It’s a cloudy July afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and MIT Edgerton Center Instructor Amanda Mayer is using brightly-colored plastic to build proteins. She takes a small yellow block and moves it to the end of a chain of blue and green ones, clicking it into place. “Congratulations,” she says to the four high school students guiding her hand over Zoom. “You’ve all become synthetic biologists.” Together, the group has assembled a model of the complex molecules found in their food and bodies. “I used to think proteins were just one…
