Now this is pretty seriously damn cool:
Scientists have developed what they say could become the world's smallest medical kit: a computer, made of DNA, that can diagnose disease and automatically dispense medicine to treat it.
The computer, so small that one trillion would fit into a drop of water, now works only in a test tube, and it could be decades before something like it is ready for practical use. But it offers an intriguing glimpse of a future in which molecular machines operate inside people, spotting diseases and treating them before noticeable symptoms even appear.
(...)
Experts called the work ingenious but pointed out that it had been done in a test tube, to which the RNA corresponding to the disease genes was added. It is not clear, they said, whether such a computer could work inside cells, where there would be many pieces of DNA, RNA and chemicals that could interfere.
"I think it's very elegant — it's almost like a beautiful mathematical proof," said Dr. George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. "But it's not working in human cells yet."
As a friend of the Zoners would say, "We're not gonna die, are we?"
Now, the tech is still a good long ways away from being ready to dump a load of nanodocs into your bloodstream, but this qualifies as a major first step towards the beginnings of a technically-augmented immune system.
These are indeed the days of miracle and wonder.
Posted by the Fourth Man at April 29, 2004 06:12 PM