Charles Fracchia on a new breed of biologists

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: The merging worlds of software, hardware, and biology.

In this new episode of the Hardware Podcast—which features our first discussion focusing specifically on synthetic biology—David Cranor and I talk with Charles Fracchia, an IBM Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and founder of the synthetic biology company BioBright.

Discussion points:

The blurring of the lines between biology, software development, hardware engineering, and electrical engineering
BioBright’s efforts to create hardware and software tools to reinvent the way biology is done in a lab
The most prominent market forces in biology today (especially healthcare)
How experiments conducted using Arduino or Raspberry Pi devices are impacting synthetic biology
Pembient’s synthetic rhino horns

This week’s click spirals

Studies on the effects of oxytocin
Dafen, a Chinese village where copies of artwork are mass-produced
Gorgeous Swiss- and Japanese-made calipers. See a brand comparison here. If you’re looking for a good way to pass a long flight, download the PDF versions of the Mitutoyo, TESA/Brown & Sharpe, and Starrett catalogs.