Beauty is often considered a superficial quality, but it has tremendous power over us. This week’s episode, produced in partnership with Grow by Ginkgo, features two stories adapted from Grow's 2020 print issue on Beauty. To read more, head over to growbyginkgo.com.
Part 1: When Sudeep Agarwala becomes a synthetic biologist, he rediscovers a tradition from his childhood.
Sudeep Agarwala is a yeast geneticist and synthetic biologist at Ginkgo Bioworks. His writing about biology has appeared in the Washington Post and Grow Magazine.
Read Sudeep’s original piece in Grow by Ginkgo.
Part 2: Jasmina Aganovic’s passion for science leads her to an unexpected place.
Jasmina Aganovic is a cosmetics industry professional passionate about translating innovation into meaningful brands that have an opportunity to connect with a broader audience. Her previous company, Mother Dirt, included a line of products focused on the skin microbiome. Now, Jasmina is working with the powerful Ginkgo Foundry to see what we can learn from biology and can harness through microbes for use in the personal care industry.
Read Jasmina’s original interview in Grow by Ginkgo.
Story Transcripts
Story 1: Sudeep Agarwala
It is the morning of my eighth birthday and I'm sitting on the floor of our kitchen in the house in the suburbs of Chicago. In front of me is this plate with a few things arranged on it. There's some grass, some patty rice, flowers, an oil lamp that's been lit. We called it a prithim. And there's this small bit of beige paste on the plate that we call Chandan.
My entire family is standing around me and they're about to start a tradition for birthdays that my parents brought over from India. One by one, my sister, my mother, my father, they approach me and they take a bit of the rice, the flour and the grass and they put it on my head.
Afterwards, they warm their hands on the oil lamp and touch my head and chest. Finally, they take their pinky finger and dip it into the beige paste. This is the part that I've been dreading this entire ceremony. They take their pinky and they dot it on my forehead.
The paste is cold and it's wet. It has a nice fragrance, a fixed scent to it, I suppose, but as it dries, it dries into this thick, white crust that's crackly and rough and it hurts when you raise your eyebrows.
This is what every birthday would look like for me growing up. My family would do this as a way of wishing me a happy, healthy year ahead. But when we were done, as a kid, I'd run upstairs, comb everything out of my hair and then jump into the shower to scrub my face hard to get rid of this hard, flaky, white crust.
Chandan, this beige paste, is made from this wood which is considered holy in India. It's been described for millennia in ancient Indian sacred text. This wood is used exclusively for worship of the Goddess Lakshmi. As a kid, though, I just knew it looked weird and it felt gross and I really wanted it washed off my face. In a sense, I kind of want to wash all of this off as a kid.
The celebration was part of my life as an Indian-American but it was also deeply embarrassing. We had this ceremony every year on my birthday but we never once invited an American friend to witness it. We never spoke of it outside of our household. We all just wanted to be normal. This tradition was an aberration from that.
But it was important to us. Important to us but not so important that we wanted to be seen as having these weird traditions. I still remember the first birthday, actually, where this ceremony didn't happen. It was one of the most exciting and liberating experiences of my life.
My birthday is in early summer, in mid-June. The first year it didn't happen, I was turning 18. I had a chance to leave Chicago where I grew up and I had this opportunity to do research in a biology lab in Maine in the summer.
That birthday, I remember feeling that something was missing. That the birthday was somehow being less special despite it being my 18th birthday. But I was too excited thinking about research in a real biology lab, not to mention exploring these Maine woods.
Science, biology, it wasn't just a career choice. It was a way to escape my parents’ immigrant life. It represented my future. It was a way to become American, to become what it felt like to become sophisticated. In fact, after that year, I never had a chance to have this birthday ceremony in my life again as I continued on to college and then to graduate school to become a biologist.
Today, almost everyone I know knows me as a scientist. It still baffles me but I make a living as a professional biologist, as a professional yeast scientist. And I stumbled into this new field, synthetic biology. As a synthetic biologist, I think of biology as a technology that we can deploy against challenges humans are facing from resource limitation.
