You may have a PhD in Genetic Engineering but you seem to know little about DNA repair. There are at least 5 different types of DNA repair. Some of these are error prone some are not. The type being used by the Sangamo group is "homologous recombination" which tends to *not* be error prone unless the DNA being copied contains an error. This does from time to time occur and can result in cancer. When this happens it is known as "gene conversion".
In this case, the Zinc Finger Nuclease is simply used to cut the defective DNA to initiate the homologous recombination process. If you had bothered to read the abstract you would understand that they are also providing an "an extrachromosomal DNA donor" (I would suspect on a plasmid) as the source for the corrected DNA sequence.
So this process *need not* be error prone. Of course they are obviously looking at a number of cells after the fact to determine the fraction of cells in which the process was successful. If one did this with stem cells (which seems to be where they are going) and put them back into the body then one would indeed be able to correct SCID or sickle cell anemia. Diseases that are present in adults in specific cell types such as cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy are going to be a bit trickier.
The preservation of our data is the understory of what it is to be human. No preservation = no humanity. All we are is just "dust in the wind".
A waste of time...
on
Ask mc chris
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
The comments on this thread represent the extent to which/. has stumbled. You are going to document some "I've never heard of" rapper over people like the Rolling Stones or the Beatles or Simon and Garfunkle???
First of all I ask, even beg, of you to ask the questions "Can they state something in a language that I can understand?" Second, I ask of you to consider "Whether or not it really matters?" Because consideration of the best way to get high or the best way to get laid are *not* going to change the world. So social discuassions failing to recognise this are simply "coasting".
When you deal with those questions --- *then* we may be able to have a reasoned conversation as to whether "Mc Chris" deserves the web time.
Cool... We may have finally observed a collection of Matrioshka Brains.
This would qualify as a Kardashev Type III civilization.
But don't suggest this to the astronomers or astrophysicists because they are so friggen sure that the universe is *dead* and nothing they observe could be explained by the activity of advanced technological civilizations... They obviously haven't read any of the work by the Lineweaver group pointing out that 75% of the stars in the galactic habitable zone are older (in some cases much older) than the Sun.
[Ref: astro-ph/0401024].
Roll the open source and nanotechnology development efforts forward by a few hundred million years and project what the universe would look like...
Human doubling time is probably a minimum of ~16 years (unless you intend to use artificial wombs...) while nanorobot doubling time is on the order of minutes. Bacteria (aka "wet" nanorobots) have a doubling time of 20 minutes. Optimally designed nanoreplication facilities could significantly outpace that. Once the proper nanorobotic foundation is laid people will be able to throw together nanorobots and start the Mars disassembly process. That will be long before significant numbers of humans will move (or be born) there.
Now... if NASA had only sent a rover to Mars that could replicate itself...:-(
This *isn't* so far fetched. NASA published a report 25 years ago on this topic. [Advanced Automation for Space Missions, Proceedings of the 1980 NASA/ASEE Summer Study.] They were just using macroscale technologies rather than nanoscale technologies.
How do you intend to "terraform Mars" when it won't be there? It takes less than a day to completely disassemble it!
Haven't all of you terraforming advocates out there ever considered the fact that to efficiently get to Mars (I don't mean a several person space capsule -- I mean quantities of people that would be required for a "real" colony...) as well as to perform rapid terraforming (within a several hundred year lifetime) you are going to require robust molecular nanotechnology? And if you have robust molecular nanotechnology you might as well convert the entire planet into more useful forms that aren't at the bottom of a gravity well.
The world seems to be full of people who have read too much anthropocentric science fiction and don't realize that technology development is going to turn many decades old concepts that people feel all warm and fuzzy about into really silly ideas.
The fundamental problem with many astronomical observations today is that astronomers and astrophysicists try to fit *everything* to the assumption that it must be "natural". Yet if the work by Lineweaver's group is correct, ~70% of the "Earth's" in our galaxy are *older* than ours -- some much (as much as a few billion years) older than ours. So the galaxy may well be populated by civilizations far more advanced than our own. They don't care about us (worms are to us as we are to them), there are no UFOs, classical SETI will probably fail, etc. However(!) if we look carefully we may be able to detect their activities.
In the construction of Matrioshka Brains (previously discussed on/. here) one has the common choices found in software development. "Do we do it top-down or bottom-up?" Taking an existing solar system (such as ours) and disassembling the asteroids and planets and eventually shrinking the star is the top-down approach and tends to be expensive (lifting material out of large gravity wells and relocating them within solar system volumes requires a great deal of energy and time). On the other hand optimizing the development of mini-solar systems could be the bottom-up approach as one avoids the expense of large gravity wells and one can optimize the construction of "computronium" as the dust cloud and brown dwarf evolve. One could imagine an advanced civilization structuring things such that they feed material into the brown dwarf such that they keep it just on the edge of becoming a star. Under ideal circumstances a civilization would like an energy source which produces the greatest amount of light (or IR) energy with the minimal amount of UV energy (which can break atomic bonds and is ultimately wasteful).
If the only criteria the astronomers are using for their conclusions is an excess of IR radiation then they don't really have much of a basis for their proposal other than the bias that such observations must fit the perspective of "natural" objects rather than "engineered" objects.
At least not for Mars at any rate. Because we can easily send up a few nanorobots to disassemble the planet. If the private space effort continues the way it is going then it is far more likely that Mars will be gone by the time any government effort gets people there to explore.
Oh yes, and before you cast me as a troll, as someone did last week, read the friggen papers.
Great! Another proposal for using a scripting language that one does not have the source code for (at least in IE, Opera and probably other browsers), and is *NOT* a standardized language (what approved "forum" such as ANSI or ISO has standardized Javascript?) AND is known in its various forms to crash browsers (e.g. Netscape 4.79 that people will still choose to use because it is still faster in many situations than Firefox) AND isn't even available in the more simple browsers (does anyone even remember Mosaic?)
The use of Javascript and Java -- i.e. languages that run code on *your* computer, vs. HTML which is a display language should be discouraged until there is some responsible independent body that has verified them as "secure".
