Science or sorcery?

It’s no secret that my favorite thing about Duke is the incredible research culture. We are lucky enough to have some of the most brilliant minds in the academic world walking through the same gothic wonderland as the rest of us, and the things those minds produce leave me speechless on a daily basis. They inspire me, and to be perfectly honest, they scare me a little too. When I think about how the world is about to enter a new age, I get visibly flustered. I’ll let you decide if that’s pathetic or not, but nevertheless, I hope you hear me out. At the end of this article, if you are not at least a little wonderstruck, I will happily buy you a cup of coffee to make up for your time.

Cool Research #1: Organ-on-a-chip. Yes—Organ, as in your liver, heart, lungs, etc, on a chip, as in the thing in your computer or smartphone. Before babbling about how insanely cool this concept is, let me tell you why the National Institute of Health is putting so much money into it: it’s really, really, really hard to predict how a drug is going to act in the human body. Something which works beautifully in the lab and in animal studies could fail in humans. There are just too many variables that we can’t account for. Now imagine what it would be like if we could create 3-D chips which model the structure and function of organs and are made up of living cells and tissues—those chips could be used to study how a drug reacts in the human body, without potentially harming a real human body. It would be faster, safer and even cheaper. This is all thanks to a merger between computers and tissue engineering—plus a lot of time, effort, frustration and money. In 2012, the NIH provided funding to 17 recipients to work on this platform, and among names such as Dr. Angela Christiano at Columbia and Dr. Kevin Parker at Harvard, there was Duke’s very own Dr. George Truskey, who is working to create a model of human skeletal muscle, complete with a functional circulatory system. In 2014, Dr. Truskey received another award from the NIH to continue this research. Also involved in the project is Dr. Nenad Bursac, who you may have heard of recently for creating skeletal muscle tissues which flex in response to stimuli. I need you guys to get as excited about this as I am. Grown in a lab. Flexes—like the kid in the gym who spends more time looking at his reflection than working out. This isn’t a sci-fi movie. This isn’t a novel by Michael Crichton. This is real life, and it’s happening on campus.

Cool Research #2: Let’s take a few steps back from cells and turn to machines. Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to go to a talk by Dr. Miguel Nicolelis. I’ll be honest—I have a hard time paying attention at talks. There are just too many words I don’t know and graphs I don’t understand to stay alert the entire time. But as Dr. Nicolelis spoke, I found myself on the edge of my seat, jaw open. He is best known for his pioneering work in Brain Machine Interfaces (BMI) and neuroprosthetics, namely the Walk Again Project, which allowed a paraplegic man to open the 2014 World Cup with the kick of a soccer ball in an exoskeleton he was able to control with his mind. It took 150 scientists and a lot of money, but they did it.

As I sat through the talk, I heard about and watched monkeys control two virtual arms using brain activity. To achieve this, the researchers had to teach the monkeys to imagine moving their arms, record the activity of almost 500 neurons from multiple parts of the brain, and translate this data into movements of the virtual arms. Despite the slight blow to my self-esteem—I think those monkeys were smarter than I am—I was mesmerized. From this, Dr. Nicolelis went on, with the Walk Again Project team, to create an exoskeleton that reads brain activity, translates that into a command, and… takes a step. A kick. Down the line, this could mean a world without wheelchairs–a world where someone who loses their arm can play catch in a park with their kids.

Those are just two cool things with Duke’s name on them. There are so many more that I didn’t talk about because of word limits and a lack of understanding. And that’s just in our little Durham bubble. The intersection of technology and biology is a fascinating place to be, and we are living in a time that is smack in the middle of it. And I can’t wait to see what we come up with next.

Ananya Zutshi is a Pratt senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday.