Gene edits, turtle rescues, and a pay-what-you-can restaurant

The first single-pickup electric guitar. The Civil Rights Movement in VR. Living T-Rex tissue. These objects tell stories of discovery, delight, and curiosity that represent the breadth of disciplines at NC State. “Brace for Impact! Invention, Innovation, and Creativity at NC State,” a new exhibit at the Hill Library Exhibit Gallery through September 20, features all this and much more.

This exhibit was researched, curated, and designed by Elise Phinazee (CHASS ’19) and Erin Nicole Delahunty (Design ’20) and draws from the Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center manuscript collections and university archives, as well as individual colleges and research centers from across NC State. The curators’ challenge was to select high-impact inventions, innovations, and ideas from across NC State’s ten colleges. That could be a vast exhibit, of course, as NC State has produced so much worth trumpeting. Phinazee and Delahunty focused on picking four things from each college that, taken as a group, expressed the mission, history, and passion of the college.

In the cases in this exhibit, you will see stories of sea turtle rescues out of the College of Veterinary Medicine, how Ron Mace started the universally-known idea of Universal Design in our College of Design, how necktie knitting led to aorta repair in the Wilson College of Textiles, and how a pay-what-you-can restaurant in Downtown Raleigh started in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

And these stories are constantly changing. CRISPR—a gene-editing technique featured in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences case in this exhibit—has been in the news very recently. For the first time, two human patients have been treated using CRISPR as part of a study approved for cancer treatment at the University of Pennsylvania.

The exhibit is free and open to the public. Phinazee and Delahunty worked with the Libraries this year as part of the Provost‘s Professional Experience Program.