopefully, that much more effectively setting the technology strategy for us here in Agilent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:54) Yeah. I like that. And I found that about two or three years ago, I was very quiet. I knew maybe about 10 or 15 people, and you know, I was all... I would think about it from that perspective. I think, oh, what blog do I need to be reading or, you know, how do I stay up?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:14) And then I found that when you get involved with community and you build up a network of people, what will happen is the most important information seems to make its way to you. And I didn't realize the benefit of having those relationships. Then, like, everyone has this almost internal rate ranking system or rating system for individuals and what quality of content they bring into your life. Right? You know what I'm talking about? It's like we don't speak about it a lot, but you could think of different people and you can instantly, you have this backlog or this data store of information about how quality and what topics they're believable on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:54) And yeah, so it's so great when you start building up. And whether you're an engineer and you're going to meetups or listening to talks or just getting out there, I think that everybody at every level of their career should be engaging and networking and being involved in their community. Because I was retracted. And when I got plugged in, it just changed everything.

(Darlene at 00:17:18) Yeah. Yeah. You're absolutely right, Joel. External focus has always been important, but more and more so in our world today. And you do find that there's some folks that have a very, very high internal credibility ranking, as you're describing, but I also find that going out, you get a much broader view of what's going on. I mean, there's no crystal ball per se, but being able to integrate those different views and kind of, as you say, sort of weigh them in and prioritize really does help set a direction. And it's also very true that different geographies have very different views of trends and markets. And so making that a broad sweep externally is extremely, extremely helpful for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:08) Alright. So I want your feedback on this. This is unscripted. So I was giving a talk in Orlando last night, and I'm in Sarasota. So it's like a three-hour drive. So I was up in Orlando, and then I was getting some food at Panera on my drive back, and I sat next to this young guy. He was probably like 20, 21. I know I look young. I'm in my early thirties, but he was younger than me. And so I saw him and I saw that he was writing some code, and I was like, oh, this is cool. And so I engaged with him. I said, hey, tell me about what you're writing. He's like, oh, it's code. And I was like, yeah, I know. Tell me more. I was like, what type of code? And so he went into it, and in short, he's been writing code and playing with these books and things for about two or three years, and he's living at home, and he had graduated from UCF, so he has a college degree. And he was just like, I'm not sure what I want to do. I'm just writing this code. And I said, you know, have you applied to places? Have you looked at places? Like, yeah. I keep sending my resume, and I want X amount of money. I'm like, well, where you at? Do you live at home? Like, what's your financial situation like? And so he told me, he's like, yeah. I live at home. My parents, they just want me to do well. And so I said, what you need to do is you need to go and find something that's cool that you think is the future. Right? Like, for example, he was really into fitness, and he said that he really liked augmented reality. So I was like, do a little side project with augmented reality and fitness. Spend ten days just building something up. I said, then go around. I mean, you're in Orlando. Like, everything's here. You know? You got a lot of opportunity here. So I said, go around to some of these companies and show them your AR project. You know? Ask who's doing AR stuff if that's what you're interested in. That's what you want to be in, you know, in the future. And then just ask for an internship. Say you don't want a job because every 20-year-old out of college thinks that they're going to make six figures, and they're sending their basic projects and saying, you know, here's my resume. Here's my—I was like, be different and just go in there and leverage the fact that you live at home and not that you want to make six figures. And then just go learn from the people because the people that you're going to learn from, those relationships are the most undervalued thing that you have in your mind right now. Like, no one thinks about that in their first job, about the relationships and who they're going to be learning from. You don't realize that until later. And so I gave him that advice, and I was curious as to two things. First is, what do you think of that advice that I gave? And secondly, how does your organization reach out to the next generation?

(Darlene at 00:20:48) Okay. So the first part is, yes. I think the advice you gave was very good. And that, you know, often in life, you don't always know what next step is going to lead to the next next step that wouldn't have happened without that one in between. So I very much agree with you that one needs to really appreciate what opportunities there are even if at first, it's not obvious what the value will be. You often find out later on. So great advice. You know, in terms of reaching out to the next generation, you know, I'll kind of give you the CTO view on that as compared to the HR view, which is where an awful lot of that happens in hiring and talent acquisition, which is core to who we are. But I will say that we offer internships within research and development here. Those internships are always opportunities for students to come in and actually do something meaningful and be part of a project. It's not just, you know, kind of—I don't want to say grunt work—but it's doing something scientific that is a learning opportunity and often can lead to a real sense of accomplishment as well as experience. Personally, I try to accept invitations when I can to go out and speak with groups of younger generation scientists as well as, you know, both in schools as well as in conferences. This last spring, I gave the keynote, for example, at the Silicon Valley Women in Engineering Conference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:33) Mhmm.

