Victoria Malloy in Atmos:
The concept of bringing back the scent of extinct flowers started with Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based biotech company founded by five MIT scientists, with an ethos rooted in the lessons of Jurassic Park: that life finds a way. “A lot of the story of biotechnology for the past two decades has been talking about living things through the metaphor of computers and code,” said Christina Agapakis, an interdisciplinary synthetic biologist and former head of creative at Ginkgo Bioworks. “Living things are coded with DNA. Now, life can be programmable.”
At the Harvard University Herbarium, more than 5 million specimens of algae, fungi, and plants are preserved—pressed, labeled, and stored in floor-to-ceiling cabinets that stretch back centuries. Researchers have long used these collections to study biodiversity and evolutionary history. But in a video providing a look inside the Harvard Herbarium, Charles Davis, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and curator of vascular plants, underscored that natural history collections are today seeing a renewed purpose for advancing innovation in the face of accelerating climate change and a sixth mass extinction.
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