HTGAA Assignment 5

Steven Ness

  1. If you could make metric tons of any protein, what would you make and what positive impact could you have?

I would make a building material that is strong and light, like leather combined with saran wrap and kevlar. It would be weather resistant and durable to the elements. It would resist tears and rips. It would be fireproof. It would be able to insulate. I would use it to build yurts and teepees for people and we could all like in the forest together.

  1. Assume that all of the molecular biology work you’d like to do could be automated. What sort of new biological questions would you ask, or what new types of products would you make?

I would automate the search for a cure for cancer. Imagine a big room with many robots and all the robots can hand things off to other robots. Some robots would do pipetting, some would put things in and out of freezers, some would incubate bacteria, some would conduct chemical tests. Instead of testing on animals, I would develop an automated model system that could test on huge amounts of cells and accurately measure them, making animal testing obsolete. This whole system could be scaled up and could be used to really hone in on the systems that are involved in cancer. This really means that we have to understand everything about the cell, so we should just set our goal on understanding everything about every cell, kind of like a Google goal, like “organize all the worlds information”, but “understand everything about biology”.

  1. What kind of flourishing bio future do you envision? What does it “feel” like? What is a person’s every day experience with biotechnology and the living world look like?

I imagine a future where we all live in the forest in harmony with nature, and all of our technology would be in bionanobots that would live in our cells and turn each of us into a supercomputer. People who dont like this can just not have the bots and if you looked at us from the outside, we would look identical. This biological supercomputer would connect our minds and our bodies in one system and would connect us to each other, to their minds and to their bodies. This is similar to future visions from Terence McKenna, Hank Wesselman, and Paul DiFillipo.