EP 114: Designing with Biology | Ritu Raman
On today's episode, we are going to talk about designing with biology.
Dr. Ritu Raman is the d’Arbeloff Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Her lab is centered on engineering adaptive living materials for applications in medicine and machines. Professor Raman has received several recognitions for scientific innovation, including being named a Kavli Fellow and a Ford Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine, an Army Young Investigator by the U.S. Department of Defense, and L’Oréal USA for Women in Science Fellow. She has also been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 and MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 lists, and is the author of the MIT Press book Biofabrication. She is passionate about increasing diversity in STEM and has championed many initiatives to empower women in science, including being named a AAAS IF/THEN ambassador and founding the Women in Innovation and STEM Database at MIT (WISDM). Professor Raman received her BS from Cornell University and her PhD as an NSF Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Episode mentions and links:
At the forefront of building with biology via MIT News
Restaurants Ritu would take you to: Sofra Bakery and Cafe
Follow Ritu: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn
Episode Reflection
“Part of what I'm hoping to do by doing this kind of research and by writing this book is to get more people involved in this space because, you know, a hand is one way of doing the things that we do, but there's probably a million other designs that could work just as well or even better. And I'm hoping that if we get more people building with biology, we can think of new sort of creative ways of addressing these problems.” -Ritu Raman
I LOVE talking about 3D printing! It still has the ability to inspire excitement, awe, and curiosity in most people who aren’t regularly exposed to it. The best part about exposing people to the technology is that most people then turn around and ask “can we print _____”. In our work in the Health Design Lab, we began using 3D printing to improve surgical planning and medical education simply by bringing 3D printing technology into the hospital and showing providers and students how it works. Our first use case involved 3D printing mandibles (jaw bones) to help head and neck surgeons prepare for reconstructive surgery. The idea (now common many years later) came from a surgeon who saw an opportunity once we demystified the tech and they realized how accessible 3D printing technology was.
This week I wanted to highlight a quote from Dr. Raman about how she wants as many different people and perspectives as possible in the field of biofabrication. She states that if we need to pick something up, one person may just envision a hand, but another person may envision an entirely different mechanism, and this creativity is essential to accelerating innovation in this space. Just as the applications for traditional 3D printing accelerated rapidly as the technology got better and more people were exposed to it, biofabrication and bioprinting will likely follow the same trajectory as access and technology improve and more people with get access to it and will come up with applications we can’t even begin to fathom. Today it’s common to find 3D printing as a standard part of the curriculum in many grade schools. Will the next generation of students have access to bioprinters in middle school?
We have bioprinters in the Health Design Lab and thanks to Dr. Raman, I’ll have an easier time explaining how they work when people come to visit! But I look forward to the day when we can point to a series of exciting use cases for the technology and inspire the same level of awe and curiosity and say “YES” when they ask “can we bioprint _____”.
Written by Rob Pugliese
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Bon Ku: On today's episode, we are going to talk about designing with biology. I'm Bon Ku the host of Design Lab, a podcast that explores the intersection of design and health. Our guest is Dr. Ritu Raman, she is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.
Ritu's lab is centered on engineering adaptive materials for applications and medicine and machines. Professor Raman has received several recognitions for a scientific innovation, including being named a Covley Fellow and a Ford Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering in Medicine and Army Young Investigator by the US Department of Defense and L'Oreal USA for Women in Science Fellow. Ritu has been named to the Forbes 30 under 30 and MIT Technology Review 35 innovators under 35 list, and is the author of the MIT Press book Biofabrication. She is passionate about increasing diversity in STEM and has championed many initiatives to empower women in science. She received her bachelor's of science from Cornell University and her PhD as an NSF Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne.
Before you jump up into our conversation, I want to remind you to visit our website designlabpod.com. There you can find show notes from each week, learn more about the guests, get related links to the content and subscribe to our newsletter.
