No one knows what the future of medical technology will look like but a glimpse into Linda Griffith's lab at MIT reveals a preview nothing short of spectacular. The biotechnologist started her career trying to grow replacement organs on the lab bench and make them available to the thousands of patients whose lives depend on finding an organ donor.

But along the way she had a better idea: Why not try to eliminate the need for organ transplants altogether?

Griffith, ChE 82, a biological engineering professor, is pioneering a novel application of tissue engineering. She builds three-dimensional physiological models of organs on tiny chips. These living chips mimic real organs in the human body and can be used to study the performance of new drugs and allow scientists to observe how diseases such as cancer form and develop — experiments that wouldn't be possible in humans.

"We hope these models will someday greatly accelerate the development of new drugs that may cure patients early in the disease so transplants won't be needed anymore," Griffith says.

Griffith's work is shaping the frontiers of biotechnology, so it doesn't come as a surprise that she was one of the 2006 recipients of the prestigious MacArthur "genius" grants.

So far, Griffith and her team have been able to build a liver chip. They transplanted liver cells onto a tiny three-dimensional silicon scaffold covered with narrow channels — the model liver's blood vessels — each only a little wider than a human hair. Then they placed the chip into a bioreactor that mimics the human circulation system and continuously pumps fluid across the top and through the channels in much the same way blood flows through a real liver in the body.

Griffith's chip makes it possible to watch liver cells under a microscope and learn what's happening in the tissue when it is attacked by a virus. Understanding how hepatitis C goes about its murderous business in the liver will allow scientists to design suitable drugs, which can then be tested on the liver chip.

The chip may also help study how cancers spread. "The model may be useful to mimic the lodging of a single tumor cell in the tissue and that would help develop antimetastatic drugs," she says.

Only a Georgia Tech ball cap hints at Kenn Walker's identity. The chief technologist for Gateway is not dressed to impress.

"I'm not here to make a fashion plate statement. I'm an engineer. I like to be comfortable when I work. I like the fact that I get to wear blue jeans every day," says Walker, ICS 86, MS Mgt 88.

His work space is equally unassuming — a cluttered cubicle in a large, nondescript room at Gateway's headquarters in Irvine, Calif. Nowhere does Walker display the award he received from Black Engineer magazine as one of the 100 most important African Americans working in technology.

"They sent me a plaque. It's at home somewhere. I don't gravitate toward worrying about honors and trappings and all the rest of that," he says. "I felt honored they would consider the things that I do interesting and worthy. Hopefully I can inspire other folks to look at technology as a viable career and an opportunity to contribute."

At Gateway, Walker works with "any sort of new technology that could affect any part of our product line — more specifically, anything that crosses an engineering, technical, functional boundary," he says. "It's my job to say whether we're prepared for it, how to prepare for it to try to build a sense of the technology itself but also the strategy of how to implement it to get it into products quickly and efficiently."

Walker, whose career has included stints at Apple, Radius and Philips, grew up in metro Atlanta, graduated high school from Woodward Academy and chose Georgia Tech "quite frankly because of the President's Scholarship Program."

Walker was one of six scholars selected in the program's second year. "It was a great program all the way around. It was the commitment to academics, but with that it was a commitment to people having a broad range of skills. It was: Will you be a leader on campus? Will you be a leader when you step away from what Georgia Tech has taught you? How will you approach the world? Will you be one-dimensional or will you be multidimensional?

"That sort of focus on the multidimensionality of the student resonated with me. I think I was extremely well prepared for the real world. It wasn't pure theory about why something occurred. We learned why, but we also learned why it was important," he says.

Walker stays connected to Georgia Tech. He watches as many Yellow Jackets games as he can in California.

"I've got three TiVos, three media center PCs, a Replay TV, a couple of extenders. I have multiple ways to do television content or to get multimedia in almost every room in the house. That way I can see what this stuff really works like when you live with it. I've found a lot of bugs in a lot of things over the years trying to actually use them."