Xconomy: From Dance Clubs to Syn Bio: MIT’s Collins on Startups, Second Chances
Summary
When I became a young academic I was thankful I had those skills, because I failed a lot with the experiments, but I just moved on to the next challenge.Starting about five years ago you saw many of those companies not doing so well, and people came back in academia to focus on developing the foundational platforms for the field and another set of applications.I think an area that is incredibly promising is therapeutics—using synthetic biology for example to engineer organisms to address a range of conditions or to produce new drugs.And in agricultural biotechnology, we’re starting to see some intriguing efforts develop as groups are seeing what synthetic biology can do to reengineer plants and other organisms.JC: We need improved educational materials, and maybe mechanisms that would allow more folks to readily transition into synthetic biology from different [fields].
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