There is a question of "trust" levels here. And in my experience I don't "trust" anything whose source code I have not reviewed or has not been reviewed by people whom I can trust. And that is simply not the case with most or all of the scripting languages currently available.
Ok, hydrogen is a reasonable energy resource. Can someone *please* show me a reasonable distribution strategy? You are talking rebuilding the natural gas pipeline system which the last article I read on that was $100B plus (where is the market that justifies that???). Or we have to have cryogenic fuel tankers with LH2 traveling all around the country. Ok, good idea if they turn over in an environment such as we saw recently in the midwest. Burning LH2 can provide heat for those poor isolated citizens who would otherwise be freezing.
I do not mean by this message to imply that we cannot move to an economy that oxidizes hydrogen as a primary resource. I *am* intending by this message to point out the amount of hand waving that is going on both within government circles, the Department of Energy, the news media, etc. about the "famed" hydrogen economy. It is a much more difficult problem than the people waving their hands would like us to believe.
In contrast an energy solution built upon methane (natural gas) which is manufactured from carbon which is in the atmosphere (rather than in the ground) is a viable sustainable solution give technologies and infrastructure we already have.
We just have to be intelligent enough to (a) develop the organisms to produce the methane;
and (b) channel said methane into the existiing natural gas pipeline system; and (c) perhaps develop some incentives that would bias farmers to produce solar ponds that produce methane instead of cows that produce methane. (Think about this for a second -- sunlight provides energy. Photosynthesis grows grass. Cows eat grass. Cows produce methane. Humans consume methane (but it is mostly methane we haul out of the ground that was manufactured thousands of years ago.)
Are we not clever enough to produce our own methane from atmospheric carbon dioxide in a way that creates a completely sustainable energy system?
This I ask you...
And by the way the complete genomes for bacteria that can (a) perform photosynthesis and so are able to harvest solar energy; and (b) the bacteria that can synthesize methane; are in the public databases. They are free for the taking.
It will not be easy to merge them. I have some ideas as to how to do this. The point of this message however is to get you to *THINK* outside of the box.
Yes, we may get some subset of a hydrogen economy. But as most/. readers are probably good engineers you should be asking how, where and when. In the meantime a methane economy could more easily be developed and sustained (i.e. the carbon we put into the atmosphere is carbon we have previously taken out of the atmosphere).
Before anyone goes attempting to drag me through the mud. Please be aware that I probably have the largest, most interlinked databases of SETI literature in the world. I *do* know this field.
And as for an attempt to discredit me from an intellectual perspective... Go ahead... give it your best shot.
They aren't going to be sending signals...
on
New and Improved SETI
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I said this at a lecture I gave at the Extro III conference. We don't talk to worms (refering to C. elegans) and they don't talk to us (refering to aliens). Anyone who believes aliens are sending us signals suffers from a significant misunderstanding as to how intelligent they might be (so far beyond us that we are *dust*) or a delusional fantasy (similar to that our president is subjected to) that they would be sending us messages.
Wake up and smell the roses -- the reality is out there in the physics. Just read the evidence.
This is not to say that there are *not* aliens out there and that we cannot detect them. They are probably out there and we can probably detect them. But the approaches the SETI Institute and the groups as Harvard and Berkeley tend to be misfounded on the basis that they are going to try and communicate with us. Any ass would see that the probability of detecting those civilizations out there who ARE NOT trying to communicate with us is higher than than any few who are trying to communicate with us.
*If* one properly understood the evolution of advanced civilizations this would be understood.
But most people engaged in SETI lack that knowledge.
(Sigh)
And as a postscript... Reality is about hard, repeatable evidence. And so whether it is about the president and his "faith" based perspectives or about SETI and "yes I heard them once" or "I hope to hear them once". Neither perspective cuts the mustard.
New Scientist has recently switched its display format such that it cannot be displayed in Netscape 4.79. This is in contrast to sites such as the NY Times or/. that believe getting the information out is more important that some fancy display format. Why is Netscape 4.79 still a reasonable brower? Its smaller, its faster, and it is less likely to be targeted for security holes than IE, Mozilla or Firefox.
The problem is not then processor numbers but bus contention. This article, posted by another user, goes into some of the problems. If you start putting the Level II, Level III and DRAM on other wafers the delays are going to kill you unless you stack the wafers in 3D -- and *that* is going to be really expensive technology.
It isn't going to happen. Gene Amdahl (of Amdahl Corporation) founded a company called Trilogy to try this in the '80s to the tune of something like $200M. It was one of the most spectacular failures in the history of Silicon Valley up until the Dot.Com debacle.
It turns out that unless you have very high yield across the entire wafer its impossible to get everything you need for a "real" computer (CPUs, cache, memory, bus controllers, etc.) wired together and operating properly. Because each wafer is going to have different yields and different fault points you have to build in a lot of redundancy for all of the sub-components. Not only is wiring together the working parts a nightmare but the excess redundancy means the wafer is going to be much more expensive than wiring together known-to-work chips for equivalent computational capacity. This is compounded by the fact that the semiconductor manufacturing processes for CPUs and DRAM memory are significantly different. To get both types of hardware on a single wafer you have to make significant compromises in the capabilities of each (or significantly increase your manufacturing costs). [This is why, with the possible exception of IBM and maybe Intel, manufacturers tend to specialize in either CPUs (logic) or memory. I doubt any manufacturer has the same factory turning out both.]
Far more likely to be of interest is reconfigurable chips. Work in these areas is being done (slowly). Perhaps the best example is the Transmeta processors.
In fact it is neither Moore's Law nor increasing transistor count that is driving multi-core designs. It is economic and competitive pressures.
