PAUL MATSUDAIRA: What
I'd like to do now is to introduce to
you our first speaker, Professor Doug Lauffenburger. He's the head of
Biological Engineering. And what he'll do is
introduce us into, what is bioengineering? Doug. [APPLAUSE] [LAUGHS] DOUG LAUFFENBURGER: Thank you. Can I ask just first, how
many of you are freshmen? Raise your hands. OK, good. For those who aren't, today
can be a bonus lecture, but then henceforth
we really do want to focus this on
the freshmen as they start to look at their
MIT educational careers. So it's a pleasure to do this. I will introduce
you to the world of bioengineering as a
whole, as we see it at MIT, to the different facets. We'll delve into a little bit
about biological engineering per se as a discipline within
the world of bioengineering overall. And, I hope, set
the stage for most of the rest of the lectures
that you'll be seeing. OK. Well, let me begin by just
talking about what engineering is at all, OK? Because we can talk
about bioengineering. It's nice to have a concept
for what engineering is. And for those of you
who are freshmen, chances are very few of you
took a course in engineering in high school. How many of you took
an engineering course in high school? They really don't
exist, do they? So you come here and you think
about majoring in engineering. Well, do I really
know what it is? So let me start there. This is one way
of looking at it. Engineering comprises
two aspects. There's a science aspect of it. Engineers are scientists. They learn about
the world around us. The second aspect is technology. Engineers are technologists. They make things that
haven't existed before. So if the science is studying
the things that exist and technology is making
things that don't exist, engineers actually do both. OK, so there's two pieces. The formal words
might be analysis. Analysis has to do
with the science. We're going to study
systems of interest. They're usually complicated,
and there's usually many, many components to them. Hierarchical means
there's details, and they come together
to create something in an integrative way, and
then they're put together to create something
yet that now all turns into one kind of
an operating system. The other word is synthesis,
and that's building, and that's making
technologies using these many, many components put
together in complicated ways. So the science is kind
of the analysis part and the technology's kind
of the synthesis part. All right. In engineering,
though, the one-- you say, well, how does this
distinguish from science? Because scientists
can also create new technologies, and
scientists certainly study how the world works. One of the crucial
aspects is that engineers tend to emphasize design both
in the study and the building. Not only you want to
see what is all there and how it works
together, you want to see if there's
design principles that help us understand the
relationship between how they're put together and how
the system as a whole operates. Because to build a
technology, if you can't think about designing it
from putting pieces together in order to
accomplish something, it's really going to
be trial and error, and that's not a very effective
way to build technology. So this is something that
really is an important facet of engineering,
and that is design, thinking about how
things get put together in order to accomplish some
kind of a desired task. Now within engineering,
each of the engineering disciplines you can think of
focus on a particular science base for the components that it
wants to study and build things from and the mechanisms it wants
to study and build things from. You can't know all the
science in the world. So if you're going to major
in some kind of engineering, you usually pick some
aspect of science that's going to be your focus. So for instance,
civil engineering, mechanical engineering,
electrical engineering tend to focus on particular
branches of physics. That's the science
they study the most. All engineers study mathematics. That's clear. But then if you're
in civil engineering, mechanical engineering,
electrical engineering, you really go in depth
on a lot of the physics, because the components you're
going to be putting together are physical components. The mechanisms are
going to be the physics of how these things interact. Quantum physics,
solid state physics, Newtonian physics, so forth. People who major in, let's
say, chemical engineering or nuclear engineering
or materials science and engineering,
they learn math. They learned some physics. But then they tend to focus
on some branches of chemistry. Maybe organic chemistry,
maybe physical chemistry, maybe inorganic chemistry. And that's the kind
of science they'll study most, because
those are the-- they're going to study how chemical
components work together and how chemical
mechanisms operate. You notice I haven't written
biology here yet, OK? That's going to come later. But if you look at the
traditional engineering disciplines that
