NSF Puts Up $25 Million to Research Biological Machines
What would you do with $25 million? If you answered "create a center to research the development of programmable, highly sophisticated biological machines," we regret to inform you the National Science Foundation and MIT have beaten you to the punch. The Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems Center (EBICS), will not only advance research in the emerging experimental discipline of engineered biological systems, but will lay an extensive educational groundwork for research in the field going forward. In other words, it appears the NSF thinks this sci-fi-tastic arena is among science's most promising frontiers. And why not? The implications of advanced biological machines are vast, impacting everything from experimental biology to regenerative medicine to energy and materials sciences. Though headquartered at MIT, research will also take place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as at various minority-serving academic institutions, as one goal of the...