As another reader pointed out there is a serious drool factor in a dual core AMD Opteron. Other than the gamers and overclockers one does not need dual cores or multi-GHz clock speeds for most applications. My desktop system is a dual processor 200MHz Pentium Pro system (circa '97) and my web server which was/.'ed in August is a dual processor 100 MHz Pentium (circa '95). "Dual" processors is *not* new. Both systems work fine for the jobs they need to perform most of the time. The only times they don't is when clueless programmers overengineer their web sites. I guess it takes a lot more than dual cores or GHz clock speeds to make me drool.:-;
But getting back to the topic at hand. Most of my dual processor systems *rarely* use both processors. I think I've only noticed one program (a commercial OCR program) that seems to be programmed to take advantage of dual processors). I think the older versions of Netscape may have an explicit problem with dual processors if Javascript is enabled. [I suspect this is because Javascript may try to run as a separate thread and both Javascript and the HTML image display code use the memory heap at the same time without single threading the code and end up corrupting the heap. But this is just a guess on my part.]
The real reason for going to multiple cores is (a) the drool factor; and (b) competitive edge [for example Sun is pushing on 4 & 8 cores to distinguish themselves from the commodity processors]; and (c) true supercomputer applications. With respect to (c) a lot of people in government and research were pretty upset with the fact that the U.S. didn't have the #1 spot in the Top500 list for the better part of 2 years. While having multiple cores helps put you back at the top of the list -- supercomputer architectures are complex. You reduce the processor delays between the processors on the same chip but for problems which require the CPU and memory of thousands of processors (protein folding for example) you still have "speed-of-light" message passing delays between the multi-core processors. That requires a very sophisticated message passing network. [See theoretical discussion here.] You can reduce these delays by packing the processors closer together but then you have heat and reliability problems.
These problems aren't quite as significant with server farms because the data is coming from and going out into the world and interprocessor delays are not as important as they are in supercomputers and large database applications that have to be concerned with concurrency issues.
It is interesting to note that IBM is running the Blue Gene clock speeds at rates significantly below what AMD and Intel chips are at and even IBM's PPC chips are capable of. And this is from the company that used to build ECL based mainframes that had to be water cooled (so they know the technology). I presume this is because the want to keep the heat production down, reliability up and perhaps to minimize the excess space (and therefore interprocessor delays) that water cooling might require.
The entire discussion as to whether you can eliminate a crop in some country is completely unimporatant to the long term discussion about drugs. Why? Because once the genetic pathways for the synthesis of the drug molecule are known then it is relatively easy to transfer them into an alternate host. Why can't corn grow THC or cocaine in the leaves of the plants as well as corn kernels in the corn cobs? The same could be asked for wheat, rye, tobacco, etc.
Once the biochemical pathway is known there are relatively few barriers to transfering it into a mass produced crop or yeast growing in a beer barrel in your basement.
The entire "kill off the crop" perspective probably has less than a ten year future. Beyond that one will be able to produce psychoactive substances in a variety of settings. It shifts from "lets eliminate the xxxyyyzzz crop" to lets test every single cornfield in America and/or lets invade every single basement to see if they have bioreactors (aka beer brewing barrels) that produce THC or Cocaine.
A real attempt to address this problem would not be focused on the production sources but would instead be focused on the causes for "demand". While it is important to limit the sources -- it ultimately isn't going to happen. (It is a task that is doomed to fail because technology advances *will* migrate around attempts to limit production.) Reduce the demand for the product and the sources of production will decrease as well. Simple economics.
Because I promise you, as someone who has studied microbiology, biochemistry and molecular biology, as well as having founded seveeral biotech companies, attempts to control the "source" are doomed to fail.
Within 20-30 years you have the technology to separate out the radioactive isotopes. (You can weigh *individual* atoms with nanotech -- hell you can even separate them today using a mass spec. or a centrifuge, etc.).
Then you decide which are useful and save them and which are not and should be transmuted into non-radioactive isotopes. The entire radioactive waste disposal conversation is of zero significance if one understands molecular nanotechnology and the context of the progress of civilization. We are only having the discussion today because of (a) near term risks [from radiation exposure], (b) costs of short term storage (years) vs. intermediate term storage (decades) considerations and (c) the relatively large number of people, particularly those with any political "throw weight", who lack an understanding of basic physics and whom one would hope have some training in the fundamentals of economic development.
Duh... How stupid do you want to present yourself as? You are having foreign code executing on your computer. How many friggin computers infected does this need to present a problem for before people get a clue?
Bottom line: EXECUTING FOREIGN COMPUTER CODE (be it Javascript or Java) IS A POTENTIAL HAZARD. Solution: Disable the execution of such code in your browser. Don't reactivate it until providers (of Javascript or Java) allow you to sue them for liability). Until then they don't trust their own code and neither should you.
Disclosure -- there are extensive other hazards being exploited by SPAMers, etc which involve executable programs that may be communicated via email. People should be aware of them. Perhaps the best diagnosis and intervention in this situation would be -- if you are running Windows? Don't.
The common cold is caused by Rhinoviruses which are a member of the family of picornaviridae (RNA viruses). The problem with rhinoviruses is that there are over 100 serotypes (sub-types) of the virus that have evolved over time. You do gain immunity to an individual serotype but you have would have to catch 1 cold a year for 100+ years before you were immune to them all. I can verify this -- I visited Russia a lot over a period of 5+ years. Whenever I went there initially I always got sick. But after several years I was able to go to Russia and return without that occuring. I presume this was because I gradually built up an immunity to all of the rhinovirus serotypes found in Russia but not in the U.S.
Rhinoviruses do change over time but they do it by recombination (swapping genome fragments) to create new serotypes not by using sloppy replication. It should be kept in mind that viral replication (of non-DNA viruses) involves very simple replication strategy. The viruses do not have at their disposal all of the repair proteins (120+) that are found in mammalian DNA replication & repair. So their genomes will vary somewhat over time -- but not vary *that* significantly because a successful virus wants to make more successful (identical) viruses.
Influenza (flu) on the other hand is a multi-chromosome virus -- it evolves by swapping chromosomes with influenza coming from other species -- human flu usually varies due to recombination of chromosomes between human, chicken/duck and pig influenza variants (commonly kept in close proximity in China).
It is only retroviruses (e.g. HIV) that have a really sloppy replication protein and mutate at a very high rate.
