A few years ago, biological engineer Reshma Shetty raised eyebrows at MIT when she helped some undergraduate students engineer batches of E. coli bacteria to smell like wintergreen and bananas. But that was just the start. Now leading a company called Ginkgo BioWorks, Shetty is wrangling microbes to create new kinds of fuel. She predicts that we will eventually learn how to engineer organisms to grow everything that we manufacture today. "If you want to build a chair, you go cut down a tree and construct it from lumber. Why not just program a tree to grow a chair?" she asks.
展开▼
