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by throwup238
698 days ago
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The individual techniques described in the class are in use all over the pharmaceutical and biotech industries (especially biosensors) but we're still in the early stages of biological circuits, akin to where electronics was right before the vacuum tube was invented. We've got stuff that operates sort of like basic logic elements like relay switches did in electronics, but we're far from designing any complex integrated circuits. I think this point from the introduction says it best: > - From a more practical point of view, we have a very limited ability to construct, test, and compare designs. Even with recent developments such as CRISPR, our ability to rapidly and precisely produce cells with well-defined genomes remains limited compared to what is possible in more advanced disciplines. (This situation is rapidly improving!) |
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Somehow this makes me think of the griping of background NPC scientists in the classic game Deus Ex, which I think has a rather high quality of year-2052 technobabble.
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DONOVAN: It's really a question of abstraction. [...] You can't be dealing with this sort of thing on the base-pair level.
LUNDQUIST: Essentially what I told Miss Chow. Tissue augmentation... it's not a matter of twiddling bits.
DONOVAN: We need to stay focused on tools.
LUNDQUIST: In principle... Yes, I agree.
DONOVAN: The older scientists don't grasp what it means to have so much data.
LUNDQUIST: Still, we have to throw them a bone once in awhile.
DONOVAN: With the right software, organism design should be indistinguishable from CAD/CAM.