Media Coverage

Forbes
...George Church, a scientific advisor to the DNA testing company 23andMe and a founder of the Personal Genome Project, has trained several DIYbio pioneers in his Harvard Medical School genetics lab. Biohackers are to biotechnology what Steve Jobs was to the IBM S/360 mainframe, he says. Church sees biohackers as early adopters of technology that will eventually be in as many hands as the iPhone and predicts "a complete disruption of the IP landscape" as a result...

Architect
In mid-September, I had the opportunity to participate in an Adaptive Architecture Workshop entitled "Buildings Inspired by Nature: Inventing the Future Built Environment," sponsored by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. The workshop hosts—Wyss faculty Don Ingber, Joanna Aizenberg, and visiting scholar Chuck Hoberman—organized the workshop thematically into the categories of materials, design, intelligence, energy, and future.

Harvard Gazette
Two young Harvard scientists will each receive $2.54 million or more in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants .... John Calarco, a Bauer Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Center for Systems Biology, and Harris Wang, a Technology Development Fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, were among the first 10 researchers to receive NIH Director’s Early Independence Awards...

Harvard Focus
...“Inspired by the pitcher plant, we developed a new coating that outperforms its natural and synthetic counterparts and provides a simple and versatile solution for liquid and solid repellency,” said principal investigator Joanna Aizenberg, a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering...

Red Orbit
Engineers and physicists at Harvard have managed to capture light in tiny diamond pillars embedded in silver, releasing a stream of single photons at a controllable rate. The advance represents a milestone on the road to quantum networks in which information can be encoded in spins of electrons and carried through a network via light, one photon at a time...

Christian Science Monitor
Over millions of years, natural processes turned the buried remains of dinosaurs, plants, and ancient fish into crude oil. Pamela Silver and her colleagues aim to compress the oil-forming process to nearly instantaneous, with some carbon dioxide, a dash of electricity, and a lot of help from the diminutive star of her Harvard Medical School lab in Boston: Shewanella oneidensis...

CBC Radio
Taking a page from nature's book, Dr. Joanna Aizenberg, a Professor of Materials Science and Chemistry, and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, and her group, have made super slippery surfaces by emulating a carnivorous plant...

Harvard Gazette
The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard has been awarded a $12.3 million, four-year grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a treatment for sepsis, a commonly fatal bloodstream infection. Sepsis is a major cause of injury and death among combat-injured soldiers in the field, as well as patients in hospital intensive care units.

The Scientist
...As an undergraduate at Duke University in the mid-1970s, George Church, now a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, keyed in every known nucleic acid sequence, some 8,000 bases in all, mostly tRNAs, and folded them into three-dimensional shapes using software he had written. “I said, ‘Wow, this is a great game,’ ”he recalls. “Why don’t we just sequence everything in sight and fold it up?”...

The Scientist
In the late 1990s, a handful of physicists and engineers began to take a greater interest in biology. The Human Genome Project was spitting out more and more gene sequences—blueprints for the protein building blocks of the cell—generating a flood of new information about the molecular machinery of life. Trouble was, there were not enough biologists doing the job of figuring out how all these genes and proteins worked together to create a living, breathing organism...

Ivannhoe News [video]
Engineers and applied scientists are creating a special ink that can hide messages in electronic chips. When a certain chemical is applied to the ink, in varying concentrations, it changes the message that is revealed.