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"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."
- Isaac Asimov
 |
| Intellectual Cell | ||
| A smart lymphocyte; a cell with enhanced capacity for memory, understanding and communication. |
Vergil Ullam was an unrecognized and unrewarded genius who spent a lot more of his time in the lab working on his pet projects than on his nominal work assignments. Fascinated by the potential of biological computing, he decided to give his own cells a boost up the evolutionary ladder. Eventually, they talked with each other, forming tiny communities that stretched across his body.
| His first E. coli mutations had had the learning capacity of planarian worms; he had run
them through simple T-mazes, giving sugar rewards. They had soon outperformed planaria...
Removing the finest biologic sequences from the altered E. coli, he had incorporated them into B-lymphocytes, white cells from his own blood...Using artificial proteins and hormones as a means of communication, Vergil had "trained" the lymphocytes in the past six months to interact as much as possible with each other and with their environment - a much more complex miniature glass maze. Every lymphocyte in the sample he was watching had the potential intellectual capacity of a rhesus monkey... They were beautiful. They were his children, drawn from his own blood, carefully nurtured, operated upon; he had personally injected the biologic material into at least a thousand of them. And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on... |
| From Blood Music,
by Greg Bear. Published by Arbor House in 1984 Additional resources -
|
If you are interested in this area, take a look at a fascinating 1996 talk by Seymour Cray, who
created the first supercomputer. Here is a short excerpt from his talk, given at the Shannon
Institute for Advanced Studies.
Let's look first at the big DRAM memory. Well, it's packaged in 48 bags. These are called
chromosomes. Now, as we look at those we are a little puzzled because there are some little
ones and some big ones and some middle-sized ones, and how did that happen?
Well, when you think about it, this computing facility started with a very small memory, and
it's been upgraded a number of times, and you know when you go to the store you'd like to get
the biggest DRAM parts, but you have to go with what's available. And that's what happened with
the biological system. It had to go with what was available at the time it was upgraded.
If we look further into the big DRAM memory, we see that probably the packaging isn't
important. Forty-eight banks probably aren't significant. We can view the whole memory as one
string of bits, a one-dimensional memory. And biologists, I think, agree with that today. And
so how big is it? Well, it's six gigabytes."
"For the overview, when we look in the cell, the first thing we see is a big DRAM memory in the
nucleus. It's called DNA. Then we look around the cell, and we see there are several thousand
microprocessors. They are called mitochondria. And if we look further at how they work, they
all share a common memory and they have two levels of cache. Now, you may not believe all this,
but wait till we get into the details.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Blood Music
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and Technology by Greg Bear
Tech news articles related to Blood Music
Tech news articles related to works by Greg Bear
Intellectual Cell-related
news articles:
- Humans Teach Bacteria New Language
- Biomolecular Computer: The Tiniest Doc?
- Bacillus Loquacious: AI-2 and the Talkative Bacterium
- Biocomputers (Biological Computers) Come Closer
- Bacterial Art - Culture In A Dish
- Morgellons Disease Has Science-Fictional Effects
- Bacteria Talk To Each Other On Bassler Video
- Bacterial 'Computer' Solves Math Problem
- Slime Mold Network Engineering
- First DNA-based Artificial Neural Network
- Can Gut Bacteria Make You Smarter?
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'The old woman laid her wire-knitting aside and fixed them with the bug-eyed, opaque gape...'
'The scope was adjusted to generate... an image of the lower section of the book.'
'They should be Welton Fine-Grains, or they would be too bulky to ship...'
'He imagined thousands on thousands of faces peering into yards, into alleys...'
Rather than nudge them up, nudge them down.