As part of this, a few years ago I was tasked with thinking about how to preserve the ways that humans worship and materials that we consider holy. To explain that, from the Christmas story, we know frankincense and myrrh. But as it turns out, frankincense and myrrh are becoming more and more precious because they're becoming endangered because of climate change and overharvesting.
Same story goes from agarwood, ud from the Islamic tradition. And I was shocked to encounter Chandan, this paste that I hated as a child in this context.
Rather than call it Chandan, though, this time around, I encountered it as sandalwood. Sandalwood may be better. Maybe more specifically I encountered as Santalum album. It's this parasitic plant, an epiphyte that's related to mistletoe. It's a vulnerable species that's currently prohibited from being harvested in India because it's over harvested for its religious context.
Climate change is making things worse. Its ecological niche is becoming increasingly rare.
Ah, the guilt. Growing up, it's such a narrow definition of what sophistication and what normal meant. I wanted to be American. I wanted to have the same parties and birthdays as my friends. What I didn't realize as a child was how amazingly special this birthday ceremony that I had was. It's only something that I could really realize once I escaped having those birthday ceremonies and became a real scientist. That this thing that I hated having smeared on my forehead was not just a part of my parents’ tradition. It's a part of the world's heritage. It's a part of the world's heritage that is disappearing.
But in the same vein, this life that I've escaped into is one which offers solutions to preserving this tradition. As a synthetic biologist, I can identify the genes which are important for this fragrance and put it into my favorite organism of choice, yeast. The same yeast we use to brew beer or to bake bread. And just like we brew a batch of beer, we can brew a batch of sandalwood fragrance produced from yeast.
There's hope here. There's hope of preserving this fragrance, but it's bittersweet. In doing my job, it somehow feels like I'm admitting defeat that climate change and overconsumption are winning, perhaps have won. As a scientist, in a way, I'm working to preserve what I can from a world that soon may not exist anymore.
Before my daughter was born this past year, my mother sent a package of things along from home. There's a bunch of clothes, some toys, things in general for having babies. It's our first daughter. It's our first child.
At the bottom of this package, though, there was this piece of wood that was wrapped in paper. Because there was so much going on at the time, I didn't have time to really unwrap or really think about what was in the package so I put everything away. But this morning, I'm holding this piece of wood eight days after our daughter's birth.
These past eight days have been amazing. My husband and I have been trying to have a child for four years. For gay men, having a child can be a long expensive journey. All of that, though, evaporates the moment she was born. It was such a complete and all-consuming joy to have this new human with us. Even the long sleepless nights this past week have seemed like a complete pleasure.
But this morning, this eighth day after our daughter was born, the house is in extra chaos because we're preparing for her simchat bat. This comes from my husband's Jewish tradition. It's when a baby girl first gets her name eight days after she's born.
My husband is outside organizing with the rabbi. And even though our daughter's going to be raised Jewish, we discussed and we agreed that it's important for me to contribute something from my Bengali heritage.
So I'm inside looking after her while she's sleeping and I'm holding this piece of wood that my mother sent me a few months ago. It's smaller than I remembered from my childhood. It's dark brown, almost black, except where it's been ground away to make this beige paste Chandan.
This piece of wood that I'm holding it's made a long journey. All the way from India at the bottom of my mother's luggage through so many years of my birthdays as I scrubbed so hard to get it off my face. But it's longer than that. This is the same piece of wood that was used for my grandfather's birthdays, for my mother's birthday. Now it's here in Boston on the morning of my daughter's baby-naming ceremony.
The famous sandalwood that Sudeep has at home.
As I'm grinding the paste to make the Chandan paste, I think about how it's disappearing in my hands, just a tiny bit at a time. That one day, this stick of sandalwood will also completely disappear. In fact, all sandalwood may disappear.
If one day we can make sandalwood from yeast, if synthetic biology is successful, and sandalwood is no longer coming from the plant, what will it feel like on the foreheads of generations that will come? Will wearing sandalwood mean the same thing to them? Will it still be a blessing if it doesn't come from this rare fragrant wood? I don't know.
But then again my experience of Chandan is almost certainly different from my mother's growing up in India. And hers was different from my grandfather's.