[This is based on my training in microbiology as well as some quick checks in "Fields Virology".]
Sigh. It would be *nice* if people reporting on a topic or who make their living by fear mongering would bother to take their time and do their homework!
Drexler *never* said that "grey goo" would consume the biosphere. What he actually said was "Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we made no preparation." (emphasis mine, see Engines of CreationChapter 11). It has been known for more than a decade that there are easy solutions to the problem of designing "safe" replicators that do not grow exponentially using strategies such as the "broadcast architecture" (in computer science terms -- you never give a replicator a copy of its own source code). [See Merkle, R. C., "Self Replicating Systems and Molecular Manufacturing", JBIS45:407-413 (1992)].
Nor is the idea that assembly lines produce better manufacturing systems than self-replicating systems new. [See Hall, J. S., "Architectural considerations for self-replicating manufacturing systems", Nanotechnology10(3):323-330 (September, 1999).] It is obvious that the ability to self-replicate is extra overhead when compared with assembly systems optimized for specific assembly tasks.
Drexler alludes to the fact that we are already in the midst of a "green goo" ("We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.") Most people are unaware of the fact that they have more copies of foreign genomes (in the form of self-replicating bacteria) on or in their body than they have copies of their own genome. Some of these bacteria actually produce vitamins that humans use. So "goo" scenarios should not be viewed as completely negative. It is worth noting that the same methods that can be used to stop the "green goo" (e.g. heat or radiation) can be used to stop the "gray goo" if we are prepared to detect and eliminate it. One sees examples of this today as government agents circulate through the crowd waiting to view President Regan's body in Washington with biological and chemical weapons detectors. It simply comes down to understanding the hazards and being prepared to deal with them.
It is also worth noting that the design of fully self-replicating nanorobots is *not* a simple or inexpensive task. (Look at how long it took Nature to get it started...) So it is highly improbable that such abilities could be developed by rogue groups before civilized nations developed robust detection and elimination methods.
For people who want to read more details, the IOP press release is here and points to the actual paper (registration probably required).
Also, I would respectfully request before you post any responses to this note that you "go do your homework" (that will put you one up on the reporters reporting on this and allow for an informed discussion).
There is so much information on this thread which is either just plain wrong or far from completely accurate. So I'll pick this one and take it apart.
"Aging is a response to mutations which naturally build up over time."
This is probably true. Scientists recently announced a mouse strain engineered without the component of mitochondrial DNA Polymerase responsible for mitochondrial DNA repair (DNA Pol, of which there are several types, is the enzyme complex that copies DNA in the mitochondria or the nucleus [as well as in bacteria]). The net result of intentionally damaging the mitochondrial DNA Pol was that the mice aged twice as fast as normal. This is confirmed by the fact that to the best of our knowledge the human mitochondrial genome is the smalled mitochondrial genome in the animal kingdom. Most of the mitochondrial genes in humans have been moved into the nucleus where they are safer, most probably from free radicals but perhaps other toxins as well. The DNA repair mechanisms in the nucleus are more robust as well. There are 120+ DNA repair genes/proteins known. Most of them are active in the nucleus. There are many many fewer active in the mitochondria.
So we know mutations in the mitochondrial genome result in faster aging.
As has been pointed out by others mutations in genes in the nucleus can quite often lead to cancer. Most often these are Point Mutations where a single base is changed. However the more severe mutations are caused by "loss-of-heterozygosity" (a.k.a. gene conversion) due to Homologous Recombination DNA Repair copying a bad gene over its previously good sister gene. It can also be caused by Double Strand Break DNA Repair which can cause microdeletions or microinsertions in the DNA sequence. Over time the code becomes corrupted and fails to function as efficiently (if it functions at all). These two pathways HR and DSB repair are the repair pathways of last resort -- there are many enzymes that attempt to return DNA to functional condition before it gets to the point of requiring one of these pathways.
It is also worth noting that the proteins produced from the two genes involved in the more common accelerated aging syndromes in humans [WRN: Werner's Syndrome and LMNA: Progeria] are active in the nucleus.
Side note to readers: When I started in biology slightly more than a decade ago the genes causing the two diseases listed above were
not known. That shows you how fast we are moving.
So mutations in the nuclear genome can cause either cancer or accelerated aging.
[Interestingly, WRN is involved in the DSB repair
process and LMNA is involved in the structure of the nucleus.]
"Most aging is the slowing down of metabolism so as the reduce cell activity in order to reduce mutations."
This is *NOT* at all clear. Proteins whose genes have been corrupted may not fold properly. If they do not fold properly they are broken down. So energy resources may be depleted due to an endless cycle of creating proteins that are non-functional and must be recycled. Or proteins essential for mitochondrial function may be non-functional or missing. Thus more free radicals are produced, producing more mutations, resulting in more defective genes in an endless downward spiral. A reduction in "effective" metabolism may not be intentional (to reduce mutations) but simply a side effect of the other processes involved in aging. And the net result may be that the
Lets see 3 college level textbooks with hundreds to thousands of peer reviewed references which for some reason are not reasonable citations for developing technologies. Precisely *what* do you require as convincing evidence? In case you have not checked -- none of the primary experts in nanotechnology are getting rich in an effort to promote it. (So I fail to see where the "money grubbing" reference comes into play).
Secondly with regard to "a non-biological self-replicating device". The human species has been dealing with biological self-replicating devices for more than several thousand years (they produce bread, beer and wine among other foodstuffs. And has been pointed out "self-replication" is *not* an essential component of molecular nanotechnology. If you had been doing your homework you would have seen a paper by Josh Hall several years ago on special purpose assembly lines for nanotechnology manufacturing purposes. This is obvious to anyone -- a special purpose assembbly line designed to produce a single product should be more efficient than an assembly line designed to reproduce itself and produce a product. Duh!
So you don't need self-replication for nanotechnology in spite of the fact that we now have the code for 100+ genomes for a variety of organisms of varying complexity that are perfectly capable of self-replication. In other words we have the source code for how they accomplish this. To assert that we cannot learn or manufacture how to do this ourselves is rather naive. And I would repeat -- self-replication is *not* necessary for molecular nanotechnology.
