How Designing Brand New Enzymes Could Change the World
Jan, 22 2020
Adam Garske
Enzyme engineer, DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences
"If DNA is the blueprint of life, enzymes are the laborers that carry out its instructions," says chemical biologist Adam Garske. In this fun talk and demo, he shows how scientists can now edit and design enzymes for specific functions—to help treat diseases like diabetes, create energy-efficient laundry detergent and even capture greenhouse gases—and performs his own enzyme experiment onstage.
“With enzymes, we can edit what nature wrote—or write our own stories.”
Adam Garske
Enzyme engineer
Adam Garske
Adam Garske is a senior scientist in Nutrition and Biosciences at DuPont. He obtained a PhD in organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he created and used chemical tools to study enzymes and proteins involved in gene regulation. As an NIH-sponsored postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, Garske studied protein kinases -- master regulator enzymes that often go awry in diseases such as cancer. He endeavors to synthesize his understanding of chemistry and enzymes to make a more sustainable world.
Enzyme solutions from DuPont:
Catalysts for a more sustainable world
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Transformation begins with the spark of something new.
In 2018, TED and DuPont began a partnership to do just that: TRANSFORM. As the world and our interactions grow more complex, so do our challenges. To solve for modern problems, we decided to pursue a new framework for innovation itself, one that considers all perspectives and outcomes in the calculus. This inaugural TED@DuPont event signifies a monumental step to unlock the institutional knowledge within the organization and showcase the New DuPont. Taking place in September 2019, at The Fillmore in Philadelphia, the day’s topics ranged from science, technology, and beyond. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED