I have finished a book by the CEO of Stratfor.com, George Friedman titled The Next 100 Years. My review of it will be up on Amazon in a day or so. In that review I commented that I was a bit disappointed by his lack of discussion of technical advances that may well affect, if not outweigh, the political ones that are the heart of his book.
Today, we learn about one of those advances that has to foreshadow huge changes in bioengineering and mechanics.
The creation enhances Seeman’s earlier work—a single nanorobotic arm, completed in 2006, marking the first time scientists had been able to employ a functional nanotechnology device within a DNA array.
The new, two-armed device employs DNA origami, a method unveiled in 2006 that uses a few hundred short DNA strands to direct a very long DNA strand to form structures that adopt any desired shape. These shapes, approximately 100 nanometers in diameter, are eight times larger and three times more complex than what could be created within a simple crystalline DNA array.
As with Seeman’s previous creation, the two-armed nanorobotic device enables the creation of new DNA structures, thereby potentially serving as a factory for assembling the building blocks of new materials. With this capability, it has the potential to develop new synthetic fibers, advance the encryption of information, and improve DNA-scaffolded computer assembly.
Here the biochemists have created what is, in essence, a mechanical equivalent to the ribosome that makes protein from DNA via instructions from RNA. The potential of such devices is beyond my comprehension and will probably exceed the imagination of anyone reading about it, including molecular biologists.
This is all about nanotechnology, the manipulation of very small structures. It is now understood to concern structures of atomic or molecular size but when Richard Feynman first offered a $1,000 prize from his own money, the size parameters were much less refined. He tells the story in one of his books. He also gave a classic lecture in 1959 that marks the beginning of the nanotechnology movement. In it, he offered a prize.
And I want to offer another prize—if I can figure out how to phrase it so that I don’t get into a mess of arguments about definitions—of another $1,000 to the first guy who makes an operating electric motor—a rotating electric motor which can be controlled from the outside and, not counting the lead-in wires, is only 1/64 inch cube.
I do not expect that such prizes will have to wait very long for claimants.
I fact, he waited a while for such a device to appear until one day a man came to his office with a wooden box and asked to show Feynman his device. Feynman had already seen many devices that, while small, were nowhere near his criteria for a nanodevice. Then, he said, the fellow opened the box and took out a microscope. “Oh oh,” Feyman thought, “this looks like it is going to cost me some money.”
And 50 years later, here we are. Who knows where this will take us in another 50 years ? I enjoyed Friedman’s book but there is a lot more to be considered.
Tags: Feynman, futurist, nanotechnology
Futurists never predict *the* future, Dr. K. They predict *a* future.
That is what Paul Ehrlich (“The Population Bomb”) tried to do, and his politics and hypocrisy kept him from seeing what was actually going on.
Nanotechnology will be neither as fantastical nor as dangerous as predicted. And truthfully, our microbial friends worked out nanotechnology a couple of billion years ago. It’ll be interesting to see what we do with the idea.
J.B.S. Haldane said the universe is not stranger than we imagine. It is stranger than we can imagine.
Seriously, think about thumb drives for your computer. Had anyone predicted that? Or the fact that the computer on which I wrote my PhD thesis was a 128K Mac.
So who knows what will happen? Progress takes many forms!
I think, as you know, that we will use bacteria and other organisms to do much of this engineering for us. It makes little sense to reinvent the nanowheel but we are learning how to get them to do what we want them to do. Learning how to replicate the structures will help to understand how to manipulate the biological ones. Venter is trying to invent a lab-based life form to better understand the life forms that already exist.