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An engineer teaches her colleagues to share their toys
Is your research about creating new
things or mimicking what nature does?
We’re often trying to mimic something
that can be found in nature, but we
are trying to do it in a different context. Biology is very good at producing
very complex molecules that have very
interesting bioactive properties that
we use as drugs to treat different types
of disease. Many times the organisms
that do these very interesting chemical
processes are things like trees or corals that are not easy to grow, or take a
longer time and more resources and
energy to grow. So an alternative to
trying to develop large-scale methods
for growing the natural organism is
to elucidate the chemistries that are
encoded in these organisms and then
harness them and put them into simpler organisms, like bacteria or yeast,
that grow very quickly and that we have
infrastructure in place to grow in very
large volumes.
What is Open Wet Ware?
Open Wet Ware is
basically a Web-based
community interface that
allows people to contribute information and share
information. A lot of the
memberships are research
laboratories, and people
can post a question
and share information
about protocols that they
are using, what they find is
working and what doesn’t
work. So it’s a way for a
community of people
working on similar things
to share their knowledge.
What are the risks? Could this work
help terrorists make anthrax?
No, but I think it’s very important to
acknowledge that there are legitimate
concerns. But there are concerns with
any technology, right? Technologies are
important because they advance our
existence, our quality of life, but they
You’re involved in several open-science
initiatives including Open Wet Ware
and iGEM, the International Genetically
Engineered Machine competition. What
is open science and why is it needed?
There are certain people in the community that recognize ... that building
out open technology platforms is the
way you really advance the field, and
this is certainly borne out in other areas
of technology like computer science.
So the initiatives were started by a community of people who were trying to
cultivate that culture within synthetic
What about iGEM?
iGEM is an undergradu-
ate competition, and the basic idea is
you have teams of students from dif-
ferent universities working over the
summer on designing and building a
biological system. And the real meat of
it is you have this parts registry, which
consists of parts contributed by teams
of previous years. So teams this year
can take those parts and reuse them
and build upon all the knowledge base
that came before that.... As you begin
to piece parts together, you can build
more complex functions.... So the idea
is you take these more simple compo-
nents that encode basic functions and
start linking them and integrate the
different pieces together. s
