Can Biological Engineering Change the World?
Science is always focused on breakthroughs and the next big thing. And, too often, there is loads of hype about what benefits to society a particular breakthrough might bring.
But when I saw the image of Albert Einstein peering out of a petri dish in the office of Christopher Voigt, the chairman of the Department of Biological Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I knew that he was on to something very big. Something that is almost certainly going to affect our children in the decades to come.
The image in the petri dish was built by tiny, living organisms whose DNA had been manipulated by Dr. Voigt and his students so that they were directed to line up in a formation that resembled Einstein’s face.
I was in Dr. Voigt’s office reporting an article on the role that re-engineering nature might play in helping fight climate change. (Read the full piece here.)
And what Dr. Voigt was demonstrating — in images created more than a decade ago during an early stage of his research — is that bacteria and other living things are as programmable as computer code. Life itself could be turned into a modifiable tool of production.
