Monthly Archives: July 2009

My entry to the Exquisite Corpse of Science

By Lily | Published: July 30, 2009
Tim Jones at the Zoonomian blog is working on an Exquisite Corpse of Science. Sounds gruesome, but it doesn’t involve any dead organisms. An exquisite corpse is a Surrealist art technique for patching drawings together using simple rules. For the Exquisite Corpse of Science, the idea is to draw what you think is important in [...]
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Microfluidics and the hunt for the killer app

By Lily | Published: July 27, 2009
In microfluidics, the search for a killer app has been on since the early 90s. Although some microfluidic products have successfully appeared on the market (e.g. inkjet printheads), microfluidics hasn’t taken the world by storm as fast as people thought it might. Over the years, leaders in the field have speculated about a potential killer [...]
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Sangeeta Bhatia and micro-liver chips on NOVA

By Lily | Published: July 26, 2009
Last week Professor Sangeeta Bhatia was featured in a fantastic profile on NOVA’s scienceNOW. Bhatia is recognized as a pioneer in bioMEMS and directs the Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technologies at MIT. Although Bhatia’s work explores a wide range of topics, she is most well-known for her development of micro-livers-on-a-chip. Primary liver cells are notoriously [...]
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MIT OpenCourseWare on BioMEMS

By Lily | Published: July 18, 2009
Several years back, MIT decided to make its course materials freely available on the web. Not all materials from all courses are available, but there are several offerings in microsystems/microfluidics/BioMEMS if you’d like to construct a do-it-yourself education. For example: HST.410J / 6.07J Projects in Microscale Engineering for the Life Sciences 6.777J / 2.372J Design and Fabrication [...]
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How commercializable is microfluidics research?

By Lily | Published: July 18, 2009
In grad school I often secretly wondered about the commercial potential of our microfluidics research. I’ve touched on this issue before, and Derek Lowe recently discussed what makes a technology useful in lab (many microfluidic devices are platform technologies designed for use in lab). In the June 21st issue of Lab on a Chip, Holger [...]
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Risk-taking in pharma vs. venture capital

By Lily | Published: July 2, 2009
I’ve been thinking lately about risk-taking in scientific research, focusing on academia. Yesterday Seth Godin wrote about the nonlinear relationship between risk and reward: small increases in risk can yield large rewards, but only large risks yield the largest rewards. This got me wondering about where pharma is on the risk-taking spectrum, and whether pharma should [...]
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