"Mini-Factories" To Make Medicine Inside the Body 79
Diggester writes "A group of scientists from MIT and the University of British Columbia have created 'mini-factories' that can be programmed to produce different types of proteins, and when implanted into living cells, it should distribute those proteins throughout the body. The scientists have initially triggered these 'factories' into action through the use of a laser light to relay the message of which proteins to produce."
Pharmaceutical Lobbyists (Score:2, Interesting)
Just wait until the pharmaceutical lobbyists get our clueless lawmakers to make protein synthesis illegal.. Then, the next step will be to make the lymphatic system illegal too. Illegal copying of cells is a violation of copyright law.
Re:Pharmaceutical Lobbyists (Score:4, Insightful)
You realize who's going to make a killing manufacturing these nanofactories, right? The pharmaceutical industry. Even more amusingly, look at who funds the facility [mit.edu] where most of the research took place. Yes, those Koch Brothers.
Go pander your conspiracies somewhere else.
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"a laser light to relay the message of which proteins to produce"
Yes, those Koch Brothers.
My guess is the Koch Brothers' new "painful-death-by-simultaneous-rapid-growth-tumors-everywhere-in-your-body-at-once-don't-you-wish-you'd-read-the-fine-print-employee-attitude-adjustment laser" is going to make one of Baron Harkonnen's heartplugs look like a fucking employment benefit.
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The scientists have initially triggered these 'factories' into action through the use of a laser light to relay the message of which proteins to produce.
Treatment will be $500. Now go put your hand under the blinking light. Okay, all done!
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Just wait until the pharmaceutical lobbyists get our clueless lawmakers to make protein synthesis illegal.. Then, the next step will be to make the lymphatic system illegal too. Illegal copying of cells is a violation of copyright law.
You mean people will have to get permission to have kids? Please let that happen. Watching/reading the news about how hard it is to enforce will be funny. A pregnant woman crosses/lands into the country, police STOP! Do you have permission to duplicate those cells? Here is your $1000 fine. The lady swings what ever she is carrying and smacks the police officer in their head. It will be like a 3 stooges comedy routine, only funnier.
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Cool. (Score:1)
Now when can i get one implanted that makes THC?
captcha:conveyor
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Why do you need THC when your body, specifically the pineal gland, _already_ naturally makes DMT? (DMT is the psychedelic used in LSD.)
Also, "DMT occurs naturally in many species of plants"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine [wikipedia.org]
--
The fact that a natural _plant_ is _illegal_ is the height of stupidity.
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I smoke like crazy and wouldn't want that! (Score:2, Interesting)
Not going to happen and you wouldn't want arbitrary amounts of THC in your system all the time either.
I know.. I'm on week 8 of my toke break and starting to be able to do some work again. Couldn't sit down
and type for a long while, was about to lose my job. I started getting better by week 6. Even THC is not
something you want to abuse too much, it is fat solvable and stored in body fat and I still feel like I'm
high sometimes.
Don't get me wrong, THC is still an infinitely superior alternative to anything bi
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"DMT is the psychedelic used in LSD."
Uh, no: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsd [wikipedia.org]
I took plenty of acid '67-'77, ain't no DMT to it. Were occasional rumors some chemists added stuff to their blotter or whatnot, but I never saw any. Helps to know good chemists. ;)
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I don't think I ever knew that, good info to file away. Thanks.
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Forgot to say, I dig your sig.
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I wonder.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if they could make these factories produce insulin, dependent on concentration of glucose? That would be cool for diabetics.
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I was thinking Type 1 diabetics, they tend to be skinny, and develop the problem in childhood due to autoimmune attack on the pancreas. The fat ones who eat their way to diabetes you're thinking of tend to be insulin resistant and so wouldn't be helped as much.
Please don't lump T1DM and T2DM together, the disease process is entirely different, and it's not fair to the T1DM patients to assume they ate their way into the disease.
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Not a problem.
A company as sensitive as Walmart is to the needs of its customer base would quickly install larger doors. And initiate One-Way aisles to avoid congestion.
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Still need an external device (Score:2)
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WCPGW (Score:2)
What could possibly go wrong. This is cool and wave of future but I'll sit back as long as I can to wait for bug testing.
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Nanohives (Score:4, Insightful)
Did anybody else think of nanohives from Shadowrun when they read the title?
Re:Nanohives (Score:4, Interesting)
Its definetely moving into a cyberpunk future. /slap on mirrorshades
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Wow, it's like a simple cell (Score:3)
Re:Wow, it's like a simple cell (Score:4, Informative)
skimmed the O, what they've done is combine two methods; essentially they've created an artificial cell wall and populated it's innards with the cellular machinery from e. coli bacteria. then they've introduced a piece of dna for the protein they're looking for. the factory claim comes from claims that the hybrid cells can still produce proteins under turbulence of the blood stream.
as far as i can tell they don't know where the energy is coming from, the action dies out after around 24 hours. these letters are usually incremental publications, it's very short and excludes most of the details, this may be just experimental error, there's no reason to suspect that this is potentially superior to conventional mab techniques, or is in any way safe to use in vivo. they look like they're looking for a mechanism right now, but this is mostly academic work, basic research, and most of all ignores the complexity of the mammalian immune system.
this is being published now for the sake of shopping it around for more grant money. if you want the O and can figure out how to get me your email, i can send a limited number of copies.
