Monthly Archives: November 2011

Bot bot here and bot bot there and a bot bot everywhere but not Old Macdonald’s Farm

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The Materials Research Society (MRS) has a Fall 2011 meeting in Boston, Massachusetts scheduled for Nov. 28, 2011 to Dec. 2, 2011, which will feature amongst other exhibits,  ‘mibots’. From the Nov. 9, 2011 news item on Azonano,

…  new “miBots” from Imina Technologies (Ecublens, Switzerland).

.. are more than nanomanipulators. Unlike conventional systems, they are virtually untethered and move independently. Working individually or in groups, they can be fitted with a variety of tools such as grippers, probes, and optical fibers so that, in addition to manipulating the sample, they can illuminate a nano workspace and conduct force or electrical measurements. Vacuum ready, miBots’ proprietary monolithic structure makes them robust, mechanically and thermally stable, and less sensitive to vibration.

…

Imina Technologies has engineered a variety of stage options for these novel mini robots. For conventional installation on inverted light microscopes (LM), SEMs, or focused-ion beam systems (FIBs), the “miBase” provides control and maneuvering room for up to four miBots. Special apertures accommodate illumination for the LM and stubs for SEMs, and multiple coaxial I/O connections enable electrical characterization and testing.

You can find out more about Imina Technologies and their ‘mibots’ here.

For a completely different kind of bot, a company named Nanobotmodels, situated in the Ukraine, offers illustration, animations, and presentation materials. From the company’s About page,

Our company Nanobotmodels was founded in 2007 and its goal is todevelop modern art-science-technology intersections. Nanotechnology boosts medicine, engineering, biotechnology, electronics soon, so artwork and vision of the nanofuture will be very useful.

We are making hi-end nanotechnology and nanomedicine illustration and animation. You can imagine any interesting-to-you animation, illustration or presentation materials, and we can make them real.

The level of detail in each medical illustration can be used to simplify complex structures and make them visually attractive.

Our clients include the largest medicine photobanks, nanotechnology magazines and publications, educational organization, and private companies.

Company was founded by CEO Svidinenko Yuriy, futurist and nanotechnology artist.

Our team consists of modern artists, modelers and nanotechnology scientists.

Here’s a bit more about the company’s work in medical illustration from a Nov. 11, 2011 news item at Nanotechnology Now,

One heat therapy to destroy cancer tumors using nanoparticles is called AuroShell™. The AuroShell™ nanoparticles circulate through a patient’s bloodstream, exiting where the blood vessels are leaking at the site of cancer tumors. Once the nanoparticles accumulate at the tumor the AuroShell™ nanoparticles are used to concentrate the heat from infrared light to destroy cancer cells with minimal damage to surrounding healthy cells. Nanobotmodels company provides good visual illustration of this process. Nanospectra Biosciences has developed such a treatment using AuroShell™ that has been approved for a pilot trial with human patients.

Gold nanoparticles can absorb different frequencies of light, depending on their shape. Rod-shaped particles absorb light at near-infrared frequency; this light heats the rods but passes harmlessly through human tissue. Sphere-shaped nanoparticles absorb laser radiation and passes harmlessly through human tissue too.

Nanobotmodels Company provides visual illustration of nanoparticle cancer treatment. Our goal – make realistic vision of modern drug delivery technology.

I found this sample on the company’s website gallery,

Illustration from Nanobotmodels website: Nanomechanical robots attacking cancer cell

You can find more artwork here.

Those are all the bots for today.

Radiance, scientists, communication and improvisation

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Marie Curie’s letters are radioactive. I discovered that fact when reading David Bruggeman’s Nov. 5, 2011,posting (on his Pasco Phronesis blog),

As part of his appearance on Thursday night’s edition of The Late Late Show to promote Tower Heist (video not yet available at the usual places), Alan Alda noted that his play, Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie, is premiering in Los Angeles.  In previews as of November 1st, the play’s official opening is next Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse.  Alda has written before, but this is his first effort for the stage.  …

… This play has percolated with him for years, first as a reading of her letters.  Their persistent radioactivity forced him to switch to Einstein and defer the work with Marie Curie until now.

