Forge of other people 's frames
Graduates of MIPT and MSU were among the 35 innovators of MIT
Molecular biologist Olga Dudchenko and physicist Ida Pavlichenko, who graduated from MIPT and Moscow State University, were included in the list of young innovators who are prepared every year by the MIT Technology Review magazine. This is reported by the press service of the Moscow Phys.Tech.
Every year, the editorial board of the Technology Review magazine, owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, prepares and publishes one of the most prestigious and at the same time unusual ratings of scientists, Innovators Under 35.
It includes only young specialists who managed to make important discoveries under the age of 35, which significantly influenced either the development of their fields of science, or played an important role in the life of society. Among the winners of this award are such famous people as Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system.
This year, the number of nominees, according to the MIPT press service, included two immigrants from Russia at once, whose discoveries attracted the attention of dozens of experts who participated in the selection of candidates for the role of the main innovators of the past year.
Olga Dudchenko, a graduate of the Department of Physics of Living Systems at MIPT, who now works at Baylor Medical College (USA), got into the top five innovators. Recently, she created a technique that allows you to quickly glue short pieces of DNA into a single whole using information about how chromosomal strands are woven into a three-dimensional tangle.
Last year, she used this idea to create the DNA Zoo project. Within its framework, Dudchenko and other leading geneticists of the world are engaged in deciphering the genomes of animals and birds that are now threatened with extinction. At the moment, biologists have managed to obtain such data for five dozen rare species, including cheetahs and red pandas.
As the creators of DNA Zoo hope, the genomes they have collected will help to understand how to save endangered birds and mammals, as well as reveal some of the secrets of their evolution.
The second laureate, Ida Pavlichenko, solved one of the main problems that worries many young mothers, grandmothers and almost all parents of young children. She created a special coating that protects children's ears from infections and inflammation during implantation of tubes for ventilation of the middle ear and removal of excess fluid from it.
"As soon as you bring children to kindergarten, you immediately begin to feel horror, expecting epidemics of colds and endless antibiotics. Some have to go through several surgeries to re-implant the tubes before they get rid of infections. Our tubes have solved all these problems," the scientist notes.
This idea has already found support from investors, and now Pavlichenko and her colleagues at Harvard are developing it within the framework of the PionEar startup. In the future, such tubes can be used not only to treat children's ear infections, but also to help adults.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru