New biological solutions to the many problems of our time

Abstract

Douglas A. Lauffenburger is Ford Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is faculty member in the Department of Biological Engineering, which he co-founded in 1998. In an interview with Heinz Koeppl, Director of the Centre for Synthetic Biology at Technical University Darmstadt, he explains how Biological Engineering differs from traditional bioengineering, what the education program in this discipline at MIT is based on and why we need biological engineering to solve many of our current challenges from climate change to world food supplies.