Event

Abstract: Living organisms remain more adaptive, robust, and regenerative than any artificial system yet developed.  It is thus promising that engineering has seen a surge in novel building materials over the past decade, including a growing catalogue of biological cells and tissues.  These living materials have the potential to overcome several problems faced by traditional engineering programs: they are biodegradable, self-powered, self-motile, self-healing, nanometer sized, and contain an inherent biochemistry.  My recent work is a collaboration between developmental biologists and roboticists, constructing fully biological machines from embryonic amphibian cells, engineered to exhibit a specific behavior. In this presentation, I’ll detail how a computer simulator automatically designs diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform a desired function.  The best performing simulation is then selected, and a living biological representation is constructed using a cell-based toolkit sourced from amphibian stem cell lineages.  This approach provides insight into both biological self-organization and ecological/biomedical applications and lays the groundwork for future large-scale and automated deployment of fully biological constructs capable of a variety of user specified tasks.

Douglas Blackiston website.