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I have a friend who's doing a PHd in building logic gates in bacterial DNA so you could program, say, E. Coli to do specific things in the body. Learning about
by Swizec 8y ago
I have a friend who's doing a PHd in building logic gates in bacterial DNA so you could program, say, E. Coli to do specific things in the body. Learning about her research is astounding, fascinating, and terrifying all at the same time.
- samstave 8y agoNearly ten years ago I ran into a researcher from UCSF who was working with StemCells where she had designed a fluid-matrix that she 3D printed, then wrote a python program to control valves which released certain proteins to the cells to determine how to get them to express into a certain type tissue/organ cell. I just point out how cheap off the shelf tooling that we take for granted in our industries and hobbies are also fueling this wave of change and how readily available they are The tools and materials to build something like this are free and open to literally anyone on the planet. So it makes sense that given enough exposure to human ingenuity, with the right tools freely available, any reality is possible.
- joycian 8y agoCould you supply a research article by this person from UCSF? This sounds very interesting!
- johnchristopher 8y agoI'll be that guy and ask: ten years later, are there new treatments based on that field that we didn't have at that time ?
- simonh 8y agoProbably not. Most radically novel technological approaches to problems fail, but as the range of new tools and techniques available expand, their possible combinations increase exponentially. Most will still fail, but hopefully many of them won’t just as with startups.
- HeadsUpHigh 8y agoOn that specific field? No because there are many steps along the way that we haven't solved yet, but it's getting there, especially for heart tissue regeneration.