Sam Kean Guinea pigs are practically synonymous with experiments. Lab rats have become the workhorses of modern medicine. Genetics owes a huge debt to the humble fruit fly. There’s almost no branch of the life sciences, in fact, that hasn’t leaned heavily on one animal or another. – Sam Kean
Ryan Bethencourt Simple genome engineering of bacteria and yeast is just the beginning of the rise of the true biohackers. This is a community of several thousand people, with skill sets ranging from self-taught software hackers to biology postdocs who are impatient with the structure of traditional institutional lab work. – Ryan Bethencourt
Ryan Bethencourt In the past, biology has been a backwater type of activity – a bunch of nerds in a lab. Now the sheer potential of biology to re-program our physical world is a new reality for everyone. – Ryan Bethencourt
Rodney Brooks I moved to MIT from Stanford in 1984 to teach, and became the founding director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. – Rodney Brooks
Robert Sapolsky My lab looks at the ability of stress hormones to kill brain cells, and basically we are trying to understand on a molecular level how a neuron dies after a stroke, a seizure, Alzheimer’s, brain aging, and what these stress hormones do to make it worse. – Robert Sapolsky
Robert J Sawyer Whether it’s created in a lab, written by a programmer, or lands on the White House lawn as a visitor from the stars, if it acts like a human being, it is a human being. – Robert J Sawyer
Rob Manuel For me, it’s great to see ‘Gateways’ finally make it to the console. Think of it as ‘Portal’ meets ‘Castlevania’ as you try to put together your gateway gun before your lab becomes overrun with nasty enemies. – Rob Manuel
Ren Ng Mark Horowitz and I built it onto an optical bench in the lab. We spent and eight-hour span putting this optical light path together. – Ren Ng
Raney Aronson-Rath My interest in Virtual Reality (VR) films began for me when I began a fellowship with MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. It was a profound experience to be on MIT’s campus one day a week and to enter a new world of storytelling where breaking convention and traditional methods were expected. This was deeply challenging and inspiring. – Raney Aronson-Rath
Peter Scolari It’s funny, because I was trained as a dramatic actor at New York’s Colonnades Theater Lab in the ’70s, along with Jeff Goldblum, Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman. People I worked with there saw a comedian in me. I’m still most at home in comedy. – Peter Scolari
