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

To further repair, one must introduce line-layers, workhorse cells to spool out
threads of electrical conductor. These tiny wires could power molecular repair
agents -- smart cells, able to break up and sort out ice crystals. Next comes
clearing blood vessels, the basic housekeeping, functions which can all be
biological in origin.

Then nanotech becomes essential. The electrical power lines could feed a
programmed cleanup crew. They would stitch together gross fractures, like good
servants dusting a room, clearing out the dendrite debris and membrane leftovers
that the big biological scavenger units missed.

Moving molecular furniture around at 130 degrees below freezing will take weeks,
months. One has to be sure the "molyreps" -- molecular repair engineers -- do
not work too fast, or else they would heat the patient up all on their own,
causing further shear damage.

How do they get the damaged stuff back in place, once they'd fixed it? Special
units -- little accountants, really -- would have to record where all your
molecular furniture was, what kind of condition it was in. They look over the
debris, tag it with special identifying molecules, then anchor it to a nearby
cell wall. They file that information all away, like a library. As repair
continues, you slowly warm up.

These designer molecules must be hordes of microscopic fanatics, born to sniff
out flaws and meticulously patch them up. An army that lived for but one
purpose, much as art experts could spend a lifetime restoring a Renaissance
painting. But the body is a far vaster canvas than all the art humanity had ever
produced, a network of complexity almost beyond comprehension.

Yet the body naturally polices itself with just such mobs of molecules, mending
the scrapes and insults the rude world inflicted. Biotech simply learns to
enlist those tiny throngs. That is true, deep technology --co-opting nature's
own evolved mechanisms, guiding them to new purposes. Nanotech goes beyond that,
one order of magnitude down in size.

Not necessary to get good circulation in the cells again -- just sluggish is
enough. A slow climb to about minus a hundred degrees Centigrade. A third team
goes in then, to bond enzymes to cell structures. They read that library the
second team had left, and put all furniture back into place.

So goes the Introduction to Molecular Repair For Poets lecture, disguising mere
miracles with analogies.

Months pass, fixing the hemorrhaged tissue, mending tom membranes, splicing back
together the disrupted cellular connections. Surgeons do this, using tools more
than a million times smaller than a scalpel, cutting with chemistry.

Restriction enzymes in bacteria already act like molecular scissors, slicing DNA
at extremely specific sites. Nanotech would sharpen this kind of carving, but