The play was given a public reading at the World Science Festival in New York, June 2011. From the May 9, 2011 article by Patricia Cohen for the New York Times,

Opening night of the World Science Festival in New York is going to feature a more glittering lineup of stars than most Broadway shows. Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Allison Janney, Liev Schreiber, David Morse and Bill Camp are among the actors coming together on June 1 at Alice Tully Hall to participate in a reading of a new play written by Alan Alda about the scientist Marie Curie.

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Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in 1902 – for the theory of radioactivity that she developed with her husband, Pierre –  and the first person to receive the award twice. She was awarded her second Nobel in chemistry in 1911 for her discovery of two elements, radium and polonium. There have been several renditions of Curie’s life on stage, television and film, including the 1943 drama starring Greer Garson. Without giving too much of the plot away, Mr. Alda said his play focuses on the period between her first Nobel Prize and her second nine years later. The Nobel committee did not originally want to include Curie in the award and only backed down after pressure from her husband. “But they wouldn’t let her get up and accept the award,” Mr. Alda said. “She had to sit in the audience.” In the intervening years, Pierre Curie died and Marie had to run a gauntlet of setbacks and obstacles, but by 1911, Mr. Alda said, “her work is finally recognized, and she takes full credit for it, even though by now she’s weakened by radiation poisoning.”

“I think she had a kind of cognitive dissonance about it,” Mr. Alda said of the damaging fallout from her experiments. “She didn’t want to believe it was sickening her,” he added. “It’s part of the heroism of science itself. We as a species are just so interested in understanding things that might be dangerous to mess with, but nothing stops us.”

Radiance is currently playing at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles and features Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad, a U. S. television series) as Marie Curie and John de Lancie (probably best known at Q in the U. S. television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation) as Pierre Curie. Ticket buying information and details about the L. A. production can be found here.

Alan Alda has a longstanding interest in science and science communication as can be seen in a National Science Foundation video, which I found on Ed Darrell’s blog, Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub (MFB). First here’s a little About MFB,

Of all the bathtubs in all the bathrooms in the world, and I had to pick Millard Fillmore’s!

Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub started as my way of learning about making blogs work, for my hope to integrate blog usage into the classroom.

This blog focuses on history education, with meanders into all of the social studies: Economics, history, geography, law, political science, and government (have I left something unmentioned? It’s in there). Debunking false, bad, bogus and voodoo history occupied me from at least junior high school; the story of Millard Fillmore’s bathtub, the hoax perpetrated by H. L. Mencken and the inability of historians to straighten out the issue in 90 years, seemed a good jumping off point.

My hope is to help students, their learning partners (especially parents), teachers and administrators make history sing for the students — and other social studies, too.

I don’t usually embed videos that run for over five minutes and this one runs for over 25 minutes but I thought it exceptionally interesting as Alda discusses, scientists, the sciences, and communicating with other human beings at a US National Science Foundation event. Here’s the video I found on MFB (March 28, 2011 post),

Knotty molecules

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I couldn’t resist the wordplay (knotty/naughty) when I saw the Nov. 7, 2011 news item on Nanowerk titled, Tying molecules in knots. From the news item,

A research team headed by Professor David Leigh of the University of Edinburgh (UK) and Academy Professor Kari Rissanen of the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) have made the most complex molecular knot to date, as reported in Nature Chemistry (“A synthetic molecular pentafoil knot”).

…

However, deliberately tying molecules into well-defined knots so that these effects can be studied is extremely difficult. Up to now, only the simplest type of knot – a trefoil knot – had been prepared by scientists. Now Professor David Leigh’s team (www.catenane.net) at the University of Edinburgh together with Academy Professor Kari Rissanen at the University of Jyväskylä have succeeded in preparing and characterizing a more complex type of knot – a pentafoil knot (also known as a cinquefoil knot or a Solomon’s seal knot) – a knot which looks like a five-pointed star.

Remarkably, the thread that is tied into the star-shaped knot is just 160 atoms in length – that is about 16 nanometers long (one nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter).

Will this repopularize macramé (making textile by knotting the fibres)?

Cavandoli Macramé_Keith Russell

I found the image in Macramé essay on Wikipedia and Cavandoli is a form of Italian macramé.

