Viruses as manufacturing plants

In her January 2011 TEDx talk at Caltech (California Institute of Technology), MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Professor Angela Belcher talks about using viruses to grow batteries that don’t require toxic materials for their production or produce toxic materials themselves. It’s similar to biomimicry in that the reference point is nature but rather than trying to simulate nature using synthetic materials this work focuses on tweaking nature so that something like a virus can be used to create something new, e.g., a battery, a solar cell, etc.

 

A Sept. 25, 2011 article by Karen Weintraub on the BBC News website offers further insight into Belcher’s work,

Prof Belcher’s work unites the inanimate world of simple chemicals with proteins made by living creatures, a mash-up of the living and the lifeless.

She is motivated, she says, by a simple question: “How do you give life to non-living things?”

Like the abalone collecting its materials in shallow water and then laying them down like bricks in a wall, Belcher takes basic chemical elements from the natural world: carbon, calcium, silicon, zinc. Then she mixes them with simple, harmless viruses whose genes have been reprogrammed to promote random variations.

The resulting new materials just might address some of our most vexing problems.

The distinctiveness of Prof Belcher’s work, colleagues say, lies in her use of biology to synthesise new materials for such a wide range of uses, to develop an entirely new method for producing entirely novel materials.

“Her methodologies for directing and assembling materials I think will be unique,” says Yet-Ming Chiang, an MIT professor who collaborates with Prof Belcher on battery research. “I think 50 years from now, we’ll look back on biology as an important part of the toolkit in manufacturing… we’ll look back and say this is one of the fundamental tools we developed in this century.”

As I’ve been thinking about life/nonlife (in the context of human enhancement and memristors), this works offers me additional food for thought. Meanwhile, the TEDx talk and the Weintraub article point to some of the vast difference between scientists and lay people (general public). Belcher references life/nonlife quite casually, almost in passing. This could be quite disturbing to folks who believe there’s a distinct difference. The disturbances don’t stop there.

In the first place, viruses do not have a good reputation. When you add in the problems with calling your work biotechnology (as Belcher does in her TEDx talk), the stage is set for some interesting possibilities. If that isn’t enough, Belcher’s work comes perilously close to Eric Drexler’s self-assembling nano entities and the spectre of ‘grey’ or ‘green’ goo. It’s been a while since the big scares over genetically modified organisms (GMO), I wonder if scientists have forgotten or perhaps they don’t realize just how much conflicting (and often frightening) information is still being pushed at the general public. As for breaching the life/nonlife boundaries, that could be a whole other mess.

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