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"Mini-Factories" To Make Medicine Inside the Body
Diggester writes "A group of scientists from MIT and the University of British Columbia have created 'mini-factories' that can be programmed to produce different types of proteins, and when implanted into living cells, it should distribute those proteins throughout the body. The scientists have initially triggered these 'factories' into action through the use of a laser light to relay the message of which proteins to produce."
Just wait until the pharmaceutical lobbyists get our clueless lawmakers to make protein synthesis illegal.. Then, the next step will be to make the lymphatic system illegal too. Illegal copying of cells is a violation of copyright law.
Now when can i get one implanted that makes THC?
captcha:conveyor
I wonder if they could make these factories produce insulin, dependent on concentration of glucose? That would be cool for diabetics.
What could possibly go wrong. This is cool and wave of future but I'll sit back as long as I can to wait for bug testing.
Did anybody else think of nanohives from Shadowrun when they read the title?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I mean how a cell (like bacteria) have a bit of DNA, mechanism to transcribe that to RNA and use rhibosomes to translate that into a protein. This thing does similar stuff except it isn't designed to replicate itself. Hmm, I don't have access to the original though, what does it use for energy to do all of this? (Since a cell might use a mitochondria to do cellular respiration. Ok, a bacteria doesn't have those but it can do something similar.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
you die and die fast
Woot! Another step towards improving the human immune system. Something like this sounds oddly similar to something I said last October:
"It would be nice if one could program the current immune system with a broad range identifier would eliminate all but the rarest of virus infections. Then the next step would be to somehow analyze foreign invaders to give scientists advance warning. Then a way to create fixes automatically. David Weber gave a shot at imagining something like that but with alien tech implants and nanotech in his Troy series. Some DNA rewriting in the first book as well. How accurate he was I leave to you."
The 'way to create fixes automatically' part would fit in well with this article. Now they just need a detection method, a way to communicate to the human host, and something to link it all together. Whee!
I'm going to save a ton of cash and outsource mine to India.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
that brings out the 12 year old popular scientist kid lurking in every geek ? This is like so far from practical clincial use. Its fun to speculate, but we should be clear, this is *specualtion* and it is many years, and tens, if not hundreds of millions to get an FDA approved device. PS: I may not be able to spell, but I have a PhD in molecular biology, and understand stuff like highly conserved initiation factors with hyper modified histidine (hypusine) residues, the role of shine dalgarno....
can imagine monsanto getting hold of this stuff... soon, we'll have all kinds of factorized cells.. next they'll claim we are GMH... I can see a lot of evil..
Just imagine soldiers and ordinary people with implants to make steroids inside the muscles and painkillers dripped directly the bloodstream without all those icky syringes!
Don't get me wrong, this is a nice achievement.
But calling this "mini-factories", "programming", and "nanotechnology" is a clever reframing to make a combination of standard molecular biology techniques that are very far from actual medical use appear more hip and high tech.
Not going to happen and you wouldn't want arbitrary amounts of THC in your system all the time either.
I know.. I'm on week 8 of my toke break and starting to be able to do some work again. Couldn't sit down
and type for a long while, was about to lose my job. I started getting better by week 6. Even THC is not
something you want to abuse too much, it is fat solvable and stored in body fat and I still feel like I'm
high sometimes.
Don't get me wrong, THC is still an infinitely superior alternative to anything big pharma wants to put into
you, it is a fantastic anti-depressant, controls blood pressure, moderates your immune-system (if it's too
depressed it ramps it up, if it is switched on "too high" it dampens it just like Vitamin D3 does incidentally)
and gives you anti-government thoughts and other insights into life and the universe. On the downside it
can build up in your system, destroy your concentration and it takes away your dreams during REM which
may be a huge issue all by itself. It also makes you superlazy. I know. I've smoked A LOT and at some point
the dosage you need to get high enough is also the dosage that gives you negative side effects. However that
is me smoking weed like some people smoke cigarettes so any anti-marijuana zealots lying out their asses,
don't quote me for I understand the upsides and downsides none to well both from having consumed it
and from having stopped it.
I'm week 8 of the toke break out of 12 and no there are no huge withdrawal effects (as it is still released in ... like I said there's a downside to it too
my system slowly), I got no huge cravings for it and I'm quiet a bit more active and yes dreams have come
back. I'm also slightly less lazy probably coming down to my natural ingrained level of laziness at this point.
Oh I'll be back to smoking in a few weeks, on the weekends after dark because I do not want to miss out
either on the health benefits nor of course on getting high every so often but one thing I know for sure is
I would not want anything in my system that produces THC all the time
if things get out of hand.
Having it release painkillers? Imagine permanent opioid high. Would be sweet.
The whole purpose of a cell is to act like a factory producing things that the body as a whole needs. Is this going to mean that pharma is going to wage a patent cell war where people who have naturally occurring mutation 'factories' will be sued and pharma can use radiation to remove the cells?
Bloody stupid..
organic unprocessed whole FOOD.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Hackable people.
But the nanoparticles still have to be pumped in the body, so this will not remove the need for device like insulin pump.
Call me when it can make the contents of TiKaL and PiKaL
I hope they work on vats of cells synthesizing things that we need, in order to help people, like insulin & stuff. That would be cool.