User:Endy
Drew Endy
Goals
- help enable the responsible and constructive engineering of biology
- better understand information flow and loss in replicating machines
Projects
- open commons of information specifying biological function
- more responsible people who are working to engineer biology and constructively apply biological technology
- decomposition of replicating machine design across three characteristic timescales (perform, learn, evolve/persist)
Meta
On construction versus creation:
The use of the word "creation" in reference to the living artifacts that we produce via biological engineering is wrong. Creation implies an act that is based on some combination of perfect knowledge, unlimited power, and infinite resources. Gods create. Engineers on the other hand, from structural to electrical to biological, are always constrained by an imperfect understanding of what we are working with, a budget (i.e., finite resources), and limited power. As a result, engineers construct. The art of engineering involves learning how to reliably construct useful artifacts despite our limits.
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-i bottles of beer on the wall, -i bottles of beer!
take the cubed root, square it to boot, -1 bottles of beer on the wall.
-1 bottles of beer on the wall, -1 bottles of beer!
times negative three and square root of e, three root e bottles of beer on the wall.
three root e bottles of beer on the wall, three root e bottles of beer!
to the power of two, eighteen divides through, point five e bottles of beer on the wall.
point five e bottles of beer on the wall, point five e bottles of beer!
now double that dog, two thirds natural log. two thirds a bottle of beer on the wall.
two thirds a bottle of beer on the wall, two thirds a bottle of beer!
times root 108 and squaring is great. forty eight bottles of beer on the wall.
forty eight bottles of beer on the wall, forty eight bottles of beer!
plus one and times pi, cosine and times i. -i bottles of beer on the wall.
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Bio
Drew Endy grew up in Pennsylvania, USA and studied civil, environmental, and biochemical engineering at Lehigh University and Thayer School, Dartmouth College. He worked for a while as a postdoc at UT Austin and UW Madison. From 1998 through 2001 he helped to start the Molecular Sciences Institute, an independent not-for-profit biological research lab in Berkeley, CA. In 2002, he started a group as a fellow in the Department of Biology and the Biological Engineering Division at MIT; he joined the MIT faculty in 2004. Endy co-founded the MIT Synthetic Biology working group and the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, and organized the First International Conference on Synthetic Biology. Endy and colleagues taught the 2003 and 2004 MIT Synthetic Biology labs organized the 2004 Synthetic Biology competition, a five-school course that enabled students to work together to design and build engineered biological systems, and are now organizing the 2005 Intercollegiate Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. Endy's research focuses on the engineering of integrated biological systems and error detection in reproducing machines.
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