With regard to "they intentionally misunderstand (such as materials science and chemistry.)"
I would strongly suggest that you cite references and quote pages -- because I am happy to do so.
I have no problems with materials science and chemistry. I view them as key aspects in the biotechnology industry (and I have run two biotechnology companies). I would just suggest that you lay down in cold hard facts the aspects of nanotechnology you object to (and *why* you object to them). Otherwise you are like Smalley and Whitesides -- very good scientists (who like the insurance researchers have failed to do sufficient research) and so your opinions are of questionable worth.
While it is fine for the insurance industry to want to protect itself it would be better if they actually did quality research. Citing the ETC group or Greenpeace as references seems to suggest a distinctly European bias (Oh no lets avoid technology progress as that would ruin our little socialistic state... It is the same argument that they have invoked against genetic technologies).
In fact they fail to reference, meaning they probably have not read, the three concrete references on nanotechnology. They are respectively works by Robert Freitas: Nanomedicine Vol. IIA: Biocompatibility, Nanomedicine Vol. I: Basic capabilities and Drexler's Nanosystems. It is worth keeping in mind that all of these are college level textbooks and the popular press and/or the authors of corporate press releases may not bother to read them (unfortunately).
Any published reports that do not cite these resources (or at least cite sources that cite these resources) can reasonably be assumed to have little or no understanding of nanotechnology and nanomedicine.
Freitas deals extensively with the biocompatibility problem in Nanomedicine Vol. IIA. and if you do not see a detailed analysis of this volume (which is several hundred pages, extensively referenced) in an insurance risk analysis then that analysis is either misinformed or incomplete.
On top of that an insurance analysis should deal with the potential benefits of nanotechnology which include extending the human lifespan to several thousand years. There is no analysis for the insurance industry of the reduced payments for life insurance due to the benefits of the technology. I.e. there is no comparison of the potential downside vs. the potential upside.
I would suggest that SwissRe has failed to do a complete job in its analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, the Zinc Finger Nuclease is simply used to cut the defective DNA to initiate the homologous recombination process. If you had bothered to read the abstract you would understand that they are also providing an "an extrachromosomal DNA donor" (I would suspect on a plasmid) as the source for the corrected DNA sequence.
So this process *need not* be error prone. Of course they are obviously looking at a number of cells after the fact to determine the fraction of cells in which the process was successful. If one did this with stem cells (which seems to be where they are going) and put them back into the body then one would indeed be able to correct SCID or sickle cell anemia. Diseases that are present in adults in specific cell types such as cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy are going to be a bit trickier.
The preservation of our data is the understory of what it is to be human. No preservation = no humanity. All we are is just "dust in the wind".
First of all I ask, even beg, of you to ask the questions "Can they state something in a language that I can understand?" Second, I ask of you to consider "Whether or not it really matters?" Because consideration of the best way to get high or the best way to get laid are *not* going to change the world. So social discuassions failing to recognise this are simply "coasting".
When you deal with those questions --- *then* we may be able to have a reasoned conversation as to whether "Mc Chris" deserves the web time.
This would qualify as a Kardashev Type III civilization.
But don't suggest this to the astronomers or astrophysicists because they are so friggen sure that the universe is *dead* and nothing they observe could be explained by the activity of advanced technological civilizations... They obviously haven't read any of the work by the Lineweaver group pointing out that 75% of the stars in the galactic habitable zone are older (in some cases much older) than the Sun. [Ref: astro-ph/0401024].
Roll the open source and nanotechnology development efforts forward by a few hundred million years and project what the universe would look like...
Now... if NASA had only sent a rover to Mars that could replicate itself... :-(
This *isn't* so far fetched. NASA published a report 25 years ago on this topic. [Advanced Automation for Space Missions, Proceedings of the 1980 NASA/ASEE Summer Study.] They were just using macroscale technologies rather than nanoscale technologies.
It takes less than a day to completely disassemble it!
Haven't all of you terraforming advocates out there ever considered the fact that to efficiently get to Mars (I don't mean a several person space capsule -- I mean quantities of people that would be required for a "real" colony...) as well as to perform rapid terraforming (within a several hundred year lifetime) you are going to require robust molecular nanotechnology? And if you have robust molecular nanotechnology you might as well convert the entire planet into more useful forms that aren't at the bottom of a gravity well.
The world seems to be full of people who have read too much anthropocentric science fiction and don't realize that technology development is going to turn many decades old concepts that people feel all warm and fuzzy about into really silly ideas.
In the construction of Matrioshka Brains (previously discussed on /. here) one has the common choices found in software development. "Do we do it top-down or bottom-up?" Taking an existing solar system (such as ours) and disassembling the asteroids and planets and eventually shrinking the star is the top-down approach and tends to be expensive (lifting material out of large gravity wells and relocating them within solar system volumes requires a great deal of energy and time). On the other hand optimizing the development of mini-solar systems could be the bottom-up approach as one avoids the expense of large gravity wells and one can optimize the construction of "computronium" as the dust cloud and brown dwarf evolve. One could imagine an advanced civilization structuring things such that they feed material into the brown dwarf such that they keep it just on the edge of becoming a star. Under ideal circumstances a civilization would like an energy source which produces the greatest amount of light (or IR) energy with the minimal amount of UV energy (which can break atomic bonds and is ultimately wasteful).
If the only criteria the astronomers are using for their conclusions is an excess of IR radiation then they don't really have much of a basis for their proposal other than the bias that such observations must fit the perspective of "natural" objects rather than "engineered" objects.
Oh yes, and before you cast me as a troll, as someone did last week, read the friggen papers.
The use of Javascript and Java -- i.e. languages that run code on *your* computer, vs. HTML which is a display language should be discouraged until there is some responsible independent body that has verified them as "secure".