Each week our producer, Rob Pugliese, will email you show notes and links whenever a new episode drops. And reach out to me on Twitter at B O N K U on Instagram at D R B O N K U. We love it when we hear from our listening audience. And we love it even more when you rate us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We have a five star rating on both of those listening platforms. Thank you. And if you're on Apple Podcasts, please, please, please give us a review. Follow us. Tell someone about the podcast. Now my conversation with professor Ritu Raman. Professor Retu Ramen, welcome to Design Lab. I am thrilled that you can make it on the show.
Ritu Raman: Thanks so much for having me. Really looking forward to the conversation.
Bon Ku: I love your book, Biofabrication ,and in the opening part of your book, you talk about, when you first realized you were a machine. Can you, can you tell us about that experience?
Ritu Raman: Yeah. And I, I know why you're asking about the story cuz I think it's a particularly ridiculous one. But you know, I think my first kind of realization that humans and other biological creatures can be thought of as machines happened when I was an undergrad at Cornell. And you know, I wasn't an international student, so I was having a lot of trouble finding, you know, internships and other things I was eligible for.
And the only job I could get was an unpaid internship in a biology lab where they were studying the role that alcohol plays on skeletal muscle. And so they knew from previous observations that, you know, if you're an alcoholic, you drink a lot of alcohol, your skeletal muscle degenerates over time.
And of course a lot of us know that if you exercise a lot, you get stronger and your muscle builds. And so they're like, what if you know you drink a lot and you exercise a lot? Could that essentially balance each other out. And the way they were testing that was on rats by giving them a very high alcohol diet and putting them on treadmills and having them sort of run their little rat feet, over time and measure the outcome of that.
And my job was to do that, was to just feed the rats every day, exercise them on their tiny treadmills every day, give them motivational speeches. Though I'm not sure that was helpful. And kind of my takeaway from that experience, spending many, many hours alone with a bunch of rats in a basement. Was seeing that those rats were sort of dynamically adapting to their environment, to the food they were consuming, to the exercise they were doing.
And of course I knew that we're all doing that in our own lives as well. But it really clicked for me there, because in my classes, my other things that I was doing at Cornell was working with a lot of machines and robots as a mechanical engineering student and was realizing that none of the things that I was working with in class could dynamically respond to their surroundings in the same way.
And so it just got me really excited about thinking about everything living as a machine, but a machine that can adapt to its surroundings because it's made out of biological materials.
Bon Ku: I had the same experience, just like going into medicine and thinking of the human body as like the most amazing machine. And I'm just like curious, like, why, you know, why do I think a lot of us don't think about our bodies as machines. And I've done like a lot of different types of like sports and activities from like surfing and weightlifting and rock climbing and mountain biking and every time I dive into one of these activities over a couple of years, my body just changes. Like, the, my muscles get different. You know, they bulk up in some areas they get leaner in other areas. My cardiovascular rate changes, my lung physiology changes.
I'm like, wow, this is crazy. Depending upon the sport and the environment of the situation that changes my physical body. Can you tell us about what Biofabrication is and what inspired you to write, your book Biofabrication.
Ritu Raman: Yeah. I mean, I think picking up on that last point that you just mentioned, one of the reasons why I think a lot of us difficulty digesting that human bodies are machines is that we're used to think of machines as something where we know all the parts, we know how they fit together. We know what each part is doing, how they talk to each other, and how they're producing some defined functional outcome at the end of the day.
And the reason we don't think of bodies in that way is because we don't know. Right. We kind of know, oh, there's cells, there's DNA maybe they're communicating electrically, maybe this is happening. But the fact of the matter is there are billions of different types of cells. They have unique functions.
It's very hard to interrogate how they're talking to each other. And sometimes they have these really unpredictable outcomes where all these cells are talking to each other in ways that we can't predict cuz they're just so many of them and they're all constantly adapting. And so that is really kind of the underlying principle of biofabrication is thinking about.
Now that we have, kind of enough of an understanding of a biology to be able to look at individual cells and groups of cells, so how they're adapting on their own, how they're talking to each other. And we also have advancements in engineering where we know how to grow living cells in the lab, we know how to assemble them into 3D tissues.
We can start asking and answering some of these questions about how cells can work together as a machine and how we can build with living cells to create machines that produce functional outcomes. And that's really just what biofabrication is. It's just building with living cells.