This morning, as I'm standing in front of all of our friends and family on Zoom during our daughter's baby-naming ceremony, I take my pinky, dip it into the beige paste and dot it onto her forehead. She's sleeping but she makes a face, and I wonder what that face means. I wonder how she's experiencing it. Certainly, it's different from how I ever felt about it, my mother, my grandfather before that. And her experience will be different from the generations to come who may not have real sandalwood for their ceremonies.
As we continue on with the simchat bat and start with the blessing over the wine and the challah, it's dawning on me that it's this changing experience that's the only thing that I can ever hope to pass on as a parent. My daughter is the next step in the ever-evolving story of this tradition.
Story 2: Jasmina Aganovic
One morning, I came into the office during a meeting that was taking place in the back conference room. The walls were all glass so the conference room was a focal point of the space. Other than those in the meeting, the rest of the office was empty.
I walked over to my workspace and sat down at my computer to prepare for a meeting that we were having that day with a prominent lab on campus. It was the summer after my junior year in college. I was interning at a seed stage venture capital company that was working with student entrepreneurs starting companies out of their PhDs.
I was not there because I was interested in becoming an investor. In fact, at that point, I hadn’t the vaguest idea of actually what kind of a job I wanted after school. But what I did know is that I really enjoyed science being used to create things in unexpected ways, which led me to this internship.
When I wasn’t in that office, I was hopping from building to building on campus with my boss. Sometimes meeting entire teams in fancy conference rooms. Other times, speaking to a lone founder in a crammed office space.
That morning, I was in the office until the afternoon. One of the partners walked out of the conference room in the back and shared that there was a lab at one of these school that had developed a partnership with a prominent cosmetics company. They were in the process of winding down that collaboration and they needed someone to take a look at the technical development that was done there and provide a summary. Would I be interested?
“Sure,” I said, but I was mostly preoccupied with the upcoming meeting at that well-known lab. So I took the folders and put them to the side.
There was another intern there that summer. We sat next to one another and we usually tag‑teamed things. I assumed this cosmetics lab was no different. I started speaking with him about it and one of the other team members at the company said something like, “Jasmina, we figured you should do this on your own. It's the beauty industry. Figured you’d have fun with it.”
It dawned on me that I was the only woman at this venture capital firm and that this was probably the driving factor for this project being given to me. I realized my colleague was well-meaning. I don't know that I recognized it as sexism, actually. I don't know if it was because I was naïve and hadn’t yet stepped into the world where I would face that full-on or maybe it just wasn’t talked about as much back then as it is today. Instead, I think most of my annoyance actually came from the fact that I viewed the beauty industry as something that was not taken seriously as an innovation driver. And I did not want to be given a project that wouldn’t be taken seriously.
I blanked out on the rest of what was being said because my soul was effectively rolling its eyes and my horrible poker face was about to give it away.
The next morning, I decided to treat myself as a bribe to do that work. I went to the coffee shop nearby. I sat by a window at a small round table and ordered an ice coffee. I opened up the first manila folder and started flipping through the papers.
Pretty quickly, I started to think, “Hah, this is kind of interesting.”
As I got deeper into the material, I realized that this was an industry I enjoyed and one that was well aligned with my background. I also realized that it had this element of creativity and speed and storytelling that was really attractive to me and how I liked to work. I ended up going through the material pretty quickly and finishing the report.
While I still thought that it was kind of a weird way to assign people projects, it was a watershed moment for me. It felt like there was a door opening and that all you saw what was on…
While I still thought that it was kind of a weird way to assign people projects, it was a watershed moment for me. It felt like there was this door opening and all you saw was what was on the other side and you just don’t even pay attention to the actual door in terms of its color or material or any of the details like that. You’re just focused on the other side, sort of like a bright light and all you see is that light blasting through the opening.
After that internship, I made the decision to start my career in the beauty industry. At that time, my senior year, the economy was effectively collapsing. I distinctly remember walking down the infinite corridor of MIT that September and seeing people crying. Undoubtedly because they had just lost their prized full-time job offers as a result of the financial collapse. This backdrop was something else that gave me maybe the prodding that I felt I needed to do something unusual because I didn’t feel like I was missing out on much.
