All his life, Doug Blackiston has been fascinated by metamorphosis — the way that one object changes into another. “As a kid, I loved those toys that start as one thing and transform into something else,” he recalls. He was interested in nature, too. He grew up in the country and searched nearby ponds for frog eggs, which he collected in jars. “Then I watched them change from eggs to tadpoles to frogs,” he says. “You’d never guess those creatures were the same life-forms if you didn’t know.” Now a biologist at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., Blackiston remains fascinated by how living things transform. His specific interests have changed, but only a little. He’s tried to figure out, for example, what a caterpillar remembers after it turns into a butterfly.
More recently, though, he’s focused on coaxing cells to transform in specific ways, either on their own or through human intervention. He says that cells can become building blocks for new machines and then programmed to do useful work.
For example, he was part of a group of scientists who recently assembled cells into living robots. These tiny bots are about as big as a grain of coarse sand. “If you take a poppy seed and cut it in half twice, that’s their size,” Blackiston says.
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