As part of its 150th anniversary celebration, MIT sponsored a series of symposia this spring exploring key interdisciplinary research questions and directions. One of these, titled “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything,” took place April 11-12, and features over two dozen phenomenal talks about how computer science is changing the world:

Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything traced the evolution of the information age and celebrate MIT’s role in it. The event brought together early and recent pioneers from a variety of fields to review the role computation has played in the past and present and to explore frontiers that lie ahead.

We’ll be featuring many of these talks in this space in the coming weeks, but we start this afternoon with a particularly fascinating one: Eric Lander — Professor of Biology at MIT, Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, and Founding Director of The Broad Institute, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — spoke for 20 minutes about “Biology as Information.”

Check out Eric’s talk below!

(Click here to start the player when Eric first steps up to the podium.)

You can view all the clips from the computation symposium here. And again, stay tuned as we feature more talks in the coming weeks!

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)