Self-assembling, ultrasmall peptides

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Charlotte Hauser and other members of her Biodevices and Biodiagnostics team at A*STAR’s Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) have (from a Nov. 9, 2011 news item on Nanowerk),

… designed a new class of ultrasmall peptides capable of self-assembling into a variety of structures such as membranes, micelles, tubules and gels that are suitable for application in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

They do seem to be doing a lot of interesting work at A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) located in Singapore. I notice that Hauser’s team is (like the team at the US Georgia Institute of Technology mentioned in my Nov. 9, 2011 posting) working on a ‘Microneedle Array for Transdermal Drug Delivery’.

As for the work on peptides (from the news item on Nanowerk),

The unique class of self-assembling peptides designed by the IBN research team consists of only 3 to 7 amino acids, in contrast to conventional peptides that usually require 16 to 32 amino acids. Each peptide molecule is characterized by a water-soluble ‘polar head’ and a water-insoluble ‘tail’, and this ampiphilic property enables the molecules to self-assemble spontaneously in water to form hydrogels—stiff, water-based gels held together by stable fibrous structures. These natural peptide-based hydrogels offer an attractive, low-cost alternative for the manufacture of biomimetic materials, as they do not require the addition of enzymes or chemical agents during the process of formation.

A*STAR’s  Sept. 12, 2011 news release notes that this new material could be used to repair spinal disc damage,

The unique class of peptides developed by IBN has similar gel strength as the jelly-like material in the spinal disc. Dr Charlotte Hauser, IBN Team Leader and Principal Research Scientist elaborated, “There is a huge unmet clinical need for a prosthetic device that can inhibit or repair early-stage disc damage. Our biocompatible peptide hydrogels could be injected into the body to stimulate disc regeneration or used for artificial disc replacement. This peptide-based approach could offer an alternative to spinal surgery by delaying or even abolishing the need for invasive surgery. Our ultrasmall peptides can also be easily translated to clinical use because they are easy and cost-effective to produce.”

Published recently in the leading nanoscience and nanotechnology journal, Nano Today, IBN’s self-assembling peptides imitate nature by forming ordered structures using molecular recognition. This self-assembly approach is emerging as an important new strategy in bioengineering because it allows the peptides to form easily into various structures such as membranes, micelles and gels. The essence of this ‘Lego’-like technology lies in the unique design of the peptide.

I’ve known a few people with those kinds of injuries and this sounds like it could be a huge improvement over procedures (fusing the spine) used currently to ameliorate the situation.

Live geoengineering webcast from Woodrow Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Program

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The Geoengineering for Decision Makers report is being released today during a live webcast from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at 9:30 am PST (until 11:30 am PST, this morning, Nov. 10, 2011. From the invitation,

There is an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that human activities are significant contributors to global temperature changes, even if other dynamics are also at work. Though there are still uncertainties about how fast the climate will change, there is substantial agreement that the impacts could become dangerous over the decades ahead. The greatest danger is that we could pass “tipping points” of self-amplifying, irreversible change into a much hotter world.

“Political decision makers are certain to face choices regarding geoengineering that will be highly controversial as well as fateful for the welfare of the nation and the planet.” says Robert L. Olson, author of “Geoengineering for Decision Makers”.

As concerns about climate change grow, strategies for intervening in the earth’s climate system – through geoengineering — have emerged. Several different viewpoints have appeared about how geoengineering should or could be developed and a number of scientists have begun to argue that geoengineering needs to be part of a larger portfolio of options for addressing climate change.

Join us on Thursday, November 10th, from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. [EST] as the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center discusses their new report Geoengineering for Decision Makers

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[Speakers]:

Robert Olson, Institute for Alternative Futures

Tim Persons, Chief Scientist, GAO [US General
Accountability Office]

David Rejeski, Director, Science and
Technology Innovation Program

You can go here to view the live webcast.

Graphene: scientific rock star? Sweden, and FET

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Well, some think graphene is a scientific rock star according to the Nov. 9, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

Graphene is sort of a scientific rock star, with countless groups studying its amazing electrical properties and tensile strength and dreaming up applications ranging from flat-panel screens to elevators in space.

That’s what a research group (Craighead Research Group) at Cornell University is saying about graphene in its article, “Fabrication and performance of graphene nanoelectromechanical systems” published n the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology B, 2011, vol. 29 (5).