have been around, they've been based on
some branches of physics or some branches of
chemistry, by and large. But in all of these, there's
a very interesting paradigm. You can use different
words for it, but here's one set of words
that's easy enough to remember. Measure, model,
manipulate, make. You need to measure things
to quantify what's there and how it works. You need to model it. You need to describe it
in mathematical terms because it's so complicated
your intuition can't do it, so you need mathematical
models to represent how the system operates in
ways that your intuition just can't grasp. Manipulate. You need to go in
and change things. Change one component. Change its properties
in order to make the system behave differently. And then if you're
good at all that, if you now can
measure what's there and know how it works
together and can manipulate it to make changes, then you can
actually make something useful. So that's the progression. It requires design
principles, design parameters, computational models. To make something,
you really need to construct it for the
kind of operation you want. You have to study how the
overall system is behaving based on the components. So that's what these
engineers do based on physics, and that's what these engineers
do based on chemistry. So that's a little bit of
a feel for engineering. OK. Well, now let's add
this engineering to the world of
biology and medicine, because you hear words
like bioengineering, biomedical engineering,
medical engineering, biological engineering. How can we make sense of that? Well, here's one
way to look at it. First, let's start with these
traditional engineerings that everybody's
familiar with that are based on mathematics
and some branches of physics and chemistry, depending
on the discipline. Chemical engineering,
electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, material
science and engineering. OK. If you take any one
of these disciplines and apply them to problems
that arise from health care, whether it's clinical
hospitals or the device or diagnostic industries,
you can call yourself a biomedical engineer. You're taking the
disciplinary engineering based on chemistry or physics. You're applying it
to a medical problem. That's biomedical engineering. It's really not a discipline
you would major in. So at MIT, we have a minor in
biomedical engineering where you can major in any
one of these things, take some courses that have to
do with biology and medicine, and that's now an application
field that applies yourself to problems. Now we also added biology,
which I forgot to put here. This is plus medicine,
and this is plus biology. So if you take any one of
these traditional disciplines and also add some
biology, that's essentially the field of
biotechnology, thinking about engineering on biology. And that can be
applied to health care problems in the
pharmaceutical industry, say, or even the
device industry. Or it's also applicable to
many other kinds of industry, new kinds of materials,
new kinds of manufacturing, biowarfare defense,
things like that. OK? So a chemical engineer,
an electrical engineer, a material-- mechanical engineer,
material science engineer can apply themselves to
biomedical engineering. They can apply themselves
to biotechnology. So that's part of your choices. You can major in Course 10 or 6
or 2 or 3 and 1, and so forth. And depending on the choice
of problems that you solve, you can also be part of the
world of biomedical engineering or biotechnology. And all of this lumped
together is what we would call bioengineering. Bioengineering is just
a very broad umbrella that covers what any of
these diverse disciplines might do that bring
engineering together with the science of biology
or the profession of medicine. Now in addition to the thing
we've created here at MIT is another
engineering discipline that's very analogous to this. You might think
of it as a sister to Course 10 or Course 6
or Course 2 or Course 3. But now the science
that it focuses on, it learns math, learns
a little bit of physics, learns a bit of chemistry. But now its basic
science is biology, the components and mechanisms
by which biology works. So genetics, biochemistry,
molecular biology, cell biology. It says, this is the science
for biological engineering. So these people can
now get a major. And I think we're a couple
of weeks away from, we hope, being approved as Course 20. And you can use this major to
solve medical problems that have to do with health care. You can use this major to
solve biotechnology problems in other industries. So it becomes a
sister discipline alongside chemical or electrical
or mechanical or materials or civil. It's just based on
a different science. All of these majors, whether
it's biological engineering or any of these, you can
be part of the whole world of bioengineering. You can do biomedical
engineering work or biotechnology work. So this is a very important
picture to keep in mind. Otherwise, these names just
