Saturday Physics for Everyone: "Building Emergent Biological Machines", September 26, 2015
As engineers, we have always built with silicon, metal, plastics, and other materials that have well defined properties. Can we build machines and systems with living cells and biological materials? Can we use top-down engineering-design approaches and bottom-up emergent biological processes to build machines and systems that can benefit humanity?This grand challenge requires a highly interdisciplinary approach, bringing together engineers, biologists, physicists, chemists, material scientists, and others. Ethical issues are very important to consider because these biological machines begin to imitate and look like living entities.
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