These ‘designer organelles’ are hoped to lay the groundwork for a universal production organism. The project has won the 43-year-old the Next Generation of Biotechnological Procedures award from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The millions-strong endowment will fund Schiller’s six-person team over the coming five years. Today, he is setting up his own real-sized reaction chambers at the Center for Biological Systems Analysis (ZBSA) of the University of Freiburg.

In the world of bioengineering, Stefan Schiller is something of an interior designer. His construction materials are biomolecules; his design objects are living cells. “We want to create new artificial reaction chambers in the cells and furnish these in a number of ways, so to speak,” says Schiller. “Throughout, we draw inspiration from biological systems. We create molecular building blocks and components with new designs in order to give cells new properties.” He refers to his area of research as bionic chemistry, also as synthetic biology. Researchers in this field use molecular biological and biochemical know-how to change cells and give them entirely new and useful features.

Even as a schoolboy, the native of Wiesbaden would be happy tinkering with molecules, if on a slightly larger scale. Various oriented experimentation kits gave the future scientist his first connection to – and love of – chemistry. “I was immediately fascinated by the complex molecules and the idea of building them yourself,” Schiller recalls. The young Schiller eventually went on to study chemistry in Gießen, Mainz and at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, USA, where even at this early stage he was specialised in the synthesis of complex natural macromolecules. In 2003 he completed his doctoral thesis at the Mainz Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research. Not long later he was back over the Atlantic, this time on the West Coast at the renowned Scripps Institute in La Jolla – the Californian research stronghold of San Diego. His four-year postdoctoral studies were completed under the tutelage of Peter Schultz, a pioneer in the field of protein engineering, whose team conducts research into non-natural amino acids used to create novel protein molecules. “I got to know many molecular biological methods here, but also many exciting concepts such as the ‘click chemistry’ developed at Scripps,” says Schiller today. One important finding that he took away with him: “Chemical synthesis and biosynthesis are not mutually exclusive – they can be consolidated.”