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

much of the work could probably be bioengineered, working at larger scales.

With such abilities, surgeons can add serotonin-derived neurotransmitters, from
a psychopharmacology far advanced beyond ours. They inhibit the switches in
brain chemistry associated with emotional states. A patient reviving may need
therapy, cutting off the memories correlated with those emotions that would slow
recovery. Such tools imply medicine which can have vast social implications,
indeed.

Here is where the future peels away from the foreseeable. Nanotech at this stage
will drive qualitative changes in our world, and our world views, which we
simply cannot anticipate in any detail. All too easily, it looks like magic.

Suppose the next century is primarily driven by biotech, with nanotech coming
along as a handmaiden. Do we have to fear as radical a shift in ideas again,
with nanotech?

Biotech looks all-powerful, but remember, evolution is basically a kludge.
Organisms are built atop an edifice of earlier adaptations. The long, zigzag
evolutionary path often can't take the best, cleanest design route.

Consider our eyes, such marvels. Yet the retina of the vertebrate eye appears to
be "installed" backwards. At the back of the retina lie the light-sensitive
cells, so that light must pass through intervening nerve circuitry, getting
weakened. There is a blind spot where the optic nerve pokes through the optical
layer.

Apparently, this was how the vertebrate eye first developed, among creatures who
could barely tell darkness from light. Nature built on that. The octopus eye
evolved from different origins, and has none of these drawbacks.

Could we do better? A long series of mutations could eventually switch our
light-receiving cells to the front, and this would be of some small help. But
the cost in rearranging would be paid by the intermediate stages, a tangle which
would function more poorly than the original design.

So these halfway steps would be selected out by evolutionary pressure. The
rival, patched-up job works fairly well, and nature stops there. It works with
what it has. We dreaming vertebrates are makeshift constructions, built by
random time without foresight. There is a strange beauty in that, but some cost
-- as I learned when my appendix burst, some years ago. We work well enough to
get along, not perfectly.

The flip side of biology's deft engineering marvels is its kludgy nature, and
its interest in its own preservation. We are part of biology, it is seldom our
servant, except incidentally. In the long ran, the biosphere favors no single
species.

The differences between nanotech and biotech lie in style. Of course functions
can blend as we change scales, but there is a distinction in modes.