(Darlene at 00:22:34) At San Jose State. And, you know, there were literally a thousand, not only young, but also female and aspiring engineers in that audience, you know, again, trying to think about what that next step might look like. So those are just a few thoughts. I don't know if you have any other questions along those lines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:55) No. I was just interested. I think a lot of the CTOs and people—I mean, that's a question I do get is, you know, I'd say a good part of our audience, maybe 20%, they're in that range of they got 30 to 90 engineers, and they're growing, and they're starting to think about what I should be doing, you know, now that the company is growing. And so it's always cool to get different perspectives of what companies do. And yeah, now that you mentioned a women's organization, WITI. Do you know WITI?

(Darlene at 00:23:25) Yeah. I know WITI quite well, Women in Technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:28) You got an award from WITI. Right?

(Darlene at 00:23:30) I did way back. It was one of the earlier awards that I received. I think it was maybe 2003, their induction into their Hall of Fame. And it was a fantastic award, and needless to say, awards earlier in your career sometimes mean the most to you looking back.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:50) Yeah. I'm actually—the reason why I was curious is because I know one of the organizers for the Tampa, like, Saint Petersburg area, and they're having an event this month that they invited me to. So I'm going to go to that.

(Darlene at 00:24:02) Oh, how good. That's great. Great to hear you, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:04) Yeah. Yeah. I met them at a conference last year, and I just—cool people. Yeah. And we were talking, then they sent me an email, and they're like, hey, we're having an event. We're just getting a bunch of great people together. It's pretty cool. And so—

(Darlene at 00:24:18) Yeah. WITI serves a really important purpose. You also hear about AWIS and SWE. Agilent's active in both of those. AWIS is, I think it's Academic Women in Science or Association for Women in Science. And then SWE is the Society of Women Engineers, and we're quite actively involved in our outreach to young professionals as well as to students through those types of groups.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:41) Oh, cool. So you see this book right here?

(Darlene at 00:24:48) Not quite. I can see your finger pointing to the book, but I can't read the title. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:55) The Princess Physicist.

(Darlene at 00:24:56) Mhmm. So this princess—who's the author of that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:00) Joel Beasley.

(Darlene at 00:25:02) Really? Yeah. Very cool. So it's a princess gets stuck—she gets stuck in a tower. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:10) And then, ultimately, she finds a book on physics. Right? And she uses the physics to—

(Darlene at 00:25:19) This is great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:19) Get herself out of the tower.

(Darlene at 00:25:21) I'm so glad we included the video. This is wonderful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:21) Right? So—

(Darlene at 00:25:22) There she is escaping the tower. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:24) And of course it—what is it?

(Darlene at 00:25:29) It wasn't luck. What did it say?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:30) It wasn't luck or—

(Darlene at 00:25:33) Or a steed with a hunk. It was 'twas physics her freedom obtained.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:37) So it wasn't a guy on a horse. She used physics to get herself out of the—

(Darlene at 00:25:41) Wow, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:43) Situation. Yeah. This is actually, so, uh, right when my wife was pregnant, she was like three months pregnant with our daughter, and then my mom, in like four weeks, got cancer and passed away. And so she left me, my brother, and my sister between the three of us, like, $25,000 and we didn't know what to do with the money, so I said, well, let's make a book so that we can read it to our grand—like, when we all have kids, we can read it and then we'll print up the books. But then it only costs a couple thousand dollars to do the book, so I said, what are we going to do with the rest? So I formed a nonprofit, printed up a couple thousand books, and then gave them away to homeless pregnant women shelters and stuff like that.

(Darlene at 00:26:25) Wow. Wow. That's just a wonderful story, and I can kind of just sort of feel your mom kind of looking down and inspired by what you was motivated. That's wonderful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:36) Yeah. We thought it was pretty cool, and then it's also—it's actually very cool to, with my daughter being 13, to sit down and read her a children's book that we made.

