30 years into biotechnology, despite all of the successes and attention and hype, we still are inept when it comes to engineering the living world. We haven’t scratched the surface of it, and so the big question for me is, how do we make biology easy to engineer? For comparison, if you look at other examples of technology, there are many of them. Take modern electronics, during and following World War Two, people are building computers. Von Neumann is building a nice machine in the basement of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The official purpose of this machine is to design hydrogen bombs and compute the trajectories of munitions. And he of course is apparently running artificial life programs on it, because that’s what he’s more interested in Let’s say it was 1950. The Apple One, the personal computer is only 25 years later.

interview with drew endy, the guy behind parts.mit.edu

• Uncategorized