kind of go all over the place. Oh, what's the difference? Oh, they're all the same. It's not true. There really are
specific differences, and it's just a
matter of choice. So let's look at
a little history to figure out how we got here. Bioengineering,
biomedical engineering has actually been around for
about more than 50 years. Back in the middle part
of the 20th century, people were creating artificial
kidneys and artificial hearts and things like that. They were trained as electrical
engineers or chemical engineers or
mechanical engineers with chemistry and
physics, but they just applied it to the problem
of replacing heart function or replacing kidney function. So the careers, they tended
to work in the medical device field. Diagnostics,
imaging, prosthetics. Those are artificial limbs, say. Implants, the artificial heart. Extracorporeal means outside
the body, artificial kidney. So a lot of these folks would
work in those industries. Or some of them could work in
the pharmaceutical industry where you actually made a drug. So you worked in manufacturing
or processing or delivery. OK. And these engineers
didn't really need to be trained in the
science of biology per se. They didn't really need
genetics or biochemistry or molecular biology
or cell biology. They could take the engineering
they learned based on physics and chemistry and
solve these kinds of problems very usefully. And most of the majors
around the country, if you go to other
universities, if you had choices to go to
other universities, if they have a biomedical
or bioengineering major, this is really what
it's focused on. And you have that choice here. You can major in one of the
other engineering disciplines and still apply yourself
to medical problems. So just some examples,
and I've got them in alphabetical
order of departments it might be associated with. For instance, there
are astro department. There's interest in
spaceflight physiology. What happens when you take
humans out into low gravity? What changes about
their physiology? That's something that an
aerospace major interested in biomedical engineering might
find a very attractive research area to be in. And that's a great
research area to be in. They can major in aero astro
and look into space flight physiology. Chemical engineering,
bioprocessing. Chemical engineers are very well
trained in process engineering, how to make things out
of chemical products. So you learn how to build
bioreactors, say, reactors that have cells making some
useful therapeutic protein, OK? That's a very
exciting type of thing to be in with a chemical
engineering background. Electrical engineering. I think I've got a
couple of examples here. Imaging, how to use
different types of modalities where you send different
types of electromagnetic waves into tissue and have them
distorted in different ways by the different components
of the tissue so they actually can see through tissue, OK? So electrical engineer
can be very good at this sort of imaging work. They know a lot about
electromagnetic physics and signal processing
and so forth in order to figure out how different
waves passed through tissue can end up depicting different
portions of that tissue, tumors and so forth. So electrical engineering,
biomedical engineering, this might be something
that they would do. Image-guided surgery. I sort of have this
under computer science, because then you can
take those images, put them in the computer,
and then say, well, where should I cut in order to
miss some arteries and veins and do the most
effective thing if I've got to do a surgery
around somebody's knee? So you've got to be
very well trained in computer science
and robotic algorithms and apply them to
this medical problem. Environmental remediation. This might be civil engineering,
environmental engineering, Course 1, where you'd
be very interested in the microbes in
the outside world and how they consume
toxic chemicals. They might be able
to clean it up, OK? So that's an interesting
application of, let's say, civil environmental
engineering to bioengineering. Material science. You might be interested
in drug delivery. Somebody makes a drug. How do you actually
get it into the body, in the right places, and
released at the right rates in the right amounts? Targeted to the brain,
targeted to the liver. So you have to create the
right kinds of materials to encapsulate drugs
and let them diffuse out to the right places and the
right time at the right pH, and so forth. So material scientists might be
very good at controlled release drug delivery problems. Do I have any more? Oh, OK. Artificial heart. Mechanical engineers
would learn all the things you need to know
to build the pumps and study the fluid flow, the
fluid mechanics of the blood, and how it doesn't get
sheared so the blood cells get damaged, and have the right
pressures, the right flow rates, the right
pulsatile oscillations. So to study that sort of fluid
physics, fluid mechanics, you could major in
mechanical engineering and make very important
