Science for All Seasons 2014

Science for All Seasons gives you a chance to explore hot topics in genomics with leading experts from the Broad Institute. Find out what key advances, new technologies, and the latest findings mean for you in this free and open lecture series.
 

2014 Lectures

[ video ]
Tuesday, September 23, 6-7:15pm
Accelerating the engineering of life for human health applications
Timothy Lu

Over the last 50 years, exponential increases in our ability to manipulate electrons and engineer electronic systems have spawned a revolution in information technology. Similarly, rapid improvements in technologies for reading and writing DNA are now transforming our capacity to engineer biological systems. Leveraging these technologies, synthetic biology is an emerging discipline for designing biological systems with novel functionalities. The field has opened up new strategies for interrogating, understanding, diagnosing, and treating human diseases. Timothy Lu will discuss several relevant examples where we have created effective and highly specific antimicrobial agents, identified novel pathways for re-sensitizing highly-drug-resistant bacteria to antibiotic therapy, and invented rapid analytic procedures for detecting microbial pathogens.

Timothy Lu is a member of the Broad Institute’s Cancer program and an associate professor in the Synthetic Biology Center in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT.