For over a decade now, driven by sheer curiosity, Bhamla and his research group have been studying the behavior of a variety of living organisms. “In our lab, when we see amazing things like slingshot spiders and wriggling worm blobs, we can’t help but ask: HOW? How do organisms do that? What is the physics behind it? What extraordinary discoveries or inventions can be made using the same biological principles?” it says on his website.

Bhamla has an impressive record of publishing in prestigious scientific journals – Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and Current Biology. He also takes the time to collaborate with professional science illustrators and has built a gallery with over a dozen comics that turn the lab’s research into playful, visual stories. Bhamla earned his degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 2010, followed by a PhD and post-doctoral work at Stanford University.

Scroll caught up with the prolific Bhamla to talk aboutThe Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms – comics that make complex science accessible, inclusive and fun.

Why do you go to the trouble of converting peer-reviewed papers into comics?

I put a lot of energy into comics, storytelling and outreach. Children need wonder; the general audience – they don’t want to see equations either. The science in the graphic version is still rigorous, but the way we share it has to be accessible, visual, and fun. Comics aren’t a gimmick. They let me take what’s happening in the lab and connect it to kids, to the public, to the next generation of scientists.

For instance, we do research in the Amazon rainforest. When local school students come to the field station, we want to tell them what we’re doing. No kid is ever going to want me to hand them a research paper. Nobody’s asking: “Can I see the supplementary information? I want to study figure 4.” Nearly all our comics are translated into Spanish. This is something tangible to give them. Typically, people from my lab translate the comic into their first language, so they can share their work with their families back home.

My eldest is now six. Every time we make a new comic, I take a printout and my wife reads it to our son – he gets so excited. That’s my way of telling him what new stuff I’ve done.

The protagonist of your first graphic novel was a spider. How did you realize this was an extraordinary organism you had just encountered?

In 2017, as a new assistant professor at Georgia Tech University, I didn’t have enough research ideas, so I thought, well, one way to find ideas is to just walk into nature’s laboratory, and maybe something will hit me. I wanted to study bugs and I went to a field station in Peru and spent two weeks studying leafcutter ants.

On my last night, my guide – a naturalist who knows the forest like his backyard – pointed to a tiny black dot near the bathroom door. He snapped his fingers, and suddenly this little spider launched itself in that direction like a slingshot. “Everybody knows about this,” the guide said, but I realized nobody in science had studied this spider’s kinematics.

We say mammals and primates are cool because they can make tools, but here’s a spider that is building a tool to hunt. Her web isn’t just a trap. She sits in the middle of it, testing each fiber, tuning the stiffness, and the Young’s modulus just right depending on the weather.

A roboticist we worked with even tried to build a robotic web, and it was incredibly hard to keep it under tension. The spider, though, just sits there, holding and holding, until a mosquito buzzes past – and then she launches and catches this insect. All this is happening in the dark. How does she do the sensing? Maybe the web acts like an amplifying antenna. Maybe Doppler effect [in essence – it is the change in how waves sound or look when the source is moving relative to you] – is at play.

What’s fascinating is that the silk itself works like a spring. Not just a single fiber, but a whole constructed structure – a metamaterial spring. But then comes the puzzle: launching takes so much energy – how does she stop? That’s when we realized there’s a clutch mechanism. She’s holding onto one of the tension lines, and that grip lets her release energy in a geared, controlled way. She can reload and do it again and again.

So why is the slingshot spider so cool? Because she’s not just spinning silk – she’s engineering a spring‑loaded hunting machine, complete with sensing, launching, braking, and reloading. We described it in a Current Biology paper .

Apart from making comics, you gave a TED talk about the fluid dynamics of insects peeing. The protagonist, which you saw in your backyard in Atlanta: is the glassy-winged sharpshooter. Then, you observe their cousins – cicadas in the wild.

On another research trip in the Peruvian Amazon, we were traveling by boat from the field station. Midway, the driver stopped in a small riverside village – an unplanned break in a place where illegal logging happens. While wandering around with cameras, we felt droplets falling from a lone Indian almond tree (Terminalia catappa).

Looking closer, we saw cicadas clinging to the bark, camouflaged, expelling streams of xylem fluid. To us, it was a perfect chance to capture rare footage. To the villagers, this was a sacred tree. They called it the weeping tree. “Jesus is crying and blessing us,” they say. To them, the water was not insect excretion but a miracle.

