Alper's team is one of only a few groups in the United States focusing on the blending of biotechnology and materials research. They are at the forefront of a very exciting, very promising field--bioderived materials--that can have a variety of applications, including artificial skin, optics, paper production, synthetic spider silk, and custom-made polymers.
"After people started asking me, `What's a biochemist doing in a materials division?' I had to come up with some justification," quips Alper. "I figured I'd create a major program so people wouldn't ask me anymore."
The mission of Alper's team is to take on a novel challenge: using biological processes to make materials. The group's seven principal scientists are already coaxing enzymes, the super-efficient facilitators of natural reactions, to do their bidding. Creating commercially viable materials through biological processes is by no means unprecedented. In fermentation, for ex- ample, a biological process creates something new--such as ...