contributions with, let's say, artificial hearts. Or hip implants, OK? You need to replace a
damaged and injured hip. Mechanical engineers
might be very well trained to be able to
study the forces that need to be withstood
and how to create the right structures of
some kind of material to bear those loads and connect
things in the right ways. You could get a degree
in mechanical engineering and be very good at
things like hip implants. OK? So you get the message. There's all sorts of things. You can major in one
of these disciplines and connect that discipline
to the application world of biology or the
application world of medicine, but still trained
in that discipline. And these would be things that
you would major in Course 1 or 2 or 3 or 6 or
10, say, and then do the biomedical engineering minor
to connect that major to some of the right elective courses. OK. And that's been the state of
the world for about the last 50 years, OK? There's been all those majors. And as I said, if you go to some
other universities and major in biomedical
engineering, you really get trained to do
one of those things. You specialize in electrical
or mechanical or chemical, controlled release or
implants, and so forth. And you notice I haven't
said anything about biology. Those folks didn't really need
to be educated in genetics, biochemistry, molecular
biology, cell biology to solve those problems. And that's because
biology as it used to be was not a science that engineers
could address very well, because in order for engineers
to really analyze, study quantitatively, develop models,
and to build technologies, alter the parts, there's a lot
of requirements on the science that really biology
didn't satisfy. The actual mechanisms of
function weren't understood. Yes, you could see
that moving your arm required a certain force and
would weigh a certain load, but you really didn't
know what was going on down in the proteins
and cells and tissues of the muscles and the bones. But still, you could design
maybe an artificial bone to do this, an implant. You didn't really know
the molecular components, so how in the world could you
actually manipulate the system if you didn't even know what the
molecules were that are really underlying this? You couldn't really
do the chemistry on the biological molecules. It's very hard to quantify,
since if you didn't even know the parts and
the mechanisms, how could you get quantitative
measurements for them, develop models? So there's good reason
why there never really was a biological engineering
until very recently, because biology wasn't a
science that was really suited for engineering analysis
and engineering synthesis. So therefore, the world
of biomedical engineering mainly involved all these
application problems that I've just talked about
that didn't necessarily require biology per se. But that's changed, OK? The good news for you folks
is biology has changed. It's now a science that
engineers can, in fact, connect to very well. It was very different
when I was your age. When I was your age and
a freshman in college, biology was just starting to
be on the verge of becoming a quantitative,
mechanistic component. Manipulable, designable,
modelable science. And when I sat in your
chair, it wasn't that way. I envy you all. Two revolutions happened. One was the molecular revolution
about molecular biology. At one point in time,
that was a revolution. It didn't exist. The identification of the
actual components involved. So if we just look at
bone, you may think, well, it's just this
mechanical material tissue. Well, no. Underneath it is cells that
build up polymers and degrade them, and they have little
motors that move them around and machinery that
pulls on the tissues, and factories inside that create
the molecules and degrade them. And that's all governed by
specific networks and machines that we'll talk
about in a minute. And molecular biology
allowed all these pieces, these components underneath just
this big, macroscopic structure to now start to be identified. Only when you could identify
the actual molecular components could you really start
to do engineering on it, could you really
decide what they were, measure them, and then
change them, say, genetically. The second revolution was
the genomic revolution. And that was really
important, because even though molecular
biology existed and you could identify these components
and study their properties and manipulate them, it
was very painstaking. You kind of have to
do it one at a time. And it might take a
decade to really learn about one particular gene
or one particular protein. The nice thing about
the genomic revolution is it just accelerated
this immensely. You can now learn
about the parts in a very comprehensive
way, hundreds at a time, thousands at a time. And the technologies that
exist now to study these now allow us to get many, many
more components understood, identified, measured,
and so forth. So we can now
identify the parts, manipulate them, and do this