There’s no question that graphene is a sizzling topic these days and much money is being flung in that direction for research. The Nov. 8, 2011 news item on Nanowerk features a major chunk of funding (which may also have an impact on a huge European Union funding project next year) for a graphene research group in Sweden,

Graphene can enable the best quantum resistance standard. This is one of many advances emerging from the active research into graphene at Chalmers University of Technology. Chalmers will now receive the lion’s share of a new Swedish research grant of SEK 40 million [approximately $6M CAD] for the supermaterial graphene.

Following the new financing from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, a group of some 30 Swedish graphene researchers will be formed, in a close collaboration between Chalmers and the universities of Uppsala and Linköping. The effort will form the Swedish spearhead in international graphene research – a hot topic ever since the Nobel Physics Prize in 2010.

…

The Chalmers researchers have already achieved several important breakthroughs with graphene, despite the fact that the material was first produced as recently as 2004. One example is a new standard for the quantum of resistance – a “tuning fork” for calibrating the correct resistance in electrical instruments and devices. State-of-the-art resistance standards are based on silicon or gallium arsenide. These are difficult to manufacture, and the method only works at extremely low temperatures and in large magnetic fields. A new generation of resistance standards based on graphene are at least as accurate as those in use today, while benefitting from being substantially easier to produce and use.

In another project, Chalmers researchers have produced a graphene transistor that operates at more than 10 gigahertz. They are now working on producing one capable of reaching into the terahertz range – in other words faster than 100 gigahertz. This may become possible thanks to a large grant that Mikael Fogelström’s research group received earlier this year from the Foundation for Strategic Research – SEK 28.5 million over a five-year period.

The Future and Emerging Technologies in information technology (Fet 11) is the name for the European Union’s 2011 Pathfinder programme, which will be awarding $1B Euros in mid-2012, and which was mentioned in my June 13, 2011 posting about graphene. Here’s an excerpt from that posting,

Bringing together multiple disciplines and addressing research across a whole range of issues, from fundamental understandings of material properties to Graphene production, the Flagship will provide the platform for establishing European scientific and technological leadership in the application of Graphene to Information and Communication Technologies. The proposed research includes coverage of electronics, spintronics, photonics, plasmonics and mechanics, all based on Graphene.

[Project Team:]

Andrea Ferrari, Cambridge University, UK
Jari Kinaret, Chalmers University, Sweden
Vladimir Falko, Lancaster University, UK
Jani Kivioja, NOKIA, Finland [emphasis mine]

2011 has been quite the year for these researchers at Chalmers since they were one of six research groups getting funds to produce more work in preparation for a final round of considerations before deciding which two groups would be receiving $1B Euro each in 2012.

I gather from the news item on Nanowerk, this latest funding will aid in next year’s big decision,

Chalmers has previously gathered together European graphene researchers for a major research initiative competing for what is known as “Future Emerging Technology Flagship” funds, providing finance of up to SEK 10 billion over 10 years. Next year, the EU will decide whether to convert the pilot project into a flagship. The new research grant from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation is believed to increase the chances of that happening.

Petman and lifelike movement

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Thanks to the Nov. 7, 2011 posting on the Foresight Institute blog, I’ve found Petman,

Last month we noted the impressive progress achieved by Boston Dynamics’ AlphaDog project to develop a robot “pack animal” for the US military. Apparently there has been equally impressive progress in developing a humanoid robot capable of faithfully mimicking human movements to test protective suits for use by the military, and ultimately, to replace humans in a variety of arduous and dangerous tasks. This month IEEE Spectrum gave us this update: “Stunning Video of PETMAN Humanoid Robot From Boston Dynamics”, by Erico Guizzo.

I have written about Boston Dynamics and its military robots before, most recently about Big Dog in my Feb. 2, 2010 posting [scroll down a paragraph or two]. It’s amazing to see how much smoother the movement has become although I notice that the robot is tethered. From the Oct. 31, 2011 IEEE Spectrum article by Erico Guizzo,

It can walk, squat, kneel, and even do push-ups.

PETMAN is an adult-sized humanoid robot developed by Boston Dynamics, the robotics firm best known for the BigDog quadruped.

