Andrew Hessel's Autodesk Team Seeks Crowdsourced Cancer Cure

Six months ago, Autodesk opened a skunk works on Pier 9 in San Francisco. The two-story waterfront space—a TechShop on steroids—houses top-of-the-line 3D printers, a precision water jet cutter, wood and metal shops, an industrial kitchen, and pretty much any other tool an inventor could possibly want. Tucked away in a corner, there’s also a skunk works within the skunk works. Here, Andrew Hessel and a team of designers, programmers, and scientists are working on what is perhaps Autodesk’s most ambitious project: building software and hardware that will simplify the task of designing and fabricating living things, including viruses, bacteria, and even human organs. “What’s beautiful about software is that it makes complex jobs easy,” he says.

Hessel is an evangelist for synthetic biology, a radical cousin of genetic engineering done with digital tools. He’s also a distinguished research scientist at Autodesk, the $11.4 billion software company best known for AutoCAD, which engineers use to design everything from sunglasses to skyscrapers. It is not yet clear when Autodesk will commercialize its newest design tools, but democratizing access to synthetic biology may hasten growth in a field that could, according to Hessel, revolutionize energy production and water purification, to name two areas.