actually in a very fast way. So biology is at the point
where getting the parts and manipulating them
is now relatively easy. Now the hard part
is, how do they work? Now that you know what
the components are, how do they work? Well, interestingly enough,
they work as machines. If you look at a
picture of a cell here migrating across
a surface and you want to know how to make that
cell migrate faster to colonize a biomaterial or
slower to prevent a tumor from
metastasizing, you have to look inside the cell for how
the molecular components work together as a machine
to transmit forces to the environment,
pull on the environment, pull the rest of the cell along. So there's actin cytoskeleton
and all sorts of proteins that link the actin
cytoskeleton to receptors that cross the cell
membrane, and they bind to proteins in the
extracellular matrix. And these all work as an
exquisite, many, many, many, many, many molecule machine to
decide what forces to generate and where and how strong, OK? So just knowing that
all these parts exist and their properties is
crucial, but then you have to put them all together
to study them as a machine. The other aspect is these
machines are not autonomous. They're not just sitting
there, working constantly at the same rates
and the same powers. They're regulated. So those machines might be tuned
to generate more force or less force, or force at one side of
the cell instead of the other. Well, who regulates them? Well, there's whole
other sets of molecules that actually work as
information processing circuits. And you can draw them as
signal transduction cascades where signals come in
from the environment and they set off
enzymatic reactions that change what genes are
expressed and the forces at which cytoskeleton pools
and the rates at which enzymes perform metabolic reactions. And people draw them then
schematically as circuits where you would take
all the molecules that might be in this kind
of biological cartoon and just draw them
here in some kind of archaic electrical circuit,
because the cells are-- they have machines
that carry out function and they have circuits that
govern how those machines work. So these are very
appealing metaphors, and this is
engineering language. So all this is saying, biology,
now that we have the components and we can do
something with them, it actually needs to be
studied, the way engineers look at things in terms of
machines, circuits, systems, and so forth. So the point is biology
is now very different. The biology of 30
years ago didn't allow biological engineering. Biology now does, OK? So the bioengineering
world that's existed for 50 years that
has chemical engineering, electrical engineering,
mechanical engineering, material science aimed
at medical problems without really studying
biology in depth, that's been around for 50 years
because it didn't need biology. It still exists. But now that biology can
be accessed by engineers, this new thing shows
up beside them. And now there is a
biological engineering that you can study if you
learn genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, cell
biology as your basic science. Because now, biology
can be analyzed and it can be synthesized. And actually, it benefits from
this engineering approach, because these machines
then-- circuits are complex. So the components
can now be identified and the mechanisms
can now be studied. You can now quantify them. Genetic engineering
means you can very easily manipulate these. If there's a protein that
has a critical function, you can mutate it,
make it express at higher levels
or lower levels, or move it to different
places in the cell, or have it interact
with different molecules or with different affinities. You can now change any
component you want. So the hard part is
predicting what's going to happen when you do. OK. So this is where
engineers now come in. So added then to the
traditional engineering disciplines that can be applied
to solving medical problems, there is this new
discipline now that MIT has created that's called
biological engineering, because it's rooted
in biology, just like chemical engineering's
rooted in chemistry. Electrical engineering's
rooted in-- well, electrons, but
that's a branch of physics, and so forth. So it's hard to call everything
physical engineering. That's why we have the
different branches. But there's an analogy
to 100 years ago, electrical engineering
was invented here. You may not know this. There was no such thing
as electrical engineering until the 1890s. MIT invented it. It's like, you know what? There's all these
advances in physics, and we ought to train
engineers to study it better and build things on it. So MIT created
electrical engineering. In the 1930s, up
till then, there was no such thing as
chemical engineering. MIT invented it and
said, you know what? There's all these
advances and chemistry. In the early part
of the 20th century, chemistry became mechanistic
and quantifiable. And MIT said, you know what? We ought to train people who
