Hariri Institute Fellow Douglas Densmore was Cited in Nature Article

Doug Densmore, a Hariri Institute for Computing Fellow and a member of the Steering Committee was quoted in an article in Nature magazine titled “An Operating System for the Biology Lab.”

The article focused on technology helping to support early disease detection on the basis of drawing blood. Radix Labs, which is a two-year start-up in Cambridge, MA, developed a computer language that can encode, compile and translate code into a machine-readable language, which ultimately enables instructions to be understood and executed by the customer’s equipment. This encoding experiment can boost reproducibility.

Ginkgo Bioworks, a biotechnology company in Boston, MA, builds a synthetic biology foundry, which can automate the design and testing of engineered organisms. The co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, Barry Canton, said that there is a huge variety of different hardware vendors represented in their foundry and they all have their own software interfaces and none of them is standardized. While technology can increase productivity, regulations are also needed.

While Canton thinks that companies will eventually deliver the standards, Densmore pointed out that academics are in a better position to produce the standards that the field needs. “Making it easy for people to replicate an experiment is often not the goal in academia,” he says. Some academic people might even prefer to boast that a successful bit of research “was done in a way only my lab could do it.”

Douglas Densmore is an assistant professor in the BU Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. Additionally, he serves as an affiliate investigator for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center. He is an expertise in computer-aided design (CAD) tools.

The Hariri Institute initiates, catalyzes, and propels collaborative, interdisciplinary research and training initiatives for a better society by promoting discovery and innovations through the use of computational and data-driven approaches, and advancing computing sciences inspired by challenges in engineering; social, health & management sciences; and the arts.