(Darlene at 00:26:47) Yeah. I can—yeah. Are there more planned along the way?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:53) There's another one that's out too. It's called Back to the Moon, and it's a brother and a sister. And the idea for the purpose of that one was to encourage space travel, and the purpose of this one was to encourage females in technology and science, the whole STEM ecosystem.

(Darlene at 00:27:09) Well, that's really great. I and, you know—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:12) So I'm going to send you—I'm going to send you both of them. I'm going to send you a copy of both of them.

(Darlene at 00:27:15) Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Very special.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:18) Yeah. They're—you're going to love them, and you—it's just, uh, it's cool. I actually found one of the artists that previously had worked for Disney, like, the illustrators—

(Darlene at 00:27:31) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:31) For the children's books. And so I just used that person.

(Darlene at 00:27:31) Wow. So you had a graphic person that—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:33) Yeah.

(Darlene at 00:27:34) Worked to make all that happen with you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:35) Okay. I sketched, but my sketches were so, like, I sketched the scene of what objects I wanted because I could see it in my head, but she brought it to life. It was unbelievable.

(Darlene at 00:27:46) Wonderful. So, actually, in terms of inspiring your next book, maybe I'll just throw out a comment there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:51) Please.

(Darlene at 00:27:52) You know, first off, physics and probably electrical engineering are two of the fields that many women shy away from. So your choice of physics is a great one. But I'll also add that, you know, if you look at where technology is changing most rapidly these days, you know, there's certainly the sort of steady wave of the computation and informatics like we talked about, but it's really in biology where the cycles are happening faster and faster than ever in terms of new understanding being generated. You know, the fact that in many circles of the life sciences there are groups of biologists aspiring to be able to understand biology the way we understand physics, to be able to model, predict, and really, you know, have that grounding, you know, of what does happen in physics when you build a bridge, whatever. Whereas in biology, we're still decades away from really understanding all the layers and how they relate to each other. So moving into the biological sciences is also going to be a place where we need all the great capabilities that we have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:07) That's amazing. Bio—so we'll do a book for the biological sciences one.

(Darlene at 00:29:13) Just want to plant the seed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:15) Yes.

(Darlene at 00:29:18) Okay. Come on. Everyone would've laughed at a convention for that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:23) Oh, it's so good. No. I like it. We're always—like, it was so much fun, and it's really cool too.

(Darlene at 00:29:32) We're still learning lots about physics. I mean, those cycles are still happening, but what is being learned and changing is probably happening more in space than on Earth at this point, you know, if you think about that. Whereas in biology, there's things that we're doing today that we didn't even know existed, you know, five years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:52) Really? It's like a little gold rush of information in biology.

(Darlene at 00:29:57) Exactly. Yeah. And that's a lot of what Agilent's doing is trying to advance the tools that can help advance that research and discover those new layers of how cells really work and communicate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:10) Oh, so you build tools and equipment to allow them to explore further?

(Darlene at 00:30:15) That's right. And so the instrumentation is about half of it, but there's a lot of front-end chemical and biological reagents that contribute to being able to simplify the complexity of biology, and then, of course, the informatics on the back end that we talked about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:30) So a fun question. How long will it be until, like, your company can produce organic wings that I can attach to my son?

(Darlene at 00:30:41) That's not—not on the roadmap. No. Not on the roadmap. Not on the roadmap. But there's two big layers of or two big horizons with one what I term the century of biology, and I think that, you know, 40 or 50 years from now, they're going to—we're going to look back on these days as the early days of what we will term the century of biology. And so one big thrust of that is precision medicine and health, but the other one is something that people call engineering biology or cellular manufacturing. And so, you know, maybe creating those wings could be part of that cellular manufacturing day direction, and a lot of that is also called bio-inspired engineering. So I think the wings fit into there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:28) I like it.

(Darlene at 00:31:29) And—but it is not—I want to make really clear that it's not part of the Agilent roadmap today, not even remotely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:37) Yes. Ultra clear. 100% clear. Yes. No. I always ask fun questions, you know, just to—it's life. So I am curious, though, because, like, I did see, um, what was it? Some video—my because my brother and son are physicians, and they're, like, you know, nerdy too. They're always sharing stuff with me. They had sent me this one video of them printing these organic structures of organs, and then they would put the cells onto them. And it was like better than a transplant because your own cells would be on them. Yes. And you're familiar with this concept?