think like engineers to study it and build things
on it, and they created chemical engineering. Well, now we're in
roughly 2000-plus, and MIT's doing the same thing
with biological engineering, saying, you know what? There's been these
revolutions in biology, and it's now mechanistic and
quantifiable and desirable and manipulatable. Let's create this too. So it doesn't take
place that frequently. Every few decades, there's
a new kind of engineering. So this is the newest one. So it's got both the technology
facets and science facets. Biological engineers
want to create new technologies, new
things that are built from biological components. And there's also
the science facet. We want to analyze
and understand better the way biological
systems work as these machines and circuits, and so forth. So you can be interested
in understanding. You can be interested
in building. Both are facets. So it looks just like all
the other engineering science technology. There's analysis of these
complicated, many component systems. There's synthesis, which is
building new things based on these systems. There's measure, model,
manipulate, and make. The only difference is
instead of doing these on the basis of
physical components and inorganic or organic
chemistry components, you're doing it on genes,
proteins, and cells. That's the science of which
you analyze and build. All right. Let me just give you a few
examples of the sorts of things that are being done
in the labs of some of the biological engineering
faculty that will give you a flavor of this, of what
happens when you think like an engineer in
terms of analysis and synthesis of
complicated things in quantitative, integrative,
design-based ways, but you're doing
it on the substrate of the mechanisms of biology. So one aspect is,
are there new methods to really manipulate
biological systems? Maybe for studying them better. Professor Bevin Engelward has
a new kind of genetic construct that she's made. I won't go into it in detail. But in the genes of a
cell, if you think about, how do you get
mutations, you may get bombarded by radiation,
toxic chemicals, chemicals in your inflammatory response. Those chemicals can
interact with the DNA in your chromosomes and
cause little mutations in the chromosomes. They just change the
basis in the DNA, and that changes the way
the genes turn into proteins and can mutate the cells. How can you watch that happen. How could you actually
see that happen? She's created a way to do
it by taking a gene that will make a protein that's
yellow, fluorescent yellow, but only when
there's been a damage event in that particular
piece of the DNA. So my mouse might normally
be whatever color it is, white or brown. If every one of its cells was
expressing this yellow protein, the mouse would be green. That wouldn't help you much. What you really want
is to be able to see a green or a yellow
cell only when there's been a
damage mutation there that might lead to cancer. So she's created that. And what you can see
here, this is actually the pancreas of a mouse. And the mouse is just
about all white or brown. But every now and then,
the pancreas, let's say, you can see one cell or two
cells that now light up yellow. It's because their chromosomes
have been damaged in this place by some radiation or chemical
or some kind of an event. So she's created a
new way to manipulate the biology inside
a living animal to study these mutation events. That's biological engineering. It's manipulated a system by
biological components in order to study them better. Another type of biological
measurement method, this is Professor Scott Manalis. And you might want to be able
to have better ways of studying how DNA interacts with RNA, or
how proteins interact with DNA, or how proteins interact
with each other. But you really want
to measure them in cells at very low
levels and without having to add extra labels like
fluorescence or radioactivity, just intact. So he's created this
new device where he can put one kind of
molecule on these tiny little of cantilevers that are
only a few hundred microns long and very, very thin. And then if he takes some sample
from blood or tissues or cells, if they bind to these molecules
in a very selective way, it'll bend. You can scan a laser
across it and watch little tiny bends
and measure tens or hundreds or thousands of
these things simultaneously. So it's a new
measurement method aimed at understanding the molecular
components inside cells. You may create
entirely new systems in which to study biology
Professor Linda Griffith-- all of these are biological
engineering professors-- is very interested in studying
the onset of human disease. And it's really hard to
study human patients and say, you know what? I want to treat you-- I want to give you
this thing and I want to see if you get this disease. That's ethically not very good. You can do it with animals,
but animal physiology isn't the same as
human physiology. So how can you actually study
human physiology and the onset of disease when you can't