We tried to show them slow‑motion iPhone videos – 240 frames per second, clear evidence of cicadas spraying fluid in high-speed jets. But the villagers refused to believe that a bug could produce so much water. Their conviction was unshakable. Ironically, it was their faith that protected the tree from being cut down. It preserved the very site where we could collect data.

In that half‑hour stop, with nothing more than the iPhone, we captured the phenomenon that became the foundation of our PNAS paper “Unifying fluidic excretion across life from cicadas to elephants.” For me it was a lesson in serendipity and perspective: science revealed the mechanism, but belief gave the tree meaning – and ensured its survival.

That is quite a story! Sometimes, your protagonist is a creature many of us have seen without traveling to exotic places – the flamingo.

A postdoc from our lab observed how flamingos look absurd when they feed: bending their heads between their legs with their bills upside down. It seems clumsy, but we learned that the posture, head bobbing, and foot‑stomping are all significant. Each move manipulates water flow: their bills filter food while vortices stirred by bobbing, chattering, and stomping funnel prey toward the beak. What looks silly is actually a precise fluid‑dynamics strategy.

By mimicking flamingos’ vortex tricks, engineers could potentially design filters that resist clogging – turning a bird’s bizarre feeding into inspiration for cleaner water systems. We describe thr research in a PNAS paper.

Overall, how do you decide which organisms to study? And are you afraid you’ll run out of things to study?

For me, it’s like a Venn diagram. A problem has to check a few boxes. First, the organism – it has to be unusual, something weird or understudied. Second, there has to be some physics, some principle or mechanism we can dig into.

I’m always a little nervous about just finding what I’d call a point solution. Those are fine – they show extremes – but what excites me is a principled framework. My goal is to use a system as the focal point to identify broader principles. That’s why we bring in math modeling and robotics, because they let us move from one system to another.

And once you look at science through that lens, there’s endless material to pick from. If you’re not scared of creepy crawlies, there’s a lot of window shopping to do. Enough inspiration for lifetimes, really. But the challenge is you can only take on so much.

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For the longest time, I thought hedgehogs were simply critters from British children’s books. But three different species of hedgehogs — living, breathing mammals — inhabit the Indian subcontinent alone. Of these, we know very little about the Madras Hedgehog (Paraechinus nudiventris), says Dr. Brawin Kumar, ecologist, and conservationist, working to save this endemic species from obscurity, even possible oblivion. The Kanyakumari-born researcher recalls his first sighting of the spiny animal, resembling “a small bunch of twigs arranged with utmost care,” as it ambled about in the scrub looking for food.  

Kumar, who earned his PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing is now a National Postdoctoral Fellow at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Tirupati. As part of his efforts to save the Madras Hedgehog, the conservationist has brought out a comic book in the local dialect for children in Tamil Nadu, who live in and around the hedgehog’s habitat.  

So, tell us how you got interested in the Madras Hedgehog?

In 2011, one year into my job in conservation biology with the ZOO Outreach Organization in Coimbatore, I went to Tirunelveli for an Earth Day celebration. We had an interactive session with the audience about the plants and animals seen the region — local flora and fauna as it were. Then, they came up with a question that stumped me. They asked me about the mull-eli (spiny rat), the tiny creature which often ends up as roadkill. One of them had even saved up spines and brought it along.  

I had no idea what creature they were talking about. I had graduated with a master’s degree in biotechnology only the previous year. So, I took back a few spines with me to show to experts at ZOO. They could identify it immediately. This was my first introduction to the Madras Hedgehog. It took several visits to the Tirunelveli area before I finally saw my first live hedgehog. I have written about the first sighting of the spiny animal, resembling “a small bunch of twigs arranged with utmost care,” as it ambled about in the scrub looking for food.  

Meanwhile, I had already started reading up everything I could about them. These mammals were recorded in scientific literature in 1851. Even today, very little is known about the behavior of these, solitary, nocturnal and elusive animals. So, I began gathering data about the distribution of hedgehogs in Tamil Nadu. 