There is a question of "trust" levels here. And in my experience I don't "trust" anything whose source code I have not reviewed or has not been reviewed by people whom I can trust. And that is simply not the case with most or all of the scripting languages currently available.
Thus their use should be discouraged.
I do not mean by this message to imply that we cannot move to an economy that oxidizes hydrogen as a primary resource. I *am* intending by this message to point out the amount of hand waving that is going on both within government circles, the Department of Energy, the news media, etc. about the "famed" hydrogen economy. It is a much more difficult problem than the people waving their hands would like us to believe.
In contrast an energy solution built upon methane (natural gas) which is manufactured from carbon which is in the atmosphere (rather than in the ground) is a viable sustainable solution give technologies and infrastructure we already have.
We just have to be intelligent enough to (a) develop the organisms to produce the methane; and (b) channel said methane into the existiing natural gas pipeline system; and (c) perhaps develop some incentives that would bias farmers to produce solar ponds that produce methane instead of cows that produce methane. (Think about this for a second -- sunlight provides energy. Photosynthesis grows grass. Cows eat grass. Cows produce methane. Humans consume methane (but it is mostly methane we haul out of the ground that was manufactured thousands of years ago.)
Are we not clever enough to produce our own methane from atmospheric carbon dioxide in a way that creates a completely sustainable energy system?
This I ask you...
And by the way the complete genomes for bacteria that can (a) perform photosynthesis and so are able to harvest solar energy; and (b) the bacteria that can synthesize methane; are in the public databases. They are free for the taking. It will not be easy to merge them. I have some ideas as to how to do this. The point of this message however is to get you to *THINK* outside of the box.
Yes, we may get some subset of a hydrogen economy. But as most /. readers are probably good engineers you should be asking how, where and when. In the meantime a methane economy could more easily be developed and sustained (i.e. the carbon we put into the atmosphere is carbon we have previously taken out of the atmosphere).
Just a few thoughts...
And as for an attempt to discredit me from an intellectual perspective... Go ahead... give it your best shot.
Wake up and smell the roses -- the reality is out there in the physics. Just read the evidence.
This is not to say that there are *not* aliens out there and that we cannot detect them. They are probably out there and we can probably detect them. But the approaches the SETI Institute and the groups as Harvard and Berkeley tend to be misfounded on the basis that they are going to try and communicate with us. Any ass would see that the probability of detecting those civilizations out there who ARE NOT trying to communicate with us is higher than than any few who are trying to communicate with us.
*If* one properly understood the evolution of advanced civilizations this would be understood. But most people engaged in SETI lack that knowledge.
(Sigh)
And as a postscript... Reality is about hard, repeatable evidence. And so whether it is about the president and his "faith" based perspectives or about SETI and "yes I heard them once" or "I hope to hear them once". Neither perspective cuts the mustard.
New Scientist has recently switched its display format such that it cannot be displayed in Netscape 4.79. This is in contrast to sites such as the NY Times or /. that believe getting the information out is more important that some fancy display format. Why is Netscape 4.79 still a reasonable brower? Its smaller, its faster, and it is less likely to be targeted for security holes than IE, Mozilla or Firefox.
The problem is not then processor numbers but bus contention. This article, posted by another user, goes into some of the problems. If you start putting the Level II, Level III and DRAM on other wafers the delays are going to kill you unless you stack the wafers in 3D -- and *that* is going to be really expensive technology.
It turns out that unless you have very high yield across the entire wafer its impossible to get everything you need for a "real" computer (CPUs, cache, memory, bus controllers, etc.) wired together and operating properly. Because each wafer is going to have different yields and different fault points you have to build in a lot of redundancy for all of the sub-components. Not only is wiring together the working parts a nightmare but the excess redundancy means the wafer is going to be much more expensive than wiring together known-to-work chips for equivalent computational capacity. This is compounded by the fact that the semiconductor manufacturing processes for CPUs and DRAM memory are significantly different. To get both types of hardware on a single wafer you have to make significant compromises in the capabilities of each (or significantly increase your manufacturing costs). [This is why, with the possible exception of IBM and maybe Intel, manufacturers tend to specialize in either CPUs (logic) or memory. I doubt any manufacturer has the same factory turning out both.]
Far more likely to be of interest is reconfigurable chips. Work in these areas is being done (slowly). Perhaps the best example is the Transmeta processors.
As another reader pointed out there is a serious drool factor in a dual core AMD Opteron. Other than the gamers and overclockers one does not need dual cores or multi-GHz clock speeds for most applications. My desktop system is a dual processor 200MHz Pentium Pro system (circa '97) and my web server which was /.'ed in August is a dual processor 100 MHz Pentium (circa '95). "Dual" processors is *not* new. Both systems work fine for the jobs they need to perform most of the time. The only times they don't is when clueless programmers overengineer their web sites. I guess it takes a lot more than dual cores or GHz clock speeds to make me drool. :-;
But getting back to the topic at hand. Most of my dual processor systems *rarely* use both processors. I think I've only noticed one program (a commercial OCR program) that seems to be programmed to take advantage of dual processors). I think the older versions of Netscape may have an explicit problem with dual processors if Javascript is enabled. [I suspect this is because Javascript may try to run as a separate thread and both Javascript and the HTML image display code use the memory heap at the same time without single threading the code and end up corrupting the heap. But this is just a guess on my part.]
The real reason for going to multiple cores is (a) the drool factor; and (b) competitive edge [for example Sun is pushing on 4 & 8 cores to distinguish themselves from the commodity processors]; and (c) true supercomputer applications. With respect to (c) a lot of people in government and research were pretty upset with the fact that the U.S. didn't have the #1 spot in the Top500 list for the better part of 2 years. While having multiple cores helps put you back at the top of the list -- supercomputer architectures are complex. You reduce the processor delays between the processors on the same chip but for problems which require the CPU and memory of thousands of processors (protein folding for example) you still have "speed-of-light" message passing delays between the multi-core processors. That requires a very sophisticated message passing network. [See theoretical discussion here.] You can reduce these delays by packing the processors closer together but then you have heat and reliability problems.
