"Benford-Biotech" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

the field. Another, thicker stream spreads into rivulets which leave their
burdens of scrap at a series of neatly spaced anthills. Dun-colored domes with
regularly spaced portals, for more workers.

These had once been leaf-cutter ants, content to slice up fodder for their own
tribe. They still do, pulping the unneeded cobs and stalks and husks, growing
fungus on the pulp deep in their warrens. They are tiny farmers in their own
right. But biotech had genetically engineered them to harvest and sort first,
processing corn right down to the kernels.

Other talents can be added. Acacia ants already defend their mother trees,
weeding out nearby rival plants, attacking other insects which might feast on
the acacias. Take that ability and splice it into the corn-harvesters, and you
do not need pesticides, or the dredge human labor of clearing the groves. Can
the acacia be wedded to these corn ants? We don't know, but it does not seem an
immense leap. Ants are closely related and multi-talented. Evolution seems to
have given them a wide, adaptable range.

Following chemical cues, they seem the antithesis of clanky robots, though
insects are actually tiny robots engineered by evolution. Why not just co-opt
their ingrained programming, then, at the genetic level, and harvest the
mechanics from a compliant Nature?

Agriculture is the oldest biotech. But everything else will alter, too.

Mining is the last great industry to be touched by the modem. We still dig up
crude ores, extract minerals with great heat or toxic chemicals, and in the act
bring to the surface unwanted companion chemicals. All that suggests engineering
must be re-thought -- but on what scale? Nanotech is probably too tiny for the
fight effects. Instead, consider biomining.

Actually, archaeologists have found that this idea is quite ancient. Romans
working the Rio Tinto mine in Spain 2000 years ago noticed fluid runoff of the
mine tailings were blue, suggesting dissolved copper salts. Evaporating this in
pools gave them copper sheets.

The real work was done by a bacterium, Thiobacillus ferroxidans. It oxidizes
copper sulfide, yielding acid and ferric ions, which in turn wash copper out of
low grade ores. This process was rediscovered and understood in detail only in
this century, with the first patent in 1958. A new smelter can cost a billion
dollars. Dumping low quality ore into a sulfuric acid pond lets the microbes
chew up the ore, with copper caught downhill in a basin; the sulfuric acid gets
recycled. Already a quarter of all copper in the world comes from such
bio-processing.

Gold enjoys a similar biological heritage. The latest scheme simply scatters
bacteria cultures and fertilizers over open ore heaps, then picks grains out of
the runoff. This raises gold recovery rates from 70% to 95%; not much room for
improvement. Phosphates for agriculture can be had with a similar, two-bacterium
method.