I applied to every remotely relevant job in the industry online at all of the major companies. I'm talking probably over a hundred jobs. I remember writing these thoughtful cover letters and they all felt like they went into the abyss. I never heard back from a single one. Not one.
And so the months went by. I was telling people about what I was trying to make happen I think a bit sheepishly because the response was mixed. And of course there was the resistance that you might expect. My advisor who’s a tenured professor and who I so admire to this day point blank told me that my decision to work in beauty was wasted because I could do more meaningful work in a field like cancer research. That was gutting, especially given that cancer hits close to home in my family, and pretty recently at that time. That statement made me feel selfish and frivolous.
My friends were generally supportive, though it came with its own experiences that could sometimes be demoralizing. I remember one of my close friends who was the endless cheerleader for everyone. We were sitting in one of the lounge areas in those armchairs that were orthogonal to one another. The juxtaposition of our circumstances in that youthful moment of insecurity caught up to me.
He was one of those people that arrived on campus and knew exactly what he wanted to do and where he wanted to work. To this day, he is in his late 30s at the job that he knew he wanted as a teenager. And that just seemed so impossible to me.
I remember him telling me, “You can do this.” But I remember looking at him and realizing by the look in his eye that he was bewildered by my decision and he just didn’t have the heart to tell me straight. Him, my close friend and encourager.
Thinking back, I think the comments that hurt the most were not actually the harsh words that came from people like my advisor. It was what was in the void of comments that came from friends who didn’t understand my decisions. I didn’t really expect my advisor to know me all that well, but I did expect my close friends to.
I started to question everything. The what-ifs were killer. I was fighting them off all the time, but sometimes they would just overwhelm me and I had to succumb. At that moment in that lounge was one of the many times I cried that last semester over the uncertainty of what was ahead. My friend was patting me on the shoulder to comfort me but didn’t know what to say and that silence only magnified the disconnect of our circumstances.
But one thing I’ve learned about myself, especially over time, even if I am devastated in discouraging circumstances, to give me a beat and my brain will probably find something else to try. And it doesn’t happen overnight, but my mind will always return to this irresistible need to figure it out. It's like something in the back of my mind just keeps churning while I am walking or making food or exercising. Whatever.
Then suddenly something emergence and you think, “That’s pretty compelling actually. I'm going to give that a go.”
And sometimes it's more like, “Yeah. That’s a stretch but doesn’t hurt to try it. If it works, it would be amazing.
And here’s what I realized. Just emailing and applying online wasn’t going to cut it.
I remember pacing in my dorm room one morning. It was a sunny day out. Through my window I could see the Charles River. The water was shimmering. Suddenly I thought, “Maybe looking at open job postings was actually narrowing my scope. What if instead I thought about the brands that I loved and just let them know that I was interested in contributing?”
So I opened up my laptop and started Googling the names of brands that came to mind. I would click on their homepages, scroll to the bottom of the page where it said Contact Us, and whatever that number was, I called it.
It was harrowing to make cold calls. The calls themselves were all different. Some of them were automated. Some of them directed me to customer service. Some of them outright said no. Others took down my info.
One of those random and uncomfortable cold calls was to a brand named FRESH. I loved this brand because they were pioneering the naturals category with stunning fragrance and ingredient stories.
After giving my spiel, “I'm a chemical engineer from MIT, I'm graduating soon. I’d love to help the team at FRESH if there are any open roles,” the woman on the other side said, “Isn’t MIT in Boston?”
I said, “Yes.”
Then she said, “Well, I don't know if you know this but FRESH’s headquarters is in Boston and I think I remember hearing that they need help in product development. Would you be open to that?” And you can probably guess what my answer was.
My time at FRESH was incredible. I savored every second of it. It helped me find my footing and launched my career.
Fast forward to this day, I’ve stayed in the beauty industry and have loved it. Today, I'm an entrepreneur in residence at the biotechnology company Ginkgo Bioworks where I'm looking at how biology can create an entirely new toolset for the future foundation of the beauty industry.
And while I still encounter judgement from others and even my own, of what the industry I am in stands for, I use it as a reminder for the opportunity I have ahead of me to change how people see this industry and to increase its impact on our quality of life. And anytime I get a cold call from a student wanting to chat about career stuff, I always answer.