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John Rogers, professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, designs flexible diagnostic tools which can be implanted in your body and harmlessly bio-degrade once they’ve stopped being useful. His key discovery is that silicon, the workhorse of consumer electronics, does actually dissolve in water when it’s made into nano-scale thin wafers.

Magnus Berggren’s lab for Organic Electronics at Linköping University is bridging the boundary between living and non-living things in another way:  they have grown electronic circuits inside a common garden rose. What’s more, they have been able to give the circuits rudimentary switching capacity, opening the door to a direct electrical interface between us and plants.

Hadyn Parry is CEO of a leading UK biotech company which is reducing the numbers of some of the nastiest disease carriers – mosquitoes – with the help of clever genetic manipulation. Unlike most other GM techniques, Oxitec’s self-limiting gene naturally vanishes from the ecosystem after one generation thus giving us the opportunity to stop releasing GM mosquitoes at any point and restore the location to its pre-release state.