After that, we did fieldwork in areas in Tamil Nadu where hedgehogs have been historically documented. I drew up a questionnaire to document people’s perceptions about hedgehogs across their known range. Local newspapers reported sightings — that turned out to be an unexpectedly good resource. We networked with local conservation groups like the Nellai Nature Club. People reported sightings from camera traps.

At the end of the five-year-long study, we got a clearer picture of the distribution of these hedgehogs and about the threats to their survival. In 2018, we published a detailed paper in Mammalia, based on our findings. 

So, what were some of the key findings about the distribution of the hedgehog?

Hedgehogs were not confined only to arid landscapes in Tamil Nadu. The habitats include pasture lands, edges of agriculture fields, shrublands, grasslands, urban areas, sand dunes, and foothills of small hillocks. Madras Hedgehogs live in burrows and come out in search of insects. You can see them in cattle-grazing fields, behind houses, and under the Palmyra tree leaves.  You could see them near lampposts, hoping to feast on insects that fall to the ground.

So, we pooled together confirmed locations and sighting records and used an algorithm to predict the potential distribution range of hedgehogs in southern India. But ninety per cent of the hedgehog population lives outside protected areas, where, unlike megafauna like elephants and tigers, small mammals have no safeguards under the Indian Wildlife Protection Act. 

Hedgehogs are not going by confined by hedges and fences.

So, the hedgehog’s range is bigger than you thought. Still, you are worried about hedgehog’s survival. Why?

Worldwide, wildlife has had to contend with habitat loss, vehicular traffic, and the threats of climate change.  Madras Hedgehogs face an additional danger: they are a victim of local superstitions.  When hedgehogs sense a physical threat, they curl up into a spiny ball. Hunters easily pick them up and sell them in the marketplace — dead or alive — as products and pets. But in these parts, the dried skin of the hedgehog is considered a status symbol.

Dried hedgehog spines are used as medicine for whooping cough and other ailments. The meat is a delicacy. Here, hedgehogs, which end up as pets, die soon because they are fed only greens. Even zoos which get rescues do much the same thing. There is simply not enough scientific awareness about the animal — few seem to realize they are not mini-porcupines. Older people said that they had seen live hedgehogs or its pawprints on the sand growing up, but no longer.

The animal is going extinct in so many of its known habitats in Tamil Nadu. So yes I am worried about their survival.

 Why did you decide to bring out a Tamil comic book on Madras Hedgehogs? 

As an ecologist, it shocked me to see that the children in the hedgehog’s homeland were growing up ignorant of this tiny mammal. Very few children in that state have even seen the hedgehog. I worked with Venkatesh Babu to create a 20-page Tamil comic book Mullikkaattu Ithigaasam (Legend of Scrub Forest). The plot is like this: Two schoolchildren rescue a little hedgehog from a misinformed practitioner of medicine. Most of its siblings have already ended up as roadkill and the mother is delighted to be reunited with her little one. 

In the academic year 2018-19, I started distributing the [comic] books in a few schools in southern Tamil Nadu, near the habitats of Madras Hedgehogs. The response was heartening. When schools reopen after the pandemic, I will restart my outreach efforts. The endemic hedgehog should be mentioned in local school textbooks.

 What are your other plans for hedgehog outreach?

My goal is to conduct a mass outreach program for the conservation of the Madras Hedgehog and its habitat.

Hedgehogs are not vermin, but their local name is mull-eli (literally thorny rats), so people don’t think twice about killing them. This is unfortunate. I would also like to explore linking with community radio stations to try and save the remaining few pockets of hedgehog habitats.  Being insectivores, hedgehogs are natural allies of farmers, a fact we need to emphasize during outreach. Researchers and local NGOs have to work together to save these little creatures before they go locally extinct.

The Madras Hedgehog is found in the other southern states as well, not just Tamil Nādu. Besides, there are two other species of hedgehogs in India: the Long-eared Hedgehog and the Indian Hedgehog. The government could nominate a Hedgehog Day. The birthday of M. Krishnan (30 June 1912), pioneering Indian naturalist and nature writer, would be an ideal date. While these mammals are known to resist a range of toxins, M. Krishnan was the first person to document that the Madras Hedgehog can even survive snakebites. It would be great to research the science behind this and other surprising abilities of the hedgehog.