The next step! (Score:2)
Woot! Another step towards improving the human immune system. Something like this sounds oddly similar to something I said last October:
"It would be nice if one could program the current immune system with a broad range identifier would eliminate all but the rarest of virus infections. Then the next step would be to somehow analyze foreign invaders to give scientists advance warning. Then a way to create fixes automatically. David Weber gave a shot at imagining something like that but with alien tech implan
Mini factories... (Score:2)
what is it about biotech (Score:1)
Re:Imagine the possibilities! (Score:4, Insightful)
Just imagine soldiers and ordinary people with implants to make steroids inside the muscles and painkillers dripped directly the bloodstream without all those icky syringes!
I'm imagining an entire populace government-healthcare-mandated to have these laser-controlled nanofactories that can, besides their publicized abilities, also produce mild or heavy tranquilizers, or other mind/mood-altering drugs.
People protesting? Flash a laser and they're not so interested any more...can't really remember what it was they were mad about. Violent mob? Flash, and they fall unconscious. Government/police wants to question someone? Flash, and they get a dose of sodium pentathol or other similar drug. Government wants to set-up someone? Flash, and they get a nice big dose of rohypnol ("rufies") and star in an embarrassing video they don't/can't remember.
There's huge potential for abuse here.
Strat
Re:Imagine the possibilities! (Score:5, Interesting)
I see my post got modded "Troll".
To those who think I'm trolling, I'm not.
Just think for a minute: What kind of wet-dream would it be for the government's "War On Some Drugs & Poor People" types to be able to make it mandatory that everyone's implants time-release constant levels of medications & proteins that would prevent a person from getting "high" from illegal substances? Or even make them violently-ill? They already make pills that make someone violently ill if they drink alcohol to treat alcoholics.
Looking back over the past, do you really trust them not to go that far. or try like hell to? Especially after a few decades?
Who gets to control the implant(s)? Can the control be overridden/hacked? How do you secure that control? How can you be sure that what they tell you it can do is all it can do?
Frankly, without so much security and personal control protections built in that it almost makes it useless for emergency-type patient-unconscious-or-unresponsive scenarios, this concept scares the crap out of me.
Strat
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t will be fine once we figure out how to Jailbreak ourselves.
Just beware of that "early termination" clause for unauthorized access!! I'd hate for my body chemistry to "get bricked", as it were. ;)
Strat
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I didn't mod your post but I can see why someone would have flagged it troll. It's a bit snarky. ;-)
However, your point is still valid and came to post this exact point: will you have a choice to not accept these "ultraviolet rays"? As much as we would like to, we don't control what our cells do. And there is a lot of good that this technology can do. How long until this becomes weaponized and used not only to cure, but also to control?
I will admit, however, there is some time before this debate absolut
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I didn't mod your post but I can see why someone would have flagged it troll. It's a bit snarky. ;-)
I just don't see any "snark" there. Maybe my "snark-ometer" needs recalibration. The only thing I see that someone could get their panties in a twist over is the mention of government-run healthcare as the vehicle for universal mandatory adoption. I simply thought it current, topical, and relevant in keeping with the recent SCOTUS decision.
If that's the case, someone needs to learn to be a little less thin-skinned. It wasn't a political bash. Trust me. Anyone familiar with my past posts would know that, whe
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I see my post got modded "Troll".
To those who think I'm trolling, I'm not.
Just think for a minute: What kind of wet-dream would it be for the government's "War On Some Drugs & Poor People" types to be able to make it mandatory that everyone's implants time-release constant levels of medications & proteins that would prevent a person from getting "high" from illegal substances? Or even make them violently-ill?
Wait, do you somehow imagine that the War on Drugs is to stop people from taking the illegal substances?!? Here are the top five lobbyists against drug legalization:
1) Police Unions. They get big budgets and more powers every year the drug war goes on. If it stops, the gravy trough dries up. They would hate this.
2) Private Prison Industry. If people aren't taking illegal drugs, we can't put them in prison, and the gravy trough dries up. They would also hate this.
3) Alcohol Industry. These guys probably woul
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The thing is, it wouldn't really enable much in the way of behaviors that the governments of the world can't do right now, if they feel like it.
It would be a fairly trivial task to simply fake a video of someone who they want to set up, or why even bother with that when it's even easier: "So and so was found to have large amounts of child pornography on their system" and said person is basically fucked for life.Who needs to roofie them?
Sonic weapons, tear gas, other "less than lethal" tools are being used a
nice job reframing (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, this is a nice achievement.
But calling this "mini-factories", "programming", and "nanotechnology" is a clever reframing to make a combination of standard molecular biology techniques that are very far from actual medical use appear more hip and high tech.
yeah. it's called (Score:2)
Hac-hac-cough-cough (Score:1)
Hackable people.