These problems aren't quite as significant with server farms because the data is coming from and going out into the world and interprocessor delays are not as important as they are in supercomputers and large database applications that have to be concerned with concurrency issues.
It is interesting to note that IBM is running the Blue Gene clock speeds at rates significantly below what AMD and Intel chips are at and even IBM's PPC chips are capable of. And this is from the company that used to build ECL based mainframes that had to be water cooled (so they know the technology). I presume this is because the want to keep the heat production down, reliability up and perhaps to minimize the excess space (and therefore interprocessor delays) that water cooling might require.
Once the biochemical pathway is known there are relatively few barriers to transfering it into a mass produced crop or yeast growing in a beer barrel in your basement.
The entire "kill off the crop" perspective probably has less than a ten year future. Beyond that one will be able to produce psychoactive substances in a variety of settings. It shifts from "lets eliminate the xxxyyyzzz crop" to lets test every single cornfield in America and/or lets invade every single basement to see if they have bioreactors (aka beer brewing barrels) that produce THC or Cocaine.
A real attempt to address this problem would not be focused on the production sources but would instead be focused on the causes for "demand". While it is important to limit the sources -- it ultimately isn't going to happen. (It is a task that is doomed to fail because technology advances *will* migrate around attempts to limit production.) Reduce the demand for the product and the sources of production will decrease as well. Simple economics.
Because I promise you, as someone who has studied microbiology, biochemistry and molecular biology, as well as having founded seveeral biotech companies, attempts to control the "source" are doomed to fail.
Within 20-30 years you have the technology to separate out the radioactive isotopes. (You can weigh *individual* atoms with nanotech -- hell you can even separate them today using a mass spec. or a centrifuge, etc.).
Then you decide which are useful and save them and which are not and should be transmuted into non-radioactive isotopes. The entire radioactive waste disposal conversation is of zero significance if one understands molecular nanotechnology and the context of the progress of civilization. We are only having the discussion today because of (a) near term risks [from radiation exposure], (b) costs of short term storage (years) vs. intermediate term storage (decades) considerations and (c) the relatively large number of people, particularly those with any political "throw weight", who lack an understanding of basic physics and whom one would hope have some training in the fundamentals of economic development.
Duh... How stupid do you want to present yourself as? You are having foreign code executing on your computer. How many friggin computers infected does this need to present a problem for before people get a clue?
Bottom line: EXECUTING FOREIGN COMPUTER CODE (be it Javascript or Java) IS A POTENTIAL HAZARD. Solution: Disable the execution of such code in your browser. Don't reactivate it until providers (of Javascript or Java) allow you to sue them for liability). Until then they don't trust their own code and neither should you.
Disclosure -- there are extensive other hazards being exploited by SPAMers, etc which involve executable programs that may be communicated via email. People should be aware of them. Perhaps the best diagnosis and intervention in this situation would be -- if you are running Windows? Don't.
Actually the last statement is incorrect.
The common cold is caused by Rhinoviruses which are a member of the family of picornaviridae (RNA viruses). The problem with rhinoviruses is that there are over 100 serotypes (sub-types) of the virus that have evolved over time. You do gain immunity to an individual serotype but you have would have to catch 1 cold a year for 100+ years before you were immune to them all. I can verify this -- I visited Russia a lot over a period of 5+ years. Whenever I went there initially I always got sick. But after several years I was able to go to Russia and return without that occuring. I presume this was because I gradually built up an immunity to all of the rhinovirus serotypes found in Russia but not in the U.S.
Rhinoviruses do change over time but they do it by recombination (swapping genome fragments) to create new serotypes not by using sloppy replication. It should be kept in mind that viral replication (of non-DNA viruses) involves very simple replication strategy. The viruses do not have at their disposal all of the repair proteins (120+) that are found in mammalian DNA replication & repair. So their genomes will vary somewhat over time -- but not vary *that* significantly because a successful virus wants to make more successful (identical) viruses.
Influenza (flu) on the other hand is a multi-chromosome virus -- it evolves by swapping chromosomes with influenza coming from other species -- human flu usually varies due to recombination of chromosomes between human, chicken/duck and pig influenza variants (commonly kept in close proximity in China).
It is only retroviruses (e.g. HIV) that have a really sloppy replication protein and mutate at a very high rate.
[This is based on my training in microbiology as well as some quick checks in "Fields Virology".]
Robert
Drexler *never* said that "grey goo" would consume the biosphere. What he actually said was "Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we made no preparation." (emphasis mine, see Engines of Creation Chapter 11). It has been known for more than a decade that there are easy solutions to the problem of designing "safe" replicators that do not grow exponentially using strategies such as the "broadcast architecture" (in computer science terms -- you never give a replicator a copy of its own source code). [See Merkle, R. C., "Self Replicating Systems and Molecular Manufacturing", JBIS 45:407-413 (1992)].
Nor is the idea that assembly lines produce better manufacturing systems than self-replicating systems new. [See Hall, J. S., "Architectural considerations for self-replicating manufacturing systems", Nanotechnology 10(3):323-330 (September, 1999).] It is obvious that the ability to self-replicate is extra overhead when compared with assembly systems optimized for specific assembly tasks.
Finally, it was shown several years ago that we have the technology to detect out-of-control self-replicating systems (nanorobots generate heat which can be detected by existing satellite systems). [For a discussion of various scenarios read: Freitas, R. A., "Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators with Public Policy Recommendations" (May, 2000).]
Drexler alludes to the fact that we are already in the midst of a "green goo" ("We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.") Most people are unaware of the fact that they have more copies of foreign genomes (in the form of self-replicating bacteria) on or in their body than they have copies of their own genome. Some of these bacteria actually produce vitamins that humans use. So "goo" scenarios should not be viewed as completely negative. It is worth noting that the same methods that can be used to stop the "green goo" (e.g. heat or radiation) can be used to stop the "gray goo" if we are prepared to detect and eliminate it. One sees examples of this today as government agents circulate through the crowd waiting to view President Regan's body in Washington with biological and chemical weapons detectors. It simply comes down to understanding the hazards and being prepared to deal with them.
