Original ideas are scarce but this one from Arnold Kling (see my blogroll) is worth considering:
I look at the problem this way. To get something useful in the nanotech world, you need to be able to accomplish both self-replication and being able to control what the stuff does. With "dry" nanotech, we might be able to control what the stuff does, but self-replication is hard. With "wet" nanotech, self-replication is easier, but controlling what the stuff does is hard. Not really knowing anything, my instinct is that it will be easier to figure out how to get living things to do stuff that we want than it will be to get things that do what we want to replicate and construct themselves. So, over a twenty year horizon, my "money" is on the wet nanotech guys.AK mind works like a Swiss watch. Mine also did at age 12, but now I have lost it. Admirable. But who has a "twenty year horizon"? It is too late for me.
5 comments:
Yes, okay, great, but out of the biotech companies, which ones should be invested in? It's like computers in 1990-how would you know which company is destined for success?
Just in case this is of any use to you, I'm pretty sure that every small bio firm in this country is termed a 'biotech'. What most of them are is small drug companies. Some of these use cutting-edge tech - and some just use the same tech that everyone uses in academe and in the drug business.
Of course, the great Craig Venter wants to use bacteria to make energy. Maybe that will happen; my gut says, naw.
Virtually everything that happens in a bacterium or a person is done by proteins. The protein is a long string of 'beads', each bead being one of 20 different molecule species. DNA contains the information for each sequence of beads. And the protein string folds up in a certain way (some need help from other proteins, and others don't). One thing Kling probably doesn't know is that we can't just make any protein we want. We most certainly can make whatever bead sequence of protein string we want, but we can't know a damn about how it will fold up into a 3-d glob. It is the 3-d structure, and only the 3-d structure, that 'does stuff'.
Thus, when we design a part for a machine, we know what the heck we are making. Obviously we have to be able to make any 3-d structure we want to - and indeed we can. (Otherwise I don't think there could have been any industrial revolution.) In biology, we can't. At least not now. How bout 10 years from now, 50 years? I don't know - we are going to have a ton more computing power later on, but I haven't a clue how much that will help. When we can't make the 3-d shapes we want, we can't make stuff that carries out the functions we want to carry out. Of course, there are a lot of proteins in nature, that have 100,000s or millions of different functions; we can use those, but each one is usable only after we find out what it does. Finding out costs maybe half a mil per each.
Thus, I'm semi-pessimistic about life-based technologies (compared to techno-optimists, at least). There might be a few killer aps, but I think there's a large chance this stuff won't 'change our lives'.
Non-animal meat (muscle) would be a hit. Cellulose eating and oil producing micro-organisms would help us. And so on.
I always think of nano-tech as distinct from bio-tech - growing bacteria or cells that produce oil or eat oil or taste like/are meat is bio-tech. Nano-tech is carbon tubes and buckyballs and micromachines and things like that. I don't see how you are going to get bacteria or whatever to form the necessary structures so you can just brew up a watch or an airplane wing or even the raw materials for same.
K
J said...
Non-animal meat (muscle) would be a hit. Cellulose eating and oil producing micro-organisms would help us. And so on.
Having just unclogged a drain I think the next "killer app" for biotech would be a a drain opener that can dissolve lipids and hair.
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