 

Here is a last question -- and maybe the most important one for folks from Chennai -- can you see the Madras Hedgehog in the capital city of Tamil Nadu?

In colonial times, vast parts of southern India constituted the Madras Presidency. That is how the Madras Hedgehog, an endemic, got its name. There is a specimen of the mammal at Madras Museum. But the collection date, location are all missing – so it hard to said to say whether even that original specimen was from the city or it was from elsewhere in southern India. There are no hedgehogs in Arignar Anna Zoological Park in Vandalur, Chennai.

There are a few potential hedgehog habitats in and around the city, but we have not done field surveys yet. Without that, we cannot say for sure. So yes, without field studies, we cannot conclusively answer even this simple question.

The Madras Hedgehog. Picture by Jude.

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Our obsession with digital screens is depriving us of sleep and hurting our health. Study after study shows that we are staying up till late, glued to our gadgets, which in turn leads to another unhealthy habit: night-time snacking. “Even healthy food eaten at this late hour is junk,” said circadian biologist Satchidananda Panda. “It is the timing of it.”

Panda, who grew up in Cuttack in Odisha, leads a research team at the prestigious Salk Institute of Biological Studies in San Diego in the United States. Broadly, he studies circadian rhythms, the innate timekeeping which tells living creatures, including humans, when to wake up, when to eat and finally when to sleep. Learning to take advantage of the body’s circadian rhythms could help in everything from losing weight to curing chronic ailments.

In June, Panda’s book The Circadian Code: Lose Weight, Supercharge Your Energy, and Transform Your Health from Morning to Midnight, which translates cutting-edge research in circadian biology into practical takeaways, was released. While it sounds like the title of a self-help book, there is plenty of science in it. In a conversation with Scroll.in, Panda talks about the circadian clock, the link between the light-sensing protein and health and the importance of Time Restricted Eating. Edited excerpts:

What is the circadian clock? Why should we be in sync with it?
The circadian clock is an internal timepiece that regulates our daily patterns of behaviour and physiology. Initially, scientists thought that there was one master clock in the brain which controlled the entire body. In 1997, they discovered that almost every organ in the body has its own clock.
Almost every cell in the body contains one of these clocks. Each clock is programmed to turn on or off thousands of genes at different times of the day or night. All these clocks work in sync to keep us going. When our daily patterns of eating and sleeping are disturbed, our clocks cannot send out the right messages to these genes, and our body and mind will not function optimally.
If the disruptions continue for weeks at a time, there are big consequences. We may succumb to a variety of infections and diseases. Slowly, it is becoming clear that a disrupted clock is the mother of all maladies, and, in many chronic diseases, clock function is compromised.

You made a key discovery in circadian biology even as a postdoctoral associate…
For almost 100 years, scientists knew that there was a sensor that sends light signals to the master clock in the brain to tell it when it is morning and when it is night. Many individuals who are blind do know when it is day and when it is night without any external cues. So, sensing is different from seeing. How does this sensor work? Is it in the eye or elsewhere?
As it turns out, the light-sensing protein, melanopsin, is present in only a few thousand neurons in the eye, but they hook up directly to the brain area that houses the master clock. Sunlight is a rich source of blue light, which is what melanopsin senses. The prestigious magazine Science listed this discovery, made independently by five research teams, among the top ten breakthroughs of 2002. Since then, we have learned a great deal more about the link between melanopsin and health.

Light is not the only thing which affects the circadian clock in mammals, you then discovered…
We experimented on mice, which are typically nocturnal creatures. They eat at night. So, we fed them only during the day and to see what that does to their internal clocks. Surprisingly, we found that almost every liver gene that turns on and off within a 24-hour period ignored the light signal and synced to when the mice ate instead.
We learned that a daily eating-fasting cycle drives almost every rhythm in the liver. All the timing information doesn’t just come from the outside world through the eye’s blue light sensor. Just like the first light of the morning resets our brain clock, the first bite of the morning resets all other organ clocks.

So, you had a new handle to deal with the circadian clock in mammals?

Yes. We did experiments to test this theory. Research literature says that when mice are given free access to fatty and sugary foods, they become obese and diabetic within a few weeks. What we did was this: we gave one set of mice free access to the fatty diet for 24 hours [while] the second group had access to the same food for an eight to 12-hour period. What we found was startling: mice that eat the same number of calories from the same foods within 12 hours, or less, are completely protected from obesity, diabetes, liver and heart disease. When we put sick mice on scheduled feeding, we could reverse their disease without medication or change in diet.