It is also worth noting that the design of fully self-replicating nanorobots is *not* a simple or inexpensive task. (Look at how long it took Nature to get it started...) So it is highly improbable that such abilities could be developed by rogue groups before civilized nations developed robust detection and elimination methods.
For people who want to read more details, the IOP press release is here and points to the actual paper (registration probably required).
Also, I would respectfully request before you post any responses to this note that you "go do your homework" (that will put you one up on the reporters reporting on this and allow for an informed discussion).
"Aging is a response to mutations which naturally build up over time."
This is probably true. Scientists recently announced a mouse strain engineered without the component of mitochondrial DNA Polymerase responsible for mitochondrial DNA repair (DNA Pol, of which there are several types, is the enzyme complex that copies DNA in the mitochondria or the nucleus [as well as in bacteria]). The net result of intentionally damaging the mitochondrial DNA Pol was that the mice aged twice as fast as normal. This is confirmed by the fact that to the best of our knowledge the human mitochondrial genome is the smalled mitochondrial genome in the animal kingdom. Most of the mitochondrial genes in humans have been moved into the nucleus where they are safer, most probably from free radicals but perhaps other toxins as well. The DNA repair mechanisms in the nucleus are more robust as well. There are 120+ DNA repair genes/proteins known. Most of them are active in the nucleus. There are many many fewer active in the mitochondria.
So we know mutations in the mitochondrial genome result in faster aging.
As has been pointed out by others mutations in genes in the nucleus can quite often lead to cancer. Most often these are Point Mutations where a single base is changed. However the more severe mutations are caused by "loss-of-heterozygosity" (a.k.a. gene conversion) due to Homologous Recombination DNA Repair copying a bad gene over its previously good sister gene. It can also be caused by Double Strand Break DNA Repair which can cause microdeletions or microinsertions in the DNA sequence. Over time the code becomes corrupted and fails to function as efficiently (if it functions at all). These two pathways HR and DSB repair are the repair pathways of last resort -- there are many enzymes that attempt to return DNA to functional condition before it gets to the point of requiring one of these pathways.
It is also worth noting that the proteins produced from the two genes involved in the more common accelerated aging syndromes in humans [WRN: Werner's Syndrome and LMNA: Progeria] are active in the nucleus.
So mutations in the nuclear genome can cause either cancer or accelerated aging.
[Interestingly, WRN is involved in the DSB repair process and LMNA is involved in the structure of the nucleus.]
"Most aging is the slowing down of metabolism so as the reduce cell activity in order to reduce mutations."
This is *NOT* at all clear. Proteins whose genes have been corrupted may not fold properly. If they do not fold properly they are broken down. So energy resources may be depleted due to an endless cycle of creating proteins that are non-functional and must be recycled. Or proteins essential for mitochondrial function may be non-functional or missing. Thus more free radicals are produced, producing more mutations, resulting in more defective genes in an endless downward spiral. A reduction in "effective" metabolism may not be intentional (to reduce mutations) but simply a side effect of the other processes involved in aging. And the net result may be that the
Lets see 3 college level textbooks with hundreds to thousands of peer reviewed references which for some reason are not reasonable citations for developing technologies. Precisely *what* do you require as convincing evidence? In case you have not checked -- none of the primary experts in nanotechnology are getting rich in an effort to promote it. (So I fail to see where the "money grubbing" reference comes into play).
Secondly with regard to "a non-biological self-replicating device". The human species has been dealing with biological self-replicating devices for more than several thousand years (they produce bread, beer and wine among other foodstuffs. And has been pointed out "self-replication" is *not* an essential component of molecular nanotechnology. If you had been doing your homework you would have seen a paper by Josh Hall several years ago on special purpose assembly lines for nanotechnology manufacturing purposes. This is obvious to anyone -- a special purpose assembbly line designed to produce a single product should be more efficient than an assembly line designed to reproduce itself and produce a product. Duh!
So you don't need self-replication for nanotechnology in spite of the fact that we now have the code for 100+ genomes for a variety of organisms of varying complexity that are perfectly capable of self-replication. In other words we have the source code for how they accomplish this. To assert that we cannot learn or manufacture how to do this ourselves is rather naive. And I would repeat -- self-replication is *not* necessary for molecular nanotechnology.
With regard to "they intentionally misunderstand (such as materials science and chemistry.)"
I would strongly suggest that you cite references and quote pages -- because I am happy to do so.
I have no problems with materials science and chemistry. I view them as key aspects in the biotechnology industry (and I have run two biotechnology companies). I would just suggest that you lay down in cold hard facts the aspects of nanotechnology you object to (and *why* you object to them). Otherwise you are like Smalley and Whitesides -- very good scientists (who like the insurance researchers have failed to do sufficient research) and so your opinions are of questionable worth.
In fact they fail to reference, meaning they probably have not read, the three concrete references on nanotechnology. They are respectively works by Robert Freitas: Nanomedicine Vol. IIA: Biocompatibility, Nanomedicine Vol. I: Basic capabilities and Drexler's Nanosystems. It is worth keeping in mind that all of these are college level textbooks and the popular press and/or the authors of corporate press releases may not bother to read them (unfortunately).
Any published reports that do not cite these resources (or at least cite sources that cite these resources) can reasonably be assumed to have little or no understanding of nanotechnology and nanomedicine.
Freitas deals extensively with the biocompatibility problem in Nanomedicine Vol. IIA. and if you do not see a detailed analysis of this volume (which is several hundred pages, extensively referenced) in an insurance risk analysis then that analysis is either misinformed or incomplete. On top of that an insurance analysis should deal with the potential benefits of nanotechnology which include extending the human lifespan to several thousand years. There is no analysis for the insurance industry of the reduced payments for life insurance due to the benefits of the technology. I.e. there is no comparison of the potential downside vs. the potential upside.
I would suggest that SwissRe has failed to do a complete job in its analysis.
Sorry, it looks like the URL has changed. The home page for Folding@Home is here.