(Darlene at 00:32:17) Yeah, I mean, regenerative medicine and stem cell technologies and tissue engineering are a hugely important area. And another, I would say, a great example of what people are doing today was really barely even imagined five years ago in terms of what the technology can do. And it's really making a big difference in medical treatments and orthopedics and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:41) Well, that's what I'm so excited about, because when you can print livers essentially, the whole concept of waiting in line for one goes away.

(Darlene at 00:32:50) You're absolutely right. This idea of being able to find alternatives to human transplants for organs and things would be immensely important. But it's not only the printing of the liver, as you say, but it's also then what happens inside the body and whether it's rejected or not. And that's where, again, this understanding of biological communication, our immune system, and things like that are so important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:15) What's a good—and sorry if I'm putting you on the spot—but what's a good source? I'm always looking for trusted sources. So is there a publication I could follow if I wanted to get some, like, non-hype actual advancements in biology?

(Darlene at 00:33:34) You know, there's a book I could suggest that I think is really aimed broadly at those interested in technology, and it's called What's Your Biostrategy? It was edited and compiled by John Cumbers, who's the president or CEO of SynBioBeta. And you might find it interesting, and it's very much along what this engineering biology, cellular manufacturing side of things, less so than the precision medicine side, although, again, both are incredibly important. But that might be one to check out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:12) Yeah.

(Darlene at 00:34:12) I could arrange to have one of those copies sent to you if you'd like.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:16) Yeah, that'd be very cool. When I'm quiet and I'm, like, you know, walking in nature doing my morning run, I'm a crazy 5 a.m. person. I like to go out and look at the stars and do a run and things like that. But, you know, my mind wanders, and sometimes I think about, like, what sort of new pumps will we be able to create once we have this ability to engineer with organics, or whatever the correct term was, the cellular manufacturing type. We could—I mean, essentially, we're always looking to transfer energy, right? That's a huge thing. But this whole world of energy transfer has been cut off to us. Like, this whole concept—we're these crazy energy machines and more organic structures.

(Darlene at 00:34:59) So cellular manufacturing has kind of a couple of different intentions or ways of really making a difference. The first is that biological-based manufacturing, as compared to our traditional petrochemical-based, is basically renewable, right? And so it's possible to, in a much more sustainable way, produce, even in very large volumes, the chemicals that are used in our industry today. And that has many environmental as well as sustainable impacts in terms of our world. But the other thing that's pretty interesting about biological-based manufacturing is that it opens the door to potentially creating, let's say, products that never existed before. Things that were—there's kind of a Venn diagram overlap of things that you could do chemically or biologically. Some you can do either way, but there's also a whole set of things that are really hard to do traditional chemical manufacturing-wise that you can do biologically. And that opens up new materials and things like that that, in principle, can have higher performance as well as the improved sustainability than what we have today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:21) I'm so excited about the future.

(Darlene at 00:36:23) Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of that future is happening today. So, you know, there's a number of products that have biologically-based materials or processes that are part of their product, but when you pick it up, it just looks like a normal product. So, for example, there's carpets that have been made by DuPont using a Sorona fiber, which is partially or very heavily manufactured biologically. It actually has better stain resistance, for example, and a nice feel to it, in addition to being sustainable compared to, say, traditional nylon or something. So when you look at that carpet, it doesn't jump out and say, "Hey, I'm biologically produced," right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:02) Right.

(Darlene at 00:37:02) So the point is there's a big future, but there's actually a lot that is happening today as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:08) I love it. I just—I see two things. The first one was, like, the leather seats when I'd seen this alternative, it's, like, biological-related, and I was, like, blown away. I was, like, oh, this is so much better than the leather seats, right? Like, and it just made me kind of happy for humanity, because, you know, we don't like to think about how everything's made. But when you think about us as a civilization, we have the option to make it with, you know, animals, or we can just make it with, like, these bio-organic concepts. It just makes much more sense to choose the bio-organic concepts.

