Charles Fracchia on a new breed of biologists
The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: The merging worlds of software, hardware, and biology.
Rhoda Erdmann's Berlin lab (source: Wikimedia Commons)
In this new episode of the Hardware Podcast—which features our first discussion focusing specifically on synthetic biology—David Cranor and I talk with Charles Fracchia, an IBM Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and founder of the synthetic biology company BioBright.
Discussion points:
Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther.
- The blurring of the lines between biology, software development, hardware engineering, and electrical engineering
- BioBright’s efforts to create hardware and software tools to reinvent the way biology is done in a lab
- The most prominent market forces in biology today (especially healthcare)
- How experiments conducted using Arduino or Raspberry Pi devices are impacting synthetic biology
- Pembient’s synthetic rhino horns
This week’s click spirals
- Studies on the effects of oxytocin
- Dafen, a Chinese village where copies of artwork are mass-produced
- Gorgeous Swiss- and Japanese-made calipers. See a brand comparison here. If you’re looking for a good way to pass a long flight, download the PDF versions of the Mitutoyo, TESA/Brown & Sharpe, and Starrett catalogs.