Was that how you hit upon this concept of Time Restricted Eating?
Time Restricted Eating means taking in all your calories within a specific window of time, typically within eight to 11 hours. Sticking to such a schedule will help you lose weight, avoid chronic diseases and enhance your sleep quality.
Till we published these results, conventional wisdom said what we eat and how much we eat determines our health. But similar observations poured in from labs around the world, including studies on humans. Now we know that in addition to what, and how much we eat, when we eat matters. Time Restricted Eating helps you reduce weight, regulates blood sugar and keeps your heart healthy.

This research is ongoing. We have developed a free app called myCircadianClock that helps you keep track of daily behaviours such as eating, sleeping, exercising, and taking supplements and medications. Your data will help researchers understand how daily timing of behaviours influence health and well-being, while the app provides you personalised insights into your daily rhythms.

Can indoor lighting be made to sync with our circadian biology?

We now know a few things about how light affects our mental and physical well-being. By using a blue light sensor, our circadian clock senses sunlight, a rich source of blue light. Bright lights, exposure to blue light, inhibit the production of melatonin, a natural sleep aid. So, newer smartphones and tablets are designed to change the background color from bright white to a dimmer orange a few hours before bedtime. Using those settings is a start. Meanwhile, researchers are figuring out how much light and what kind of light [meaning, which colour] we should experience, at what time, to promote health and mental well-being.

What are some lifestyle changes people in India might benefit from?
Even half a century ago, the common practice was to eat sparingly and finish eating the last meal around sunset or early evening. The Jains ate all their food before sunset.Now, majority of Indians suffer from chronic circadian rhythm disruption because of their eating patterns. Some of this is shaped by culture and some by the new urban lifestyle. It is customary for people to wake up early and have a cup of tea or coffee and a snack. This breaks their overnight fast. The body can efficiently process food for the next twelve hours at best. But they eat dinner late, often after 9pm. More than a third of their food is consumed when the body cannot optimally process it. Consequently, the incidence of pre-diabetes, diabetes, hypertension, heart attacks and general inflammatory diseases are on the rise even in people in their 30s and 40s.

Those with long commutes may consider bringing breakfast with them and eating around 10am and to eat dinner with the family before 9pm. Such a simple lifestyle change can be the first step towards building other healthy habits of better food, little more physical activity and better quality of sleep. These will work together to prevent or reverse non-infectious chronic diseases that are afflicting millions in India.

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Physician-chef Rani Polak explains why clinicians should learn cooking skills—and teach them to patients.

Midway through medical school in Jerusalem, Rani Polak had doubts about his chosen path. He decided to quit and pursue a different passion, cooking, at Le Cordon Bleu academy in Sydney. It was among the pots and pans that he began to see a way that he could help people lead healthier lives—through food, but in the role of a physician. He completed his medical degree, and today is a leading physician-chef in the burgeoning field of culinary medicine.

In 2014, Polak started a telemedicine program based on an old-fashioned idea now supported by growing evidence: when it comes to health, home cooking matters. While many doctors may agree, most don’t have the training to teach patients how to cook healthy meals for themselves. To help other physicians, Polak founded and directs the Culinary Healthcare Education Fundamentals (CHEF) Coaching program at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, which helps clinicians lead patients to build healthier—and often tastier—habits around food.

Q: What is culinary medicine?

A: The American College of Preventive Medicine calls it “the practice of helping patients use nutrition and good cooking habits to restore and maintain health.” How is this new? Well, until recently, most studies and medical advice about food addressed specific nutrients—this is good for your body, that is not.

What’s new is the understanding that food is a behavior that requires skills to maintain. If you want people to adhere to a diet, you need to offer them ways to behave around food—and that includes tools and solutions for mealtimes. If you want a person to cut down on one food, you’ll have more success if you can suggest a flavorful, healthy alternative. And if we teach people to cook those better foods themselves, they’ll start eating in a healthier way, almost by default.

Q: How does that work in practice?

