Sparky Mitra

she/her | candidate for congress, CA-50 | San Diego | @brownuniversity @columbia @UCSanDiego | bioengineer | JCVI | 🇧🇩🇮🇳 | tenant, engineer & laborer

[A New Policy @anewpolicyorg]

‼️Breaking: U.S. Senate bill directs @SecWar to consult Israeli government on Israeli technologies they think should be integrated into the U.S. military. 1/

[Sparky Mitra @sparkymitra]

@sdut We are the candidate recommended by California DSA and several other progressive organizations and organizers in San Diego and nationwide. Joining us in fighting against AIPAC, ICE and Trump. Election Day is June 2nd and we are counting on you!!!

[The San Diego Union-Tribune @sdut]

Q&A: Meet Sparky Mitra, candidate for California’s 50th Congressional District https://t.co/rlhaE0DwWX

[AIPAC Tracker @TrackAIPAC]

@ScottPetersCA50 Scott Peters supports Israeli apartheid and genocide. Vote @sparkymitra for an ARMS EMBARGO NOW! #CA50

[AIPAC Tracker @TrackAIPAC]

It's Election Day for the May 19 Primary in Oregon and @jsalfororegon is 100% FREE of AIPAC donations. If you live in #OR03, make sure to get to the polls and VOTE for our endorsed anti-AIPAC candidate!

[Sparky Mitra @sparkymitra]

As a school shooting survivor, I cannot begin to express my horror and anguish.

Dehumanizing rhetoric only exacerbated this tragedy. My heart is broken and with our Muslim family in San Diego. ICSD has always been a home for all San Diegans. May we all move forward in peace.

[Sparky Mitra @sparkymitra]

@ABC Mortified at the shooting at ICSD, a pillar of San Diego. As a survivor of Brown’s school shooting at the end of 2025, I cannot begin to express my horror and anguish. My heart is with my friends and community at ICSD. This violence needs to stop. Enough.

[AIPAC Tracker @TrackAIPAC]

@RepScottPeters Scott Peters is pro-genocide. It's time for change! Vote @sparkymitra for Congress in #CA50!

[Sparky Mitra @sparkymitra]

We deserve progressive representation that is always going to stand beside us: for universal healthcare, to stop funding genocide, to abolish ICE and to make San Diego better for all working people.

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

Beauty should be a core pursuit of biotechnology. There should be companies and nonprofits that engineer organisms solely for the sake of crafting beautiful things.

A few reasons why:

1/ Biotechnology has historically worked in reductionist ways, but many useful functions only emerge at the systems level. By engineering a systems-level outcome, like beauty, we will get much better at engineering organisms in predictable ways.

When I say "reductionist," I mean that most useful things in biotechnology (drugs and tools) were discovered by stripping molecules from their natural contexts. Scientists collect organisms from soil or wherever and then study their molecules in isolation. This basic approach has yielded everything from rapamycin to antibiotics and CRISPR.

This reductionism, though, means that that we know disturbingly little about how life actually works at a systems-level. My core argument is that, by studying beauty, we can remedy this.

Beauty has persisted through tens of millions of years of evolution because it is functional; bright colors help attract pollinators to a plant, for example, which helps the plant breed. If evolution has created all of this beauty for functional reasons, then it stands to reason that by trying to create **new** forms of beauty, we'll be able to discover and understand how these systems-level functions work! Indeed, we may even be able to create entirely new functions that biology hasn't evolved yet. These functions will not possible to understand via isolated molecules or reductionism.

Therefore, a company pursuing engineered beauty for the sake of beauty will probably make many fundamental discoveries about how organisms develop, interact, adapt to their surroundings, and so on.

2/ Beauty is a way to grow the field and bring more people into biotechnology. Nick Desnoyer’s flower design work, for example, has probably reached hundreds of thousands of people. The glowing plants from Light Bio, too, were featured in the mainstream press. You may not think that these examples are “important” for the universe relative to, say, an incrementally better cancer therapeutic, but there’s no question that they are way more popular to mainstream audiences and good, overall, for the field.