Bon Ku: Hmm. . So you are a designer, but you design with biological materials. Can you talk about some of these materials that you use?
Ritu Raman: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, design is really the best way to describe it. One of the advantages that designers who work with more traditional materials, say like wood, metal, glass, have, is that we have hundreds, thousands of years working with these sorts of materials, right? And we know, oh, if I apply a certain amount of force, the wood is gonna deform this much, or the glass is gonna break in that way if I cut it in a certain way.
So we kind of have an understanding of what we can do to manipulate these materials. a desired outcome. We don't have that so much for biology because we're still learning as we're going. and so a lot of what we're doing, at least, you know, there's design at many scales when it comes to bio fabrication.
It could be working with proteins or DNA, you could be working with cells, you could be working with tissues. I tend to work a little bit more with cells and tissue. So cells are kind of on the order of, few microns, so millionth of a meter. Up to maybe millimeter, centimeter scale. the larger you go into the tissue and organ domain.
So we work there. And we're kind of learning as we are growing. So we say, okay, well let me look at how something is built in biology and in a natural system, how muscle looks, for example. And then I can try to put together different sorts of muscle cells and try to create something that looks like the body.
And in doing that, I might learn a little bit more about that process, but I might also tweak it in a way that it acts different than it does in its native system. And so then I'm kind of a dynamically adapting my design rules as I'm building. It's a very, very, adaptive process.
Bon Ku: Now you are a professor of, mechanical engineering at MIT, is that the normal route to design with biology? Cause I would think of like maybe is it better to have, be like a cell biologist versus a mechanical engineer? What's the advantages and any disadvantages of your training and background for the type of work that you do and the type of research that you do.
Ritu Raman: You're giving me a lot of flashbacks to my faculty interviews now because it's, honestly, it's a great question, right? Because when you're working in this sort of emerging field that is kind of at the intersection of biology, engineering, robotics, a lot of different stuff going on, and really you could approach it from any of these perspectives in any of these training sets.
and you would have some of the information and not all of the information. So I actually applied to be faculty in a variety of different departments that would kind of highlight different aspects of this work. I ended up picking mechanical engineering, for many reasons. It's one of the main reasons.
It's, that's what my training is in. I know how mechanical engineers think and design and build, and I just wanna add biological materials to the types of materials that they design and build with. but the other thing that's really cool about mechanical engineering is that. it's one of the oldest, disciplines, right?
And so it's very broad. It can apply to health, it can apply to robotics, it can apply to energy. So I figured that way I'm giving myself kind of the most flexibility in the sorts of problems we could address in the future, while still giving myself a place where we can ask really fundamental questions about how to build with biology.
Bon Ku: Hmm. tell us about the research that you do in your lab. You are designing muscle. Is that right?
Ritu Raman: Yeah, so the overall goal of my lab is to, once again, think about how cells talk to each other when they're in a group. And the ways in which they can communicate mechanically, chemically, and electrically to produce some really, really interesting functional outcomes. The specific type of tissue that we're focused on right now is skeletal muscle, as well as the nerves that control skeletal muscle.
And the reason this is exciting to me is because I think, you know, movement is just something that is so, Obvious in nature and so exciting and so fundamental to our lives and the way we navigate our world. And voluntary motion in our bodies. And many biological creatures is powered by skeletal muscle and controlled by motor neurons and the motor control system.
And so what we're trying to do in my lab is build little tiny versions of the biological motor control system. So little tissues that contain muscle cells and nerve cells and that can move and generate force and produce motion. And our goal is to basically use these not only as model systems to understand how our bodies work when they're healthy, how they're hurt, when they're diseased, and how we can help cure diseases that impact mobility.
But also think about how we could design robots that use these sort of living biological tissues to generate force and produce some sort of interesting functional outcome.
Bon Ku: Wait, wait. Did you say robots, robots are gonna have skeletal muscle on them in the future?
Ritu Raman: Yeah. Yeah. Well, they already do. um, But just in our lab, um, yeah, but that's the goal. I mean, really muscle is an actuator. An actuator is something that converts. You know, some form of energy, chemical energy, electrical energy into another form, mechanical energy or force.
