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

All this, using "natural biotech." Farming began using wild wheat -- a grass.
Immunology first started with unselected strams of Penicillium. We've learned
much, mostly by trial and error, since then. The next generation of biomining
bacteria are already emerging. A major problem with the natural strains is the
heat they produce as they oxidize ore, which can get so high that it kills the
bacteria.

To fix that, researchers did not go back to scratch in the lab. Instead, they
searched deep-sea volcanic vents, and hot springs such as those in Yellowstone
National Park. They reasoned that only truly tough bacteria could survive there,
and indeed, found some which appear to do the mining job, but can take
near-boiling temperatures.

Bacteria also die from heavy metal poisoning, just like us. To make biomining
bugs impervious to mercury, arsenic and cadmium requires bioengineering,
currently under way. One tries varieties of bugs with differing tolerances, then
breeds the best to amplify the trait. This can only take you so far. After that,
it may be necessary to splice DNA from one variety into that of another,
forcibly wedding across species. But the engineering occurs at the membrane
level, not more basically --no nanotech needed.

This is a capsule look at how our expectations about basic processes and
industries will alter long before nanotech can come on line. What more
speculative leaps can we foresee, that will show biotech's limitations? -- and
thus, nanotech's necessity.

Consider cryonics. This freezing of the recently dead, to be repaired and
revived when technology allows, is a seasoned science fictional idea, with many
advocates in the present laboring to make it happen. Neil R. Jones invented it
in an sf story in the 1931 Amazing Stories, inspiring Dr. Robert Ettinger to
propose the idea eventually in detail in The Prospect of Immortality in 1964.

It has since been explored in Clifford Simak's Why Call Them Back From Heaven?
(1967), Fred Pohl's The Age of the Pussyfoot (1969), and in innumerable space
flight stories (such as 2001: A Space Odyssey) which use cryonics for long term
storage of the crew. Fred Pohl became a strong advocate of cryonics, even
appearing on the Johnny Carson show to discuss it. Robert Heinlein used cryonics
as part of a time-traveling plot in The Door Into Summer. Larry Niven coined
"corpsicle" to describe such "deanimated" folk. Sterling Blake treated the field
as it works today in Chiller. Cryonics is real, right now. About fifty people
now lie in liquid nitrogen baths, awaiting resurrection by means which must
involve operations below the biotechnical.

Repairing frozen brain cells which have been cross-slashed by shear stresses, in
their descent to 77 degrees Absolute, then reheated --well, this is a job
nothing in biology has ever dealt with. One must deploy subcellular repair
agents to fix freezing damage, and replenish losses from oxygen and nutrient
starvation. A solvent for this is tetrafluoromethane -- it stays liquid down to
minus 130 degrees Centigrade.