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Viruses Enlisted as Nano-builders
Parsa writes "Nanotechnology is getting closer with genetically engineered
viruses grabbing zinc sulfide and arranging themselves into
highly organized structures. The
story is here at MSNBC.com."
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Look up the 'Gray Goo problem' on Google, there's plenty of discussion on this.
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"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Not sure if your serious or not, however, I remember where this comes from.
"ugly bags of mostly water" was a description of humans by a microscopic yet intelligent lifeform found in one of the ST: TNG episodes. It seems someone is showing some objection to using whatever you're using for your own purposes, "enslaving" it.
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I don't really see how this is fundamentally a novel concept...I mean viruses and bacteria have been operating on these scales forever, they've been manipulated for decades... It is interesting to hear that they're being used in a manner not dissimilar to earlier self-assembly techniques.
The line about disassembly is interesting, though. If this is self-dissasembly and reassembly, wow, that makes for some interesting possibilities. Kind of like a ship-in-a-bottle, you could get devices into places with no route for the whole object...does your bladder need repair? Stick a catheter in, pump in whatever solution the nanotech-viruses need to operate, pump in the viruses, and let them build the surgical tools, then take them apart when they're done. Better than laproscopy (sp?), we could be talking about surgery through a syringe.
I'm sure this could also be used for evil, as well...