• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 19, 2012

This morning, it was the egghead, Rachel Armstrong, a researcher who is speaking at the Ted Talk series Starcom MediaVest Group is sponsoring at the Cannes Festival of Creativity, and she’s talking about some pretty heady stuff: “Synthetic biology.”

According to Armstrong, that means integrating “living materials” into our everyday products and services.

To illustrate this point, she said, “I would like to think about how we design a chicken.”

Not just any chicken, but a specifically produced and engineered chicken.

“We can design a chicken that is featherless, so that we don’t need to pluck it before we eat it,” she said, making some Cannes locals thing differently about the concept of coq au vin.

What you do with synthetic biology, depends on what you want to do with the biology you’re synthesizing, she said, noting, ““Is our chicken going to be a family pet, or is it going to end up as chicken nuggets?”