"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."

Comments

nice job reframing

[khipu]

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.

Re:Imagine the possibilities!

[BlueStrat]

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