The National Science Foundation recently awarded $25 million to the creation of the Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems Center (EBICS), a new research and education center dedicated to the development of complex biological machines. As part of NSF’s Science and Technology Centers Integrative Partnership program, EBICS will include participation from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Georgia Institute of Technology and will hold its headquarters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
EBICS will be a multidisciplinary research unit where engineers and biological scientists work collaboratively toward the construction of complex biological machines. This newly evolving field aims to elucidate the complex relationships and interactions between cells and cellular systems by building high-tech mechanical units (sensors, processors, and actuators) that can be assembled into machines to simulate the behavior of biological systems. If successful, the creation of biological machines could become a key method of study for neuroscience, particularly contributing to research on neural connectivity. The technology used to construct such machines could also have major implications for the future of medicine.
NSF’s support of EBICS illustrates current trends toward interdisciplinary scientific investigation and remote collaboration. As neuroscience evolves, it becomes increasingly clear that the mysteries of the brain cannot be understood without extensive cooperation between various academic fields. If all is successful, the new “biological machines” should help to shed some light on cognition as an emergent property of the complex biological organization and computational power of the brain.
For more information, see the NSF Press Release.
Tags: biological machines, EBICS, MIT, NSF