A: One of my first patients in Boston was a physician with type 2 diabetes. The lunches he bought near his office were mostly unhealthy, so we talked about meals he could prepare at home. He felt confident about making sandwiches but didn’t have time to buy fresh rolls every morning. We discussed how to freeze and defrost fresh bread for use, and that led to major improvements in his diet. If people know what to buy at the grocery store, how to make a meal and make more time to cook, they can make very important changes.

Q: Isn’t food the domain of the dietitian or nutritionist?

A: Usually only people with certain health conditions are sent to that kind of specialist. But most patients can benefit from a change in their diets. Clinicians should also know how to talk about food. If they had training in culinary medicine, they could plan interventions to improve their patients’ eating habits—working together with dietitians and nutritionists to achieve better outcomes. It might take only a minute to ask the patient questions and prescribe culinary videos and then to follow up on future visits. Doctors can do this even if someone has simply come in for an annual physical or has the flu.

Q: How did you get started?

A: For my medical school thesis, I developed a culinary medicine program for patients with inflammatory bowel disease in Israel. Then in 2013 I came to Boston to pursue a fellowship at the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine, which was then located at the Joslin Diabetes Center. I wanted to invite patients into the kitchen and cook with them. But like most hospitals and medical schools around the world, we didn’t have a teaching kitchen. They are expensive to build and maintain.

As part of my fellowship, I received training in online coaching, and immediately saw the possibilities of using telemedicine to teach food habits. I worked to develop the CHEF Coaching program—a combination of culinary training and health coaching principles, delivered through the internet.

The program works mainly with clinicians. We have cooking videos that clinicians can review in their own time and prescribe to patients, and doctors can join us live from their own kitchens for cooking classes. The idea is that once providers learn, they can lead those under their care to better health. But we also work with some patients. We are starting a three-year randomized controlled trial at Spaulding soon to study the impact of our telemedicine program on overweight and obese participants.

Q: You place a huge emphasis on home cooking. What does the research tell us?

A: It is a worldwide epidemic: People cook significantly less today than they did 30 or 40 years ago. But study after study shows that home cooking results in better nutritional intake. Even when people say they are not trying to lose weight, and they eat anything they want from their own kitchens, they still do better than they would in a restaurant—but cooking instead of eating pre-prepared foods is better in general. We use fewer fats and sugars in our own kitchens than commercial kitchens do.

Ultimately, home cooking is a behavior, not a skill. It is not simply about picking the right raw ingredients, or knowing to roast vegetables. It is about making the time to cook, gaining some basic skills and having the confidence to enter the kitchen and come out with something you’d like to eat. So those are the skills that our program tries to build.

Read the article here. html.

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Recently, the  Food and Drug Administration approved the manufacture of the world’s first 3D printed pill Spritam, a reformulation of the anti-epileptic seizure drug levetiracetam. In the late 1980s, Michael Cima, professor of Materials Science and Engineering, along with fellow MIT professor Emanuel Sachs invented the 3D printing technology used in the process. I caught up with Michael Cima to find out what the FDA approval for the manufacturing of a 3D pill means for the future of the pharmaceutical industry.

How did the idea of 3D printing a drug evolve?

Once we developed the 3D printing technology in the 1980s, we licensed it out to eight to 10 different fields. Aprecia Pharmaceuticals bought rights and focused on printing jaw augmentation prosthetics with calcium phosphate in those with gum disease, the bone might’ve worn down to a point where it was difficult to put in implants. Now, the folks at the company have moved on to 3D printing tablets.

Why was the medicine for epilepsy, the first candidate for 3D printed medicine?

Imagine getting a person who is in the middle of a seizure to take a big tablet.  The person would find it hard to swallow anything during an episode. It will be great to have something that goes down easily with just a sip of water. Of course, epileptic medicine can also be given as a suppository, but not all caregivers are comfortable with this mode of delivery in public. With the conventional process you can make porous, rapid-dissolve tablets, but the technique also limits the amount of solution you pour into each grid. That limits the dosage of the pill.

If you use 3D printing to make the same medication, you are printing in layers and that allows you to go as high as five times the conventional dosage in a given volume. So, a rapidly dissolving tablet that can deliver a high dose of epilepsy medication fulfills an unmet medical need.

Rapid dissolve tablets are useful in other instances too, one would imagine.