Today, the company is unveiling footage of the robot’s latest capabilities. It’s stunning.

The humanoid, which will certainly be compared to the Terminator Series 800 model, can perform various movements and maintain its balance much like a real person.

Boston Dynamics is building PETMAN, short for Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin, for the U.S. Army, which plans to use the robot to test chemical suits and other protective gear used by troops. It has to be capable of moving just like a soldier — walking, running, bending, reaching, army crawling — to test the suit’s durability in a full range of motion.

Marc Raibert, the founder and president of Boston Dynamics, tells me that the biggest challenge was to engineer the robot, which uses a hydraulic actuation system, to have the approximate size of a person. “There was a great deal of mechanical design we had to do to get everything to fit,” he says.

The Guizzo article features a number of images and a video demonstrating Petman’s abilities along with more details about the robot’s full capabilities. I went on YouTube to find this Petman mashup,

The Japanese have featured some robots that look like and dance like people as I noted in my Oct. 18, 2010 posting where I also discussed the ‘uncanny valley’ in relationship to those robots. Keeping on the ‘humanoid’ robot theme, I also posted about Geminoid robots in the context of a Danish philosopher who commissioned, for a philosophy project, a Geminoid that looked like himself and whose facial features are expressive. In that same posting, March 10, 2011, I wrote about some work at the Georgia Institute of Technology (US) where they too are developing robots that move like humans. The March 2011 posting features more information about the ‘uncanny valley’, including a diagram.

I wonder what it will be like to encounter one of these humanoid robots in the flesh as it were.

Micro needle patches project gets Grand Challenges Explorations grant

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The project being funded with a Grand Challenges Explorations grant (from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) reminds me a lot of the nanopatch that Mark Kendall and his team have been developing in Australia (a project last mentioned in my Aug. 3, 2011 posting). This new initiative comes from the Georgia Institute of Technology and is aimed at the eradication of polio. From the Nov. 7, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

The Georgia Institute of Technology will receive funding through Grand Challenges Explorations, an initiative created by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that enables researchers worldwide to test unorthodox ideas that address persistent health and development challenges. Mark Prausnitz, Regents’ professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, will pursue an innovative global health research project focused on using microneedle patches for the low-cost administration of polio vaccine through the skin in collaboration with researchers Steve Oberste and Mark Pallansch of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

…

The goal of the Georgia Tech/CDC project is to demonstrate the scientific and economic feasibility for using microneedle patches in vaccination programs aimed at eradicating the polio virus. Current vaccination programs use an oral polio vaccine that contains a modified live virus. This vaccine is inexpensive and can be administered in door-to-door immunization campaigns, but in rare cases the vaccine can cause polio. There is an alternative injected vaccine that uses killed virus, which carries no risk of polio transmission, but is considerably more expensive than the oral vaccine, requires refrigeration for storage and must be administered by trained personnel. To eradicate polio from the world, health officials will have to discontinue use of the oral vaccine with its live virus, replacing it with the more expensive and logistically-complicated injected vaccine.

Prausnitz and his CDC collaborators believe the use of microneedle patches could reduce the cost and simplify administration of the injected vaccine.

Iwonder if this team working at the microscale rather than the nanoscale, as Kendall’s team does, is finding some of the same benefits, from my August 3, 2011 posting,

Early stage testing in animals so far has shown a Nanopatch-delivered flu vaccine is effective with only 1/150th of the dose compared to a syringe and the adjuvants currently required to boost the immunogenicity of vaccines may not be needed. [emphases mine]

I find the notion that only 1/150th of a standard syringe dosage can be effective quite extraordinary. I wonder if this will hold true in human clinical trials.

If they get similar efficiencies at the microscale as they do at the nanoscale, the expense associated with vaccines using killed viruses should plummet dramatically. I do have one thought, do we have to eradicate the polio virus in a ‘search and destroy mission’? Couldn’t we learn to live with them peacefully while discouraging their noxious effects on our own biology?

A glacier in the desert

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Strictly speaking this is not nano but it is interesting and artistic too. A Dutch artist is planning to create a sculpture that will make ice in the desert. From the Nov. 7, 2011 news item on physorg.com,

“You have to open the borders of your thinking,” he [Ap Verheggen] said, in his apartment surrounded by his works. “To make ice in the desert is breaking down the border, and that is opening a new world.”

