UC Berkeley Announces First "Bionic Chip"

ebibe writes, "Researchers at UC Berkeley will announce successfully creating the 'bionic chip.' Part living tissue, part machine, this chip is the first in which a biological cell is part of the actual electronic circuitry. The chip, which took three years to build using silicon microfabrication technology, has a wide range of potential uses, including new ways to treat genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis or diabetes, safer methods to test new pharmaceuticals for side effects and more complex bionic electronic circuitry. View the entire press release here."

Comments

Some thoughts...

[British]

Hey I can't wait until i can instal linu..... naw, too easy.

Oh great, this is the beginnings of the bor.... nope, too geeky.

Hey I could turn myself into a human Beowu.... nahh, too abstract.

What would happen if a vir..... uh uh, too obscure.

What would happen if this ran Windo..... ah screw it.

Read the release, heading is misleading

[be-fan]

The heading (actually the title given to it by the university) is a little misleading. What we have here is not biological computing devices, for example like the ones that use a slugs brain cell to compute, but a new way to get at the cell. It will probably be more usefull to genetic engineering than anything else. (It says the cell opens and closes in a millisecond, which is an aweful long time.) That out of the way, I think this is really what is needed to take genetic engineering to the next level. By having a "door" as the article put it, into the cell, genetic engineering can take place much more easily. Although this current technology of integrating the cell into a chip will be great for experiments, this technoglogy can also be taken to the point where cells can be operated on directly, perhaps with some sort of probe. This does, however, raise again the ugly question of ethics and science. Anybody see the movie Gattica? (An awesome movie by the way) If something goes wrong with this technology (ie corperations get a hold of it before educational institutions) then Gattica might not seem so much like science fiction.