(Darlene at 00:37:45) The hope is that some of these new technologies and capabilities will address some of the challenges that we definitely face today on Earth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:52) And then the other thing was, like, when I started engineering or writing code and building things, you know, we just had to lay so much groundwork, so much foundation, over and over and over again to just do the most basic simple things, like reading records out of the database. It's like you just continually write the same stuff over and over. And then, you know, over the past 20 years, it's like now I can jump in and there's a framework and I can basically do what would take 50 people three months, you know, in the nineties—I can do in five minutes now. And so it'll be really cool when we have our youth in elementary schools designing these bio structures or being able to easily and readily access them. That'll be really cool, a really cool time. I'm sorry. I'm all excited. You got me all excited because I don't get to talk about this area a lot.

(Darlene at 00:38:45) Well, thanks for reaching out to me and to Agilent. We're glad to diversify your conversations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:51) I love it. So what are you most excited about today?

(Darlene at 00:38:56) Today, I think that, you know, it really kind of comes back to this impact of biology. And in that, you know, there's this area of precision medicine that we haven't really talked about very much, but it's the idea that we'll be able to understand and treat various disorders and diseases at a molecular level. And, you know, how we classify and think about diseases has evolved greatly over the last many decades. You know, in the really early days, if you had a fever, you know, you didn't know if it was scarlet fever or an infection or whatever. But today, our tools are much, much better for diagnosing a fever. And similarly, in areas like cancer and oncology, we're starting to appreciate how what we might call breast cancer or lung cancer is actually many, many different disorders that all have a different molecular basis. And that if you understand that molecular basis, you might be able to much better predict who, in fact, really is going to respond to a specific therapy.

(Darlene at 00:40:09) We've probably all had friends and family in our lives that have had to deal with cancer, and it's always—it has seemed, up until recent years, that it was rather unpredictable why one patient who seemingly had breast cancer or prostate cancer, one responded and one didn't. And so the understanding that we're getting in terms of genomics and cells and proteomics and metabolomics is helping us to be able to much better understand those disorders. And in complement to that, there's a whole new generation of therapeutics that are also being generated, based on proteins and nucleic acids. And so this direction of precision medicine and potentially being able to dramatically change outcomes and maybe even cure some of these diseases, to me, is just an incredible contribution if we can even play a small role in helping make that happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:09) Yeah. I'm on your side. You let me know what you need. No, I like it. So what you're saying kind of makes—was an interesting view for me. So tell me if I'm wrong with this. What we would call, like, a breast cancer, right? It's much more detailed than that. Like, there's a deeper resolution.

(Darlene at 00:41:29) Perfect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:29) Okay.

(Darlene at 00:41:30) Exactly. And up until now, you know, we didn't really have the tools or the understanding to take those deeper resolution steps. And that's what's really been changing in this whole area of precision medicine, where there's a much more detailed view of your particular challenge and what is much more likely to work. And, obviously, if you want to find the right therapy in the beginning, that is the best thing that can happen. But in an area like cancer, it's even more important because time's important. And so being on the wrong therapy before getting on the right therapy, you know, can also make a huge difference. So we're really trying to help get to early detection and choice of the therapy that's best for that individual.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:13) Ah, I'm so excited with what you're doing. I'm so glad a company like you exists, and you're there with the leadership. And every generation of equipment and learning that you successfully produce, you get us one step closer to solving these problems and improving the quality of life for everybody. So thank you so much.

(Darlene at 00:42:34) No, absolutely. And it's really an honor to work with our research partners and customers in these areas and starting to see some of their really great results.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:43) Amazing. Darlene, we did it.

(Darlene at 00:42:44) Thank you. We did. Did we do it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:46) We made a podcast. It was great. Thank you so much.

(Darlene at 00:42:51) Yeah. That was really, really nice talking to you, Joel. And, you know, let me know what we can do to help support you and next steps, and I'll send you the book, and you'll send me your two books.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:01) Yeah. Excellent. After the call, Jake will send over—we'll get your address. We can send you the books, and then we'll let you know when the clips are gonna be posted and when the podcast is going, all that good stuff.

(Darlene at 00:43:13) Thank you so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:13) For calling.

(Darlene at 00:43:14) Really nice to meet you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:15) Nice to meet you. Bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then cc me, [email protected]—if you cc me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout-out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.