And so skeletal muscle is just basically turning a voltage input from a motor neuron into contraction or getting smaller and generating a force. And so we can essentially use muscle as an actuator in a robot, just the same way we would use any other kind of system that we're traditionally used to working with.
Bon Ku: That is amazing. I heard in a podcast that about superheroes that you're kind of like into superheroes. You have a favorite superheroes, and why are you into superheroes?
Ritu Raman: Yeah. Well, maybe I'll start with the second question. I think the reason. I find superheroes and those kinds of stories very fascinating and really any kind of science fiction story fascinating is that you know, , when you think about, oh, let me have an ethical discussion about the kind of work I'm doing in the lab, that sounds like it's gonna be really tedious and boring and something that you have to do cuz somebody's making you do But if you said instead, let me think through some interesting potential consequences, some far-reaching consequences of the work I'm doing, then that has produced some of the greatest, most engaging art of our generation, right? Like huge sci-fi movies and superhero movies, because each of those is just diving into asking the question.
So for example, with Captain America, we might be asking the question, what happens when we give someone Incredible strength, like one, how might we do that? What might the consequences be on that person? What might consequences be in on society? And then what happens when that technology propagates? So that's a really interesting way to think about the questions that we're working on in the lab.
I don't know if I have a favorite superhero, but I would say, I mean obviously Captain America, he's pretty gray. He's very strong. And I work on muscle, but I also really like the flash because there's a tremendous amount of interesting biology when you think about how can he get muscle that can move that fast?
Because if we actually tried to move our muscles that quickly, we can't really get that fast, not even close. So he's basically like a hummingbird, but in a human, and I wanna know how that works and whether I can make something like that in the lab.
Bon Ku: I particularly like Wolverine cuz of just this amazing ability to heal, which I've just always been fascinated by that. I'm like, whoa. It's because the healing process to me is just so miraculous when I see patients with. It looks like devastating injuries and their skin heals. Their bones heal. Like, I'm like, this is incredible.
So I've always been fascinated by that. And I like the science fiction cuz that's a sort of like speculative design and thinking about what may happen like 10, 15, 20 years from now can inform our current work that we do. Can I read a quote from your book?
Ritu Raman: Oh, please do. I'll try not to blush.
Bon Ku: Ha, you say, uh, "mapping out the ethical landscape of building with biology requires asking deeper questions about the definition of life."
That's pretty heavy. For those who haven't read your book? Everyone should. Where does that come from?
Ritu Raman: That realization actually, or that question came from a conversation that I had with a middle schooler once. so, you know, we have a lot of these outreach events at MIT and I had the opportunity to present in front of a bunch of 10 and 12 year olds, and I gave them a talk on the kind of robots we were making.
And the first question I got in the audience from a little girl, she raised her hand, she said, Oh, you know, just wondering if you're building something out of living materials, does that mean that it is alive? And that, I mean, it just stunned me as a question because it's actually an incredibly deep philosophical question, right?
Like the cells themselves are living, but is the thing you are making a living being worthy of moral consideration with a consciousness, and when it's just a chunk of muscle, the answer is very obviously no. But I can imagine that when you integrate more cell types or more functionalities, you might start thinking about those kinds of questions.
And so I think what helps is to think about a framework for what you mean when you say a living thing or what you mean when you say alive. So what that quote was trying to convey, is maybe we'll never get to a, a definition of life that everybody agrees with all the time. But if we can talk to a bunch of people, not only in science but also outside of science, possibly through things like science fiction, that in science communication to help kind of engage people in these conversations. We can come up with a set of things that we agree, like all living things should be able to do these things. And then we'll know when we're working on something in the lab versus not how we should be treating that tissue or that robot.
Bon Ku: And in your book you talk about how, you know Biofabrication is already impacting our everyday lives. You know, this technology is, Out there. And, one example is engineered meat. For those who have not heard about that, can you talk about how that's done and how soon are we gonna have like a steak at our, uh, table when we go out to a restaurant?