really do it in humans and you can't really
do it in animals? So in the world of tissue
engineering, what she's really discovered is you can create
human tissues outside the body. So here, she has this
tiny silicon chip. You can see how small it
is relative to a penny. And in this is drilled
all sorts of holes. And in these holes
essentially she can build, with the right
combinations of cell biology and biochemistry and biophysics,
she can recreate liver tissue capillary beds where she has
liver cells all branching, and she can have blood-like
fluid flow through it and the cells live. And she can study this with
microscopy or things like that. So she's created human
tissue, liver tissue outside the body, so she can now
study the onset of human liver diseases, cancers,
viral infections in ways that you could never
do, because you couldn't do it on human patients. This is biological engineering. She's created a new
biological assay system out of biological components. New biology-based materials. Professor Angela Belcher
wants to create-- it's very important to
have small micro electronic circuits, let's say,
or photonic displays. But what they require is to get
inorganic compounds patterned in a very, very careful
and very reliable way down at the nanometer
scale so that the right crystal structures form, and so forth. Right now, that's done with
very expensive and very toxic processes. Toxic chemicals, high
pressures, things like that. Could you replace this all
with a biological process that didn't require
the toxic chemicals and the high pressures
and temperatures and the environmental waste? And so she's taken
viruses that are tiny-- they're on a nanometer scale-- and engineered them,
genetically altered them so that on their
tips and their sides they express specific
peptide sequences that can bind to the particular
inorganic materials crystals that she's interested. And the viruses will
organize them into wires. She's made conducting wires. She's made batteries. And she can do this on the lab. She could do on this
bench right here. No high temperature, no high
pressure, no toxic chemicals. Just do it right
here, or the viruses will do it if she
just manipulates them correctly genetically, OK? So new kinds of materials
based on biology. Professor Matsudaira, who's
your instructor for this course, you might think of this as
new biology-based devices. I talked about
biological machines. Well, these molecules
come together and they can generate
forces in very clever ways. So he's studying how, for
instance, in some organisms, the horseshoe crab
has something called an acrosome in which
you have a coiled up cytoskeletal structure. And then under the
right conditions it gets released
and very quickly generates a very large force
that can push or penetrate, or so forth. So he's threading the
structure of this molecule, how it's regulated, how it
moves from a confirmation that stores energy and
that can be triggered to then change its
conformation and structure and generate a force. This now can create new kinds
of force-generating devices based on biology. Creating whole new organisms. Some of you have heard of this
field of synthetic biology. Really, what that is
is genetic engineering but with an engineering
design perspective rather than just trial and error. What happens if I
mutate this gene? It's, OK, I'm going to have
a model for gene regulation and expression and the proteins. And what are these
proteins going to do in a network for
metabolism or protein production or things like that? I'm going to have
engineering models for this, and I'm going to
say exactly what I have to do to the gene
sequence in order to get the outcome that I want, OK? So that's genetic engineering
with real engineering. Interestingly, it's
called synthetic biology. So Drew Endy, Professor Endy
in biological engineering has taken a particular virus,
the bacteriophage T7 that has a very complex genome that
people understand parts of it but not all of it. And he's essentially refactoring
it, re-engineering it. He likes to call it
refactoring, because it's like he's redoing a
computer algorithm. And he's intentionally
changing the genome on a base-by-base sequence,
fundamental modeling understanding to
say, what proteins are going to be expressed,
and at what levels and in what order? And then study the
various new organisms that he's made for
how they can grow under different
conditions, and so forth. So you can actually create
new organisms or organisms with new processes,
new properties. OK. So these last examples I
gave you came from over here. This is what you
can do if you're educated to think like
an engineer in terms of the analysis and synthesis
and complicated, many components, quantitative
modeling design, but just on genetics,
biochemistry, molecular biology,
and cell biology. And that now creates
this discipline that's alongside of all these
others that are strongly based in chemistry and physics. And the application areas, yes.