Verheggen’s giant sculpture is so far only a sketch and a series of charts in a laboratory in Zoetermeer, near his home in The Hague. Cofely, a refrigeration company that makes ice rinks and custom-designed cooling units for food storage, is testing the principles of creating ice in desert conditions.

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Scientist Andras Szollosi-Nagi says Verheggen’s work falls at the crossroads of art, environment and science. “It’s an amazing piece, it’s very unusual and that makes it very exciting.”

In Zoetermeer, engineers have produced a 10-centimeter (4-inch)-thick layer of ice on a slab of aluminum inside a shipping container-sized box that simulates desert conditions, with the temperature set at 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) and plans to crank it up to 50C (122F). A humidifier provides the moisture, and a fan is directed at the ice like a desert breeze, resulting in a pool of water dripping off the surface of the ice sheet even as it thickens.

The company is using off-the-shelf technology. “Everybody thinks it’s dry in the desert, but it’s roughly the same amount of moisture in the air as here,” said project manager Erik Hoogendoorn.

Verheggen has created other art/science sculptures with environmental themes. You can read more about them on his blog and about this project SunGlacier on its own blog. I found this video about an earlier project, cool(E)motion, on Verheggen’s personal blog.

According to the SunGlacier blog (Project Outline page), there is a link between the two projects,

The SunGlacier art project hopes to stimulate people to think creatively about solutions to the challenges of climate change. These changes are not necessarily all negative or better still, if we can find a way to turn some of them to our advantage then nothing should stop us to do so. To carry this fresh and positive way of thinking forward, I have kicked off the SunGlacier project as a new and unique sequel to the successful cool(E)motion endeavour.

Personalized agriculture

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They talk a lot about personalized medicine (drugs and procedures specifically formulated for individuals) but this is the first time I’ve come across ‘personalized’ agriculture. According to the article (not dated for some reason, I did find it last week [Oct. 31 – Nov. 4, 2011]) by Christopher Mims for Fast Company,

For centuries, farmers have been trying to tweak their practices to get plants to grow well. But what if the plants could tell you exactly what they needed, and you could engineer one that was perfect for your farm?

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Agriculture has a problem. Its one-size-fits-all model requires outsize amounts of pesticide, fertilizer, and water to create a homogenous environment for a homogenized product. Monocropping means covering as much area as possible with a single, often genetically identical crop, and commercial genetic modification techniques only exacerbate the problem by self-destructing after a single generation, preventing seed-saving and the development of new varieties by farmers themselves.

Nature long ago solve this problem through the process of mass customization we know as natural selection. Now the challenge for agricultural scientists is to reintroduce biodiversity in the one place it’s been most thoroughly eradicated–the industrialized farm.

Mims notes this is at the idea stage only.

“Plants sense their environment and exhibit sophisticated responses–the idea is to engineer that,” says Reid Williams, a PhD candidate at UCSF [University of California at San Francisco] who also worked on the project.

We already know that plants can sense gravity, touch, and probably dozens of other environmental factors. Regardless of their innate responses, all living things also encode information about their environment through a process called DNA methylation. When DNA is methylated, it changes its expression during the life of an organism, and there are ways to determine precisely which genes have been altered in this way.

Add some “big data” to this equation–massive, automated studies that statistically match DNA changes to the conditions in which a plant is grown–and you could begin to build a system that can examine the genetic code of a particular plant and spit out a record of the conditions in which it developed. Something along these lines has already been developed, namely a plant that turns red in the presence of land mines.

The endpoint for this new thinking about agriculture would be ‘personalized’ seeds.

The ultimate result would be “personalized seeds” (think of it in terms of personalized medicine) that are tailored to the environment in which they’ll grow. This application of synthetic biology turns the usual sequence of events in agriculture on its head.  …

… the name of this field, synthetic biology, which implies that humans are at the stage that we are in a position to directly influence the substance of evolution itself, and not just in the accidental ways we have in the past. [emphases mine]

Or perhaps we’ve found a new way to further our delusion that we can control life.