Walter Isaacson Interviews MIT President Emerita Susan Hockfield on Overcoming the COVID-19 “Diagnostics Deficit” and How Convergence of Biology and Technology Will Drive 21st Century Innovation - Seite 3

“Much as I love all of my computer devices, I hadn’t really paused to think about where it came from. I realized that what enabled the electronics and the information, and the computer industries was the convergence of physics with engineering. The ‘parts list’ to physics really wasn’t known until 1900. [J.J.] Thomson discovered the electron in 1897 and the components of the atom were resolved. Engineers love a parts list and so they picked up those parts and turned them into the electronic gadgets that we have so enjoyed. The electronics, computer, and information industries, in my view, have been the most transformational technologies and industries of the 21^st century.

“Biology didn’t have a parts list in the first half of the 20^th Century. But it was only with the advent of molecular biology and genomics that we really had a parts list of biology that engineers were picking up to turn into technologies that really sound like science fiction, but they’re not. It’s an understanding that is not general yet, but I think it’s an exciting promise for solving the great challenges that are with us in the 21^st Century.

“DNA, RNA, and I throw proteins in their too, because the DNA and RNA by themselves rarely manifest function. The DNA and the RNA that produce these fantastic little machines called proteins really represent a parts list that allow engineers to build incredible new kinds of technology with the kind of resolution – biological parts are very, very small and it allows engineers to build from very small components really extraordinary new kinds of technologies.”

• Tangible examples of biology-based engineering:
  
  “One of my favorites is for water. We have been purifying water for thousands of years. We have been distilling dirty water to provide clean water for thousands of years or filtering it through sand or now through complex chemically built filters. And yet today we don’t have anywhere near enough clean water to meet the world’s needs. It’s a hard problem, but our cells, the cells in every organism on earth, have figured out how to purify water.
  
  “It ends up that water control in cells is mediated by a protein – a very, very small channel that regulates the flow of water into and out of a cell. It was discovered by a hematologist named Peter Agre at Johns Hopkins University and he did an incredible set of studies on this protein that he named aquaporin – or ‘water pore.’ And every organism uses this water pore.