The elderly and children have trouble swallowing pills, in some cases, as do those with Parkinson’s disease. Any medication given to these patients may take the form of rapid dissolve tablets, which go down easily with just one sip of water.

In what other instances would 3D printed pills be useful?

Tablet pressing is an established industry – there is no need to switch to 3D printing for every pill. Only medical need will drive other uses of this technique. For instance, the best thing about this technique is how uniform the dosage will be throughout the pill. Yet the same technique allows for precise non-uniform layers as well, which enables very specific, controlled releases of the drug inside the body.

Then, there is the capability of delivering micro doses of the drug. At small dosage levels, it is not possible to ensure content uniformity with conventional techniques. So certain potent drugs, like the ones in say hormone replacement therapy are now given as injections. It might be possible to deliver them to patients in an oral form. Now, we can put that one droplet of an ingredient into each individual tablet. Industry has not seen this level of precision before.

Can pharmacies start printing tablets now? Where do you see this technology going next?

Initially, we thought at best these 3D machines would be used in rapid prototyping or manufacturing small lots — producing fewer units per batch to gain flexibility, reduce waste, and improve responsiveness, a cornerstone of lean manufacturing.

Now the pharmaceutical companies have taken this technique to mass manufacture tablets.

And what comes next, I really don’t know though I imagine that many other companies will start 3D printing pills now it has been proved it can be done. As an inventor, I have realized that the user will discover new uses for a technology I did not dream of. I have fun watching what users make of the invention.

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Evolutionary engineer Kevin Esvelt, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, works with gene drives, engineered bits of DNA that can cause a mutation to become heritable all the time. He calls for researchers to create and use safe lab procedures while working with this powerful but potentially risky technology.

What is a gene drive?

In nature, a gene drive occurs when a DNA sequence spreads through a population by breaking the conventional rules of inheritance. For example, if an organism has a single copy of a fluorescent marker gene and its mate has none, normally only half their offspring will fluoresce. When a gene-drive system is in play, almost all of them will glow.

How can scientists use this capability?

Gene drives allow us to drive altered traits through wild populations over generations. For instance, we could alter the DNA of wild mosquitoes to stop them from carrying disease. We could restore damaged ecosystems and save endangered wildlife by genetically removing invasive species.

How did your insights help to propel this field?

Even ten years ago, heritable genome editing was a possibility, but no one had found a molecular tool that would enable it to be done efficiently. In 2013, laboratories began using CRISPR to precisely edit the genomes of many species. I realized then that this tool could be used to build stable gene drives in many complex organisms. It could also be used to build reverse drives, which are like molecular erasers for overwriting previous edits.

Why did you explain how gene drives would work before you published results showing that they could work in any organism?

Most advances don’t give individual scientists the power to affect entire ecosystems. By detailing what was possible, how it could be achieved and what safeguards were needed to prevent any accidental release of altered organisms from the lab, we hoped to set an example of how future work in gene drives should proceed.

Why was this important?

A single escaped organism that found a mate could eventually alter most of the local population and, very possibly, every population of that species worldwide. The ecological risk might be low, but the damage to public trust in biotechnology could imperil the future of the field.

Did you want researchers to agree on some guidelines first?

My immediate priority was to prevent the accidental release of any gene-drive organisms into the wild. I wrote to the few researchers working on gene drives to explain my concerns about ethics and safety. Not all of them responded.

Then, what happened?

Last year, when we released results showing that gene drives work in yeast. Then another group — who were working with fruit flies — independently created a functional gene-drive system. They were careful to keep the flies contained, but unlike our paper, their manuscript, which was meant to be published as a how-to for other labs, made no mention of safeguards or the risk to wild populations. We got wind of that and approached them. To their credit, they agreed to include those details.

Did your efforts help to usher in regulation?

The fruit-fly case triggered responses from many scientists. For months, we struggled to agree on which safeguards should be used in the lab. We eventually published our recommendations in July 2015, and this year the US National Academy of Sciences released a report setting out how to conduct gene-drive research responsibly.

Should gene-drive information be classified?

Classifying such information would hinder beneficial applications and threaten biosecurity. We must know which species to monitor. Open science is the best defence and the best way to earn public support.

Read here. html. PDF

Mice Against Ticks

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