Are living things really just machines made of little genetic parts? Are genes just like little software programs that we can plug into living things? That’s how synthetic biologists think about life. Brian Baynes gives us a tour of his company, Codon Devices, where they make and sell genes. Then ...
Biology class is all about putting living things into categories, based on their differences. And creatures are different because they have different genes. But life wasn’t always like that. In this segment, Steve Strogatz, an applied mathematician at Cornell, tells us about a radical theory that says that way back ...
The uneasy marriage of biology and engineering raises big questions about the nature of life. In this hour, Radiolab journeys to the first billion years of life on Earth, looks at how modern engineers tinker with living things, and meets a woman who could have been two people.