Ritu Raman: Yeah, mean if you think about meat, and caveat that I mentioned in the book that I didn't even mention again here, is that I'm vegetarian, so what do I know? but if you think about meat, it's essentially, I mean, it's, it's dead tissue, right? So if you can build tissues with living cells, you can certainly kill it.
And then you'll have meat. And the advantage of doing that is that then you can essentially just put together however many cells you need to make a certain piece of meat, rather than necessarily growing a whole animal and spending a ton of environmental resources raising this over years, and then having a ton of waste as well.
So there's been a lot of thought about whether it might be more efficient and more effective, and perhaps more health conscious to be able to make meat with very defined properties by putting together muscle cells and proteins and other things to make tissues that have the same texture and feel and taste as meat because they are essentially made of the same materials. In terms of how quickly that might happen.
it has already happened in some ways, right? So people have made it in the lab, people have consumed engineered meat there. It's even been commercially available, I think at a restaurant in Singapore offered it for
about a year or two
Bon Ku: Oh really?
Ritu Raman: But one of the big things is that it's very hard to make billions of cells very quickly in a cost efficient manner.
And you also wanna make sure that you wanna be using not necessarily animal products to grow the cells and other things so that it might be appealing to vegetarian or vegan audiences that might be craving this sort of, material. So there's some costs- efficiency concerns, but I think those are very solvable problems.
Something that we have learned throughout kind of industrialization is that once we know how to do something, we will probably figure out how to do it fast and how to do it, cost effectively. So that's kind of the major technical hurdle that's being overcome right now, but I don't think it should be too, too far in the future where you start seeing approval of some of these sort of engineered meat items to eat in the US and beyond.
Bon Ku: Cool. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing a designer meat, but I am trying to eat less meat and eat more vegetables, so I'm not sure if I will actually eat it. And, can we talk about bioprinting organs? is that something that is far off? Is it near? And like, how is it done? And as a disclaimer, I'm on, the medical advisor board for a company called 3D Systems and around regenerative medicine.
So, we've been taking a deep dive into this, but it's like hard for me to explain to people how it's done. So can you take us through what are the current approaches to making organs for transplantation and how far away are we from doing that?
Ritu Raman: Yeah. I mean, I think it helps to start with just a general definition we can agree on, on 3D printing. So obviously we're all familiar with 2D printing on a piece of paper. I mean 3D printing is essentially that, but just stacking many pieces of paper or whatever material we're making with, on top of each other.
So you could think about, you know, some approaches to 3D printing that's biological in nature. You essentially have a syringe that's gonna be squirting out cells and little proteins into some sort of 2D pattern, and then it allows those cells to kind of solidify and then on top of it, it'll pattern a second layer, allow that solidify and build more and more things.
So then you can make a really cool complex 3D shape that's made out of cells and proteins. That's one kind of approach that's called extrusion based bioprinting. But there's other kinds of printers, but they all really rely on the same philosophy, which is how do I build a 3D object layer by layer from the bottom? And you know, it's a really dynamically evolving field even since I started my PhD 10 years ago. the kinds of things we've been able to print, the very sensitive cell types, really, really large tissues. Tissues that incorporate blood vessels so that they can get even bigger. You know, all these things, have evolved very rapidly of the year so it's hard to put a timeline on things, because even in the past 10 years since I started my PhD, the technologies have been evolving and improving very, very rapidly and very suddenly.
But I can share some of the major, you know, technical hurdles that we might be facing as a field. One of them is again, the ability to get a lot of cells quickly and in some sort of cost effective way. So if you think about something like an organ transplant. If you don't want the person's body to reject it, you probably need to make it from their own cells.
So what you would need to do is harvest some cells from the patient, grow up a whole bunch of those kinds of cells, and then print them into some complex 3D shape very quickly, very cost effectively. that would be quite challenging. The other big challenge is that when you make tissues very big, they typically need a whole bunch of blood vessels and nerves.
Other things to keep them active and to keep them integrated with the surrounding network and the body and those kinds of features. You know, blood vessels, nerves are all so, so tiny. So you need to be able to pattern these very, very tiny features into potentially a pretty large organ that you're printing.
