More Cheese, Please - Life Lab, Part 1 | Tumble Episode
- tumblepodcast
- Sep 16, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: Dec 26, 2025
What does cheese have to do with technology? What does engineering have to do with biology? And why should we know about it? We’ll slice into these questions to get a taste of what synthetic biology is, how it's already in our lives, and how it got there.
Welcome to Life Lab! This is the first part of our five part series about how tiny life can change our world. In Life Lab, we explore the incredible power of synthetic biology to solve some of our biggest challenges - and asking how it could change our future.
Life Lab is supported by the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, a non-profit committed to educating the next-generation and building a community dedicated to solving big challenges with engineering biology. Funded by the National Science Foundation.
🎧 Listen to the Episode
🔎About The Featured Experts
Christina Agapakis is head of the Gingko Studio at Gingko Bioworks. She's trained as a synthetic biologist, but she's always been drawn to communicating science creatively.
Here's a video of Christina at work:
Her weird synthetic biology stories don't stop there. Hear the podcast mentioned at the beginning of the episode:
Kristala, or Kris, Prather is a chemical engineer at MIT. Synthetic biologists go by many names! Kris was trained in chemical engineering, but is studying how to replace chemistry with biology.
In this video, she provides a great introduction to synthetic biology for older students!
Here's part 2:
Want to hear more from Christina and Kris? Listen to our bonus interview episodes on Patreon.
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