“I came to engineering from biology ten years ago. Very much the standard biologist, never thought about engineering at all. So, I didn’t have a clue what a logic gate was, no idea about circuits, switches, repressors, and all this kind of stuff. Not concepts I had ever thought about, but the kind of biology that I was always interested in was applied biology, and using biology for useful purposes.”
“When these were being used for experimentation, aeronautical engineering didn’t really exist; it was just getting going. So in a sense, it was in a similar state to what synthetic biology finds itself in now.” Explore more >>
“I was looking for something that was archetypal engineering. So, you look at this picture and there are two obvious pieces: one obvious piece of civil engineering, the viaduct, and an obvious piece of mechanical engineering, the train.” Explore more >>
“Uri Alon’s textbook here, it’s a first-year textbook in systems biology. I don’t know if you can see but the subtitle says something about design principles. I opened the book and I was shocked by the lack of molecular details in these diagrams. You have these networks where you have just nodes. You have diagrams where, what I was used to would be very detailed descriptions of the properties of specific components, was just replaced with these line sets. You have these quantitative models; I was used to more qualitative descriptions.” Explore more >>
"The whole idea of learning by building immediately struck an intellectual chord in me. I thought that was a really interesting thing. And so I was interesting in this. The more I got into synthetic biology, the more I had to engage with more traditional engineering.”
“Engineering is through tinkering, through being playful with the world that’s around us. So, understanding fundamentally how things work to the point where I can start to wonder around ‘how can I hack them.’ That’s the first step: ‘how can I change them?' and ‘how can I make through a systematic process changes to these things I’m playing with to make them do what I want?’” Explore more >>
“This never delivered, at least not this particular project, fundamental understanding of thrust. But it worked. Maybe that’s the point. Does it do what it’s supposed to do? And who cares about fundamental understanding?” Explore more >>
“I became interested also in the challenges for collaboration between molecular biologists and engineers that were doing the modelling in terms of differences in their epistemic ideals for what a good model is, what a good explanation is, what the purpose of this type of science is.” Explore more >>
“I’m now engaged with robotics, with software engineering, with mathematical modelling. So, now I actually get more involved all the time with more traditional engineering disciplines, which I’m enjoying. But all the time that pesky evolution thing.”
“Uri Alon’s textbook here, it’s a first-year textbook in systems biology. I don’t know if you can see but the subtitle says something about design principles. I opened the book and I was shocked by the lack of molecular details in these diagrams. You have these networks where you have just nodes. You have diagrams where, what I was used to would be very detailed descriptions of the properties of specific components, was just replaced with these line sets. You have these quantitative models; I was used to more qualitative descriptions.” Explore more >>
“If you look at how engineers solve problems, because engineering is also about problem solving, you see that when they have a choice, when they are facing a certain problem, engineers tend to get the humans out of the picture. That’s why I’ve given this example in the photo, right? Suppose that they are given the problem of solving a traffic jam at the crossroads in a city. One way of doing that is not by solving it by technology, but by introducing a social system. You put a police officer there, or traffic man, who organises, who rules the traffic. A more advanced system from an engineering point of view is the traffic light. They want to get the humans, who are error-prone, out of the picture.” Explore more >>
“I was looking for something that was archetypal engineering. So, you look at this picture and there are two obvious pieces: one obvious piece of civil engineering, the viaduct, and an obvious piece of mechanical engineering, the train.” Explore more >>