 Lemelson-MIT Program | |
| MIT graduate student Erez Lieberman-Aiden holds models of DNA fractal globules and is surrounded by designs symbolizing other research interests, ranging from evolutionary graph theory to the iShoe. |
Four amazingly inventive students have won $30,000 each for innovations ranging from a DNA puzzle-solver to a low-cost prosthetic arm to an “iShoe” that checks your sense of balance.
The monetary payoff came today from the Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize Program, which has rewarded inventors with cash prizes since 1994. But the biggest payoffs from the winning inventions are still to come, in the form of new medical therapies, more efficient energy storage devices and lives more fully lived.
A century ago, the stereotypical inventor was a Thomas Edison type, slaving away in a lab, trying to blend 1 percent inspiration with 99 percent perspiration to come up with a stroke of genius. Nowadays, the stereotype is more likely a Borg-type hive mind, in which legions of anonymous engineers come up with innovation by design.
Erez Lieberman-Aiden, a 30-year-old student winner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks the truth is somewhere in the murky middle.
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