And that can be a pretty hard manufacturing feat, but, you know, I think there are a lot of really promising approaches in a bunch of different labs and companies around the world. So I'm pretty excited to see the first few trials of when we start doing this in a real medical application.
Bon Ku: Yeah, it's super cool technology and I know, we've been talking about, creating organs for transportation , for decades, but I feel like it's different now. Like it's like, the advances in research, make it a lot more tangible, so it's super super exciting. you talk about organ-on-a-chip in your book and how we could design pharmaceutical drugs better through this technology.
what is organ-on-a-chip?
Ritu Raman: If we think about, kind of the traditional way we design and test pharmaceutical drugs. Right? Kind of the typical process is somebody might try something in a lab with certain types of cells on a Petri dish and they're like, oh, I think I have some insight that this one thing drives a disease and if I made this kind of drug, it's changing that thing and maybe it will stop the disease.
And then when it works in cells in a Petri dish are like, well, let's try it in an animal, typically like a mouse or something kind of similar to a human, more similar than you would imagine, and that is replicating that disease. You try your drug on it, you're like, yeah, that seems to work pretty well in this mouse.
And then you go to humans and you're go more and more humans. And unfortunately what happens is that, you know, humans aren't mice and they aren't cells in a Petri dish. And so often there's this huge drop off or failure rate that happens when you're translating to do clinical trials in human beings.
So the idea of this organ-on-a-chip Type systems is that if we could print very tiny miniature versions of tissues or organs that are made of human cells and are still representative in structure and function of some larger organ system in our body, so like a tiny clump of heart cells that might mimic some portion of our heart.
Then you have a really highly effective and high throughput way to test what's going on with that organ in healthy states and in disease states. So I could make a tiny model of muscle. I could make a big cut in it that mimics some sort of injury that I might face in my body. And then try out a whole bunch of different therapies on it to see what works really well to help restore muscle function.
And the hope is that not only will that potentially be a cheaper way of kind of assessing a lot of different therapies, but also potentially a more effective way. Because if you're testing something on human cells that are in some sort of organ or tissue like structure that mimics the human body, then maybe when you actually try it in a real human being, it's more likely to be effective.
Bon Ku: You explained. Well, I've tried to explain this to people and I'm just bumbling all the time. Do you have any other examples of how biofabrication can advance, uh, human health? Stuff that's going on like right now, or maybe that's stuff , around the corner.
Ritu Raman: A really big focus of my work is not only thinking about. How we can build with biological materials, systems or tissues that look like things we already have in nature. So it could be like meat, organs, all the things we've been discussing so far, but also thinking about how we can use biological materials to build new types of machines or systems that we haven't seen before that might still have an impact on human health.
So one example of that is in robotics, a lot of different robots, especially robots that we use in a human health context, like surgical robots, for example. Need to generate force and produce motion. They need to do these really complex, you know, suturing, tying things together, cutting things open, and sometimes in these sort of very high stress, domains, right?
So you kind of wanna make the best possible robot that is most dynamically adaptive to its surroundings, and that also has the softness, the flexibility that a surgeon has so that you can best kind of mimic and provide the best quality care to a patient. And currently, if you look a lot of surgical robotic tools and technologies, for example, they're metal and they're controlled by a surgeon, but they themselves are not necessarily doing a ton of computation or thinking or adaptation. And our goal is if we can integrate real living muscles, for example, into robots like that, we might be able to make things that work with surgeons better and can help provide a higher quality of care.
So that's just one example. But I think there are many things we can think of, of robots that help restore mobility or could help deliver a drug to the right location or take a less invasive biopsy. All of these sort of things are things that we could do, if we integrated biological materials with machine.
I'm trying to figure out does that look like? Can you, can you describe like, is it like metal surrounded by muscle? Does it look like a robot at all? Does it or does it look more like a human arm?
That's a good question. I mean I think the answer I have is that it can look like any of those things and it really depends on who's building it, right? one thing, probably the easiest or not necessarily easiest to implement, but the easiest thing to think of is like I know how hands work and I know how dexterous they are.
