Charles Fracchia on a new breed of biologists

O'Reilly Radar Podcast - O'Reilly Media Podcast

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: The merging worlds of software, hardware, and biology.

In this new episode of the Hardware Podcast—which features our first discussion focusing specifically on synthetic biology—David Cranor and I talk with Charles Fracchia, an IBM Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and founder of the synthetic biology company BioBright.

Discussion points:

• The blurring of the lines between biology, software development, hardware engineering, and electrical engineering
• BioBright’s efforts to create hardware and software tools to reinvent the way biology is done in a lab
• The most prominent market forces in biology today (especially healthcare)
• How experiments conducted using Arduino or Raspberry Pi devices are impacting synthetic biology
• Pembient’s synthetic rhino horns

This week’s click spirals

• Studies on the effects of oxytocin
• Dafen, a Chinese village where copies of artwork are mass-produced
• Gorgeous Swiss- and Japanese-made calipers. See a brand comparison here. If you’re looking for a good way to pass a long flight, download the PDF versions of the Mitutoyo, TESA/Brown & Sharpe, and Starrett catalogs.