4 ms·

After listening to one of the world's top organic chemists, one realises that humanity is still in the stone age when it comes to industrial and technological s

After listening to one of the world's top organic chemists, one realises that humanity is still in the stone age when it comes to industrial and technological systems when we look at what is going on inside a single biological cell. This includes chemical transport, energy transfer, system construction, chemical processing and purification, adverse chemical reduction and removal, etc. The more I look at the information obtained about biological cells and their operation the more it becomes obvious that certain popular models related to biological systems are in the category of "the emperor has no clothes" ideas. Biological systems are so complex and so integrated and so coordinated that we still have so little actual knowledge on how and why they work the way they do. So duplicating the various industrial processes that occur within a cell with any finesse is still a long, long way off.

jfarlow 9y ago
What you're seeing here (and in other places), is us advancing to the tool-making stage of biological nanotechnologies. And this is one aspect of it. We've been gorging on grounded knowledge in the past 2 decades with the ability to readily read DNA, and we're now at the stage where there are enough robust tools in enough different biological disciplines that we no longer just 'find' tools, but we can actually start to create them. Between companies providing the ability to cheaply synthesize DNA in bulk (Twist), companies essentially doing machine-guided evolution on bacteria (Zymergen), synthetic therapeutic circuitry (Cell Design Labs), and a host of brand new entrants to the synthetic biology space, we've a lot more capability than we did just a few years ago. We've found enough stones that we're now starting to build our own primitive (3D, atomically precise, wet, self-replicating nanotechnology) tools. CARs, SynNotch, HBB[T87Q] are all creative upgrades to existing biological systems used where our own bodies have failed, and all only very recently effectively delivered. And we can achieve those pragmatic wins without having a complete and thorough understanding of the entire system.

jfarlow 9y ago

What you're seeing here (and in other places), is us advancing to the tool-making stage of biological nanotechnologies. And this is one aspect of it. We've been gorging on grounded knowledge in the past 2 decades with the ability to readily read DNA, and we're now at the stage where there are enough robust tools in enough different biological disciplines that we no longer just 'find' tools, but we can actually start to create them. Between companies providing the ability to cheaply synthesize DNA in bulk (Twist), companies essentially doing machine-guided evolution on bacteria (Zymergen), synthetic therapeutic circuitry (Cell Design Labs), and a host of brand new entrants to the synthetic biology space, we've a lot more capability than we did just a few years ago. We've found enough stones that we're now starting to build our own primitive (3D, atomically precise, wet, self-replicating nanotechnology) tools. CARs, SynNotch, HBB[T87Q] are all creative upgrades to existing biological systems used where our own bodies have failed, and all only very recently effectively delivered. And we can achieve those pragmatic wins without having a complete and thorough understanding of the entire system.