Learning biology by playing with proteins

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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."

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