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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."
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.
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.
You realize who's going to make a killing manufacturing these nanofactories, right? The pharmaceutical industry. Even more amusingly, look at who funds the facility where most of the research took place. Yes, those Koch Brothers.
Go pander your conspiracies somewhere else.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
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!
I'm imagining an entire populace government-healthcare-mandated to have these laser-controlled nanofactories that can, besides their publicized abilities, also produce mild or heavy tranquilizers, or other mind/mood-altering drugs.
People protesting? Flash a laser and they're not so interested any more...can't really remember what it was they were mad about. Violent mob? Flash, and they fall unconscious. Government/police wants to question someone? Flash, and they get a dose of sodium pentathol or other similar drug. Government wants to set-up someone? Flash, and they get a nice big dose of rohypnol ("rufies") and star in an embarrassing video they don't/can't remember.
There's huge potential for abuse here.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I see my post got modded "Troll".
To those who think I'm trolling, I'm not.
Just think for a minute: What kind of wet-dream would it be for the government's "War On Some Drugs & Poor People" types to be able to make it mandatory that everyone's implants time-release constant levels of medications & proteins that would prevent a person from getting "high" from illegal substances? Or even make them violently-ill? They already make pills that make someone violently ill if they drink alcohol to treat alcoholics.
Looking back over the past, do you really trust them not to go that far. or try like hell to? Especially after a few decades?
Who gets to control the implant(s)? Can the control be overridden/hacked? How do you secure that control? How can you be sure that what they tell you it can do is all it can do?
Frankly, without so much security and personal control protections built in that it almost makes it useless for emergency-type patient-unconscious-or-unresponsive scenarios, this concept scares the crap out of me.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
skimmed the O, what they've done is combine two methods; essentially they've created an artificial cell wall and populated it's innards with the cellular machinery from e. coli bacteria. then they've introduced a piece of dna for the protein they're looking for. the factory claim comes from claims that the hybrid cells can still produce proteins under turbulence of the blood stream.
as far as i can tell they don't know where the energy is coming from, the action dies out after around 24 hours. these letters are usually incremental publications, it's very short and excludes most of the details, this may be just experimental error, there's no reason to suspect that this is potentially superior to conventional mab techniques, or is in any way safe to use in vivo. they look like they're looking for a mechanism right now, but this is mostly academic work, basic research, and most of all ignores the complexity of the mammalian immune system.
this is being published now for the sake of shopping it around for more grant money. if you want the O and can figure out how to get me your email, i can send a limited number of copies.
Well art is art isn't it, but then again water is water; and east is east; and west is west; and if you take cranberries