Results tagged “igem”

A town that celebrates (or at least tolerates) the geeks among us never has a shortage of science news, and 2008 was no exception. We kicked off the year with the shocking revelation that ESP was DOA, according to researchers at Harvard. Distraught by the news that Miss Cleo and her ilk were frauds, we found that Harvard had set up a more scientific look at love just in time for Valentine's Day. (Maybe it was all part of the plan?)

At the end of the poster session Saturday night, the judges crowded all 84 teams around in one of the narrow hallways to announce the six finalists. Unfortunately, we had only gotten a chance to talk to two of them earlier in the evening: our hometown favorites from Harvard, and the eventual winners from the National Institute of Chemistry in Slovenia. (The other four finalists were from Berkeley, Caltech, the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, and NYMU-Taipei.)

As mentioned in Part 1 of this series, we were able to talk to a handful of the iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) teams during their poster presentations last Saturday evening. Here’s the (slightly) distilled version of what we found.

Over the weekend, one of the most prestigious student research contests took place in the labyrinthine halls of MIT’s Stata Center. 2008 marked the fifth year of the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, in which 84 teams created anything they could think of, using the techniques of the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. Over the next three days, Bostonist will be giving everyone a crash course in this new biological frontier.