Episode 124 - Prof Weiss - "When I realised we could programme cells, I knew it is what I had to do"

StemCells@Lunch Digested

Today Ron Weiss, Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering and in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the Synthetic Biology Center at MIT, is interviewed by PhD student Matt Chung. Ron is a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology, using computer engineering principles to program cells to be controlled by analog and digital logic circuitry. He discusses how synthetic biology can be translated into clinical benefit for a wide range of diseases, including cancer. He talks about the challenges of building reliable networks that are robust to environmental change, a key challenge in the clinical translation of synthetic biology approaches. To find out more about Ron’s work please visit the following website: https://weiss-lab.mit.edu/