3/ The market is huge! Breeding is already widely used to engineer beauty, or at least to select for aesthetic preferences. Pugs are evolutionarily suboptimal, but they've been bred precisely to satisfy a certain aesthetic desire are now a multi-billion dollar industry. The Juliet Rose, developed via breeding over a 15-year period, debuted at the 2006 Chelsea Flower Show and is enormously profitable today. Why should deliberately engineered forms of beauty be any different?

If you are building a biotech company or nonprofit that is pursuing beauty, please reach out! I’d love to help.

[Beyond the Ballot @beyondballott]

We’re proud to endorse @sparkymitra for Congress in CA-50. Rooted in bold progressive policy, she rejects a status quo that’s “too expensive, too violent, and too cruel.”

From Medicare for All to ending U.S.-funded genocide abroad, she’s running on change — and we’re all in!

[AIPAC Tracker @TrackAIPAC]

Today we are proud to endorse @sparkymitra for Congress in #CA50!

Rep. Scott Peters has made his allegiances clear: he supports funneling billions of our tax dollars overseas to fuel a genocide, twice voted to sanction the ICC for pursuing arrest warrants against Israeli officials, and voted to codify the IHRA definition of antisemitism in an effort to crush free speech critical of Israel. That's a checklist from the Israel lobby, not representation.

Sparky Mitra is running to change that. As an organizer at Columbia University's pro-Palestine encampment, she has firsthand experience confronting a system that punishes solidarity. She rejects AIPAC and the Israel lobby entirely, condemns the ongoing genocide, and demands an immediate arms embargo. We can count on Sparky to defend free speech and hold war criminals accountable, not sanction the court trying to prosecute them.

Scot Peters sides with foreign interests. Sparky sides with the American people!

[the ScottiDog @theScottiDog]

Cali voters, we need people beholden not to super PAC’s and rich corporate donors but to the people of California, let’s Spark change and vote for @sparkymitra !

[Rose Penelope Yee @RosePenelopeYee]

We can always find billions for war.
But somehow never enough for rural hospitals, wildfire prevention, or housing.
That’s a choice. I’m running to change it.

[Kate Powell @katefortheppl]

@sparkymitra is ready to educate on the finer points of Progressive policy. Her approach is equal parts science and justice and we are HERE for it all. CA-50, say hello to this dreamboat (and make her your next Congresswoman on the June 2nd primary!).

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Due to federal budget cuts, PBS News had to make the difficult decision to rework our staffing and programming.

This Sunday, our PBS News Weekend team will sign off the air.

[Sparky Mitra @sparkymitra]

Join me at Escondido Free America Walkout on January 20th https://t.co/l8hDZQPb6b via @womensmarch

[Sparky Mitra @sparkymitra]

Trump is flouting congressional authority, federal law and international law by carrying out strikes in Venezuela. With him also threatening to run Venezuela, Trump must be impeached. Congress must vote to block this military action. No to forever wars. No to imperialist motives.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

Nicolás Maduro was not a good guy. His brand of socialism and authoritarian rule devastated Venezuela and crushed democratic institutions. There’s no serious argument that the country is better off under his leadership.

Venezuela deserves democracy.

But believing that does not mean the US gets to break international law, ignore Congress, and unilaterally overthrow the government of a sovereign nation to “police the world.”

So a simple question for MAGA:

Are you still against regime change and endless U.S. intervention abroad, or was that principle only convenient before Trump did it?

You don’t get to oppose imperial overreach in theory and cheer it in practice when your guy is the one pulling the trigger.

[Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg]

It's an old and obvious pattern. An unpopular president - failing on the economy and losing his grip on power at home - decides to launch a war for regime change abroad.

The American people don’t want to “run” a foreign country while our leaders fail to improve life in this one.