ripperdoc's clinic

Biopunk is already here. Filed in the WTF department. 

John Robb of Global Guerillas makes his living off predicting the end of the world, which is a reason to take this with a pinch of salt, but it still is good inspiration:

• Weaponized computer worms/viruses/malware.  Legal bot networks that control/manipulate society and markets (think in terms of quant hedge funds).  That’s the White horse.  Conquest.
• Drones/robots.  Weaponized drones that at first self-perpetuate by acquiring fuel from the environment.  Weaponized drones that can self-replicate ala 3-D fabrication and scavanged materials (think rep-rap).  That’s the Red Horse.  War.
• Superbugs/superweeds (some may be aided by engineered modification, but all get their start due to the stupidity of growing food in monocultures).  Organisms that can wipe out monocultures and cause the loss of productive farmland and crops ond a global scale.   That’s the Black Horse.  Famine.
• Plague.  Genetically modified weapons, laboratory mistakes, or naturally occuring disease (due to too much physical proximity) that result in plagues.  That’s the Pale Green horse.  Death.

Breakout Labs recipient Modern Meadow is developing a fundamentally new approach to meat and leather production that is based on the latest advances in tissue engineering and causes no harm to animals. Co-founders Gabor and Andras Forgacs respectively invented and helped commercialize bioprinting, a technology that builds tissues and organ structures based on the computer-controlled delivery of cells in three dimensions.

The computing power needed to simulate the lowest life form is immense. Assuming Moore’s law holds for next 30 years (which is a feat in itself), what now takes 10hrs would be down to 9.5 ms. But that is for one bacteria. Fascinating.

The bacterium, with its 525 genes, is far less complex than E. coli, another bacterium widely used in laboratory experiments; E. coli has 4,288 genes. The researchers said that more complex cells would present significant challenges. Currently it takes about 9 to 10 hours of computer time to simulate a single division of the smallest cell — about the same time the cell takes to divide in its natural environment.

Ah, bio-weird is coming!

unexpectedtech:

Bioengineers have made an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat’s heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart.

“Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat,” says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work. The project is described today in Nature Biotechnology¹.

Parker’s lab works on creating artificial models of human heart tissues for regenerating organs and testing drugs, and the team built the medusoid as a way of understanding the “fundamental laws of muscular pumps”. It is an engineer’s approach to basic science: prove that you have identified the right principles by building something with them.

(via palmersmedic-deactivated2012082)

We imagine making products “not found in nature”—but even natural microbes make molecules that organic chemists would never dream of. Look at thisantitumor agent discovered from a filamentous soil bacterium, the kind of bacteria that give soil that new smell in the springtime (Science 297:1170). Those sets of three parallel lines are each triple bonds, within a nine-carbon ring. Who would even think to draw such a thing, let alone make it? To make it, the bacteria use modular enzymes, nanoscale assembly lines that condense one functional part after another. The original nanotechnology.

Researchers have invented a new form of secret messaging using bacteria that make glowing proteins only under certain conditions. In addition to being useful to spies, the new technique could also allow companies to encode secret identifiers into crops, seeds, or other living commodities.