Andrew Hessel: Using Emerging Tech to Craft Our Biological Future

On This Episode

What exactly is synthetic biology and how will it affect our future? Andrew Hessel discusses the far-reaching implications of how rapidly emerging technological advancements in the field will change our entire lives, from the homes we live in, to the food we eat; and the results are far less scary than you think.

Andrew Hessel is a pioneer in synthetic biotechnology, a futurist, co-founder of the genome project write, and a Distinguished Research Scientist at Autodesk. There he collaborates with researchers around the world to explore how to make biological and nanoscale systems programmable and is personally involved with the rapid design and manufacture of synthetic viruses as cancer therapies.

Hessel and Kaplan discuss what it’s like to unleash the adjacent possible as it relates to cellular biology, entering into a whole new area of design and manufacturing as an entirely new paradigm in creating the things that humanity needs to grow and thrive. The future is now, and we are at the cusp of realizing incredible changes in the field of life science.