PopTech : Blog : Donald Ingber on the serendipity of science

Donald Ingber on the serendipity of science

Emily Spivack ( Bio / Posts ) | Wednesday, April 27, 2011 UTC

It may have been serendipity. While Donald Ingber was enrolled in an undergraduate sculpture course, he was also learning how to culture cells in a biology class, which led him to an unexpected breakthrough in comprehending cellular construction. It’s that same kind of chance that Ingber hopes will infiltrate Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, where he is the organization’s founding director.
The Wyss Institute launched in 2009 when Harvard received $125 million from Hansjörg Wyss to carry out the Provost’s challenge to envision the future of bioengineering across the entire university.

In his 2010 PopTech talk, Ingber explained that the Institute’s goals were not only to create a new model for technology innovation and collaboration, but also to look to biology to develop new engineering solutions. The Wyss website goes into more detail: “By emulating Nature's principles for self-organizing and self-regulating, Wyss researchers are developing innovative new engineering solutions for healthcare, energy, architecture, robotics, and manufacturing.” Working with hospitals and universities across the Boston region as well as supporting collaborations among different disciplines, the Wyss Institute encourages high-risk projects that may fail or evolve into commercial products, medical treatments, corporate alliance and start-ups.

A few of the projects that Wyss scientists are developing include:

Devices that will predict life-threatening events in premature infants and prevent them from happening,
Shoes with vibrating insoles to improve the stability of elderly people,
Robotic devices, such as tiny autonomous flying machines shaped like houseflies used to pollinate crops while the causes of bee colony collapse are identified and solved, and
'Organs-on-a-chip' that mimic the complex interactions between living tissues within an organ and the physical cues that cells normally experience within the body.

Here’s to hoping that when serendipity runs its course at the Wyss Institute, the world will be a safer and healthier place.

Tags: