It’s also about understanding; the work is conducted in a science lab (as opposed to engineering). The first goal was to understand and model the behavior of biological systems, THEN possibly improve on them.
I don’t think that this is a laptop that transforms into a desktop… From the looks of it, maybe the screen flips around to be used as a tablet. Think Acer’s take on the Yoga or that Dell that rotates the screen around (forgot the name).