So let me first try building something like that. And usually, you know, when we think about Westworld or other kind of examples or imaginings of this, we're thinking, oh, there's some metal exoskeleton, maybe some fleshy components. You're mixing these together and you're making something that looks like a hand.
That's one way that we have been imagining it for a long time, but part of what I'm hoping to do by doing this kind of research by writing this book is to get more people involved in this space because you know, a hand is one way of doing the thing that we do, but there's probably a million other designs that could work just as well or even better.
And I'm hoping that if we get more people building with biology, we can think of new sort of creative ways of addressing these problems.
Bon Ku: Yeah. Now for those who are, interested in this field for people listening, what is the pathway to design with biology? Can you be like an architect, a designer? Do you have to be a mechanical engineer or a physician? Like who, who's going into this space? Cuz this is an emerging field and it's changing so rapidly.
Ritu Raman: Well, I am a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, so I'm contractually obligated to say everybody to be a mechanical engineer. You should come to MIT, you should enroll in our programs. Okay, so that disclaimer aside, I think the really great thing about the era we're living in is that.
We're kind of at this place where biology is exploding and it's infiltrating and integrating with a whole bunch of different fields. So if you're really interested in biology, you could train in biology, but even if you trained in pretty much any kind of engineering or physical science or architecture, aspects of biology, it might be with mammalian cells or cells from mammals or plant cells or insect cells, all these things will probably infiltrate into all those fields.
And so it's really a question of keeping this idea in your mind, being open to new possibilities, being open to continuing learning throughout your life, and you'll find a path to it. I hesitate to give young people the advice to sort of follow a very regimented path because I didn't do that, and I actually think that that's what leads to the most interesting kinds of discoveries and outcomes.
Bon Ku: Yeah, well definitely read, your book cuz it's such a great primer and
Ritu Raman: Oh right. Thank you. that. Yeah, you should definitely read it. the nice thing about the book is it is written for sort of high school biology level and above. Cuz the last biology class that I took was actually in high school. So, you know, a lot of this is self-taught and I'm hoping to kind of share that with folks.
Bon Ku: One cool fact about your book, your the illustrations. I love who, who did the illustrations?
Ritu Raman: Oh, my mom did. Thank you. She'll appreciate that shout out. She is, just a great artist and she's a chemical engineer, but you know, she was trained at a time where biology wasn't a part of the engineering curriculum as much, and so I have. A lot of great conversations talking to her and my dad, who is a mechanical engineer, about kind of how these fields have evolved over time and talking to them in a way where not necessarily dumbing things down, but sharing kind of new ideas and disciplines and watching how they process that information.
And with my mom comes with the side effect of, she draws a lot to convey, her thoughts. And I thought that she did an incredible job of kind of helping me convey those principles in the book.
Bon Ku: That's so cool. I love it. Ritu, my last question. If a listener were to visit you, where would you take them out to eat?
Ritu Raman: So, as I mentioned, I'm vegetarian, so I'll give an option. A place that has a lot of vegetarian options, but also other things. Possibly my favorite restaurant in the Greater Boston area is called Sofra. It's in Watertown and they, it's a sort of Mediterranean place and the thing I really like about it is the food is amazing.
There's not a ton of place to sit inside, so you kind of have to stand in line for a long time. You eat the food, it's great. They have a cherry dragon iced tea, which I love, but the best part about it is after you eat right across the street is Mount Auburn Cemetery, which is a really, really beautiful historic location.
A lot of great Boston history, a lot of huge trees and a lot of opportunities to get some exercise, work out your muscles and get rid of some of those, those calories you've pounded on at Sofra. So it's just a great experience and one of my favorite, favorite things to do with people when they come visit.
Bon Ku: Well, I'm gonna go check it out next time in Boston. Thanks for that, and thanks for coming on the show and for teaching us about Biofabrication. I love it.
Ritu Raman: love talking to you. Thank you.
Bon Ku: You can follow Ritu on Twitter at D R R I T U R a M a N. And on Instagram at R I T U dot R a M a N. Design Lab is produced by Rob Pugliese, editing by Fernando Queiroz, our theme music was created by Emmanuel Houston and the cover designed by Eden Lew. See you next week.
