Benedetto Marelli, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, was a postdoc at Tufts University’s Omenetto Lab when he stumbled upon a novel use for silk. Preparing for a lab-wide cooking competition whose one requirement was to incorporate silk into each dish, Marelli accidentally left a silk-dipped strawberry on his bench: “I came back almost one week later, and the strawberries that were coated were still edible. The ones that were not coated with silk were completely spoiled.” Marelli, whose previous research focused on the biomedical applications of…
