Harvard professor David A. Edwards is a biomedical engineer whose medical research has made him a rich man. With a need to make profit no longer a pressing concern, he is now free to engage in his wondrous experiments with how we consume things as human beings.
We don't mean "consume" as in "buy"—we mean literally consume. One of the free-thinking Edwards' inventions is Le Whaf, a kind of booze-vaporizing carafe that lets you inhale Scotch whisky, among other libations. Then there's his WikiPearls, balls of ice cream that come wrapped in edible skins. And his oPhone devices provide something like smell-based telephony—smelephony, we'll call it—allowing users to remotely send each other scents.
If these inventions sound difficult to wrap your head around, well, Edwards knows that. That's why he's opened up Café ArtScience in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a café-restaurant-bar that not only serves proper meals, but showcases his inventions in hopes of acclimating folks to these new ways of thinking.
Sound like a kooky vanity project with no hope of mass uptake? Guess again:
Edwards says Café ArtScience brings in $10,000 to $15,000 a day—the average entrée is $22—and he’s on track to pay back its five outside investors in two years. Prime dinner reservations have been tough to get since it opened.
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It would be a pleasure to dine at such a cafe and enjoy their food as well as the scientific inventions there.