Verbing Science! with Ritu Raman

7. Ritu Raman, “Bio and the Bot” The nature of scientific research is that you don’t know for sure whether something will work when you first try it – if you did know, it wouldn’t really be science, now would it? The most successful scientists are comfortable taking intellectual risks – trying out an idea, seeing what happens, saying, “Hmmm, that’s strange,” and trying to figure out what went wrong, often many times over before something finally goes right – maybe something they couldn’t even have anticipated at the beginning of this process. Meet Dr. Ritu Raman: engineer, innovator, risk-taker! In this episode, Ritu shares how wondering whether living tissue could be used to develop a new kind of robot—a “bio-bot”— started her on a journey that, like so many scientists’, has been marked by lots of failures, some successes, and a perpetual willingness to be surprised.