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Science

Nano Subs in your Blood 83

Posted by michael from the damn-the-torpedoes dept.
Noryungi writes "The BBC is reporting about bacteria-propelled nano-subs that can be used to deliver drugs in the bloodstream. Interesting part is that (a) salmonella bacteria are ideal for this and (b) that prototypes could be just one year away. Nano-VaporWare?" Somehow, I think the one-year estimate seems a bit optimistic.
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Nano Subs in your Blood More

Nano Subs in your Blood

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  • This is actually not as far from the truth as it might seem - hospitals are just about the worst place to go if your ill - it's a fecund environment for viruses, and almost all of the so-called 'superbugs' have developed in hospitals - they get resistant to the antibiotics used.

    I'm not sure what the precise figure is, but an alarmingly high number of people get ill[er] in hospital.
  • This will must be extremely efective in quimiotherapy, perhaps reducing the nasty efects that runs along with those treatments...

    Now they can poison the cancer directly, so this should allow an incresead dosage with a direct relation to an increase in the success rate.

    I'm just glad to live in this century... Maybe we all live enough to see these criters kill all our disease problems.
  • Scientists have yet to succeed in teaching bacteria how to ride a nano-bicycle, yet these researchers actually think they can get these things to drive nano-subs? Who do they think they're kidding?

    Let's not put the cart before the horse, people.

    $ man reality

  • My understanding of antibiotics was that they helped to identify the unwanted virus/bacteria. I didn't think they actually killed anything , just made it easier for your immune system to identify and thus destroy it.
  • Antibiotics are drugs which kill bacteria. These can be either natural (Pennicillin) or synthetic (like Amoxicillin, or any other variation).

    Antibodies are cells(?) produced by the immune system that mark and immobilize antigens (invaders) so that white blood cells can more easily capture and destroy them.
  • The idea is that you don't. How does a microorganism know to attack a certain organelle or whatever? It doesn't make decisions, the structure of the bacterium dictates what structures it interacts with. You would have to choose the bacterium in such a way that it it targets certain areas of the body. So you will have to modify the surface character of the bacteria to the place you want the drug delivered. One problem I see is that the immune system is going to kick in and do what it is designed to do. This will have the effect of scaverging a lot of the input drug deliverers. This isn't so much a problem as the fact that when the body starts to break down the bacteria, which it has learned to do, I might not know what to do with the drug that is contained inside. Interesting concept though, like people above have mentioned, fanastic voyage inspired all the way. It will be intersting to see how topics like this in the general area of melding nanotech with medicine will develop. Interesting time we live in, let's see what happens
  • About the only thing that you said which was basically correct was that "markers" and "killers" exist in the immune system. This is overly simplistic too, since many cell types and proteins (antibodies, compliment proteins, cytokines) exist and work in conjunction.

    Everything else is basically wrong

    1 Antibiotics do not disable your immune system - they either are bacterioCIDAL (kill bacteria - NOT human cells), or else they are bacterioSTATIC (they stop the bacter from growing, so that our own immune system can rev up and kill them)
    2 The capitalist system producing a poor immune system is a non-sequitar Infection used to be the top six or seven causes of death before modern antibiotics were introduced. Since their introduction infectious death remains around number 10 and average life expectancy has doubled

    3 As far as a billion "markers" being released in 10 seconds- not true. An allergic reaction can take place that fast to a PREVIOUSLY EXPOSED antigen, but no markers are released in that time frame that are specific to that antigen.

    A normal immune reaction takes about a week to sucessfully produce a specif antibody to a antigen (an immune producing substance, i.e. a foreign protein/sugar) for the first time, there after further exposures will take about a day.

    I can't teach you immunology in a few paragraphs. Get a BASIC immuno text and learn about B and T cells, antibodies and compliment proteins.

  • Because Nature does not select the best design, just the design that is good enough.

    True, but with bacteria Nature can get closer to the ideal due to the high mutation rates and range of environments. And it's not like they're required to be able to cope with multiple environments - all that is needed is for them to be able to do one thing very well.

    And sure, one day artificial systems will be designed that are superior. But for now, adapting biological ones makes a lot of sense.

  • Pet rats are completely different to wild ones yet are still real rats. They're very friendly, intelligent and docile. Definately cute. Vastly superior to mice and hamsters (which tend to score very low in the intelligence stakes). We've had about fifteen pet rats.

    ian.
  • are you on drugs? What is blood but cells? Red blood cels, white blood cels etc. If your sub is the size of a blood cell, how are you going to 'paint' that sub with blood exactly?
  • Sugars and microscopic particles will also trigger the immune system. Most bacteria have a sugar coat which our cells/antibodies react to.

    Microscopic particles can also cause an immune reaction - asbestos, carbon fiber (from artificial ligaments), certain metals (nickle allergy is quite common)
  • I think that, for the first few days anyways, Salmonella reproduces *much* faster than your body can destroy it. Your body rarely ignores any foreign material that is put inside of it (opening for lame jokes here). Once the immune system gets ramped up, and figures out how to make the antibodies, the salmonella doesn't stand much of a chance.
  • Holy hypocrit batman!

    Reminds me of kids saying my dad can beat up your dad when they had nothing intelligent to say. Is this why you said your gf can kick their asses in physical or technical?

    And finally about that same comment, you were bitching because people were inferring things about Russians without foundation, and then you go infer that your gf is the almighty woman that can kick their ass without you even seeing the competition?

    There are better ways to get your point accross hypocrit

    (posted non-anonymously cuz I don't give a shit)
  • This sounds hard to do. Love to find the original reference. I mean from nasty bacteria to biomed workhorse has been the course for salmonella. Funny thing is spooky techno-paranoid writer Don DeLillo came up with an idea just as it was being implemented in a cold med. Kinda cute submarine pill. There are things possible but still not in wide use like transdermal patches with electricly controlled dose control. Interesting experimentally but tend to involve those nasty TLAs like FDA and DEA.

  • We've all read Fantastic Voyage, and know the problems those guys had with antibodies... (not to base my theories on a scene in a novel or anything:)

    I think that it's worth bearing in mind that the book was written by Issac Asimov, that's Professor Asimov of the UMass Department of Biochemistry. Whilst I'm not saying he wouldn't use a bit of artistic license I'm think he'd probably be closer to the facts, as known at the time, than certain random Sci-Fi authors who make it up as they go along.

    IIRC in the book a major feature of the sub was that it could mimic the electric field produced by the antigens of the bodies own cells, this being how the immune system recognises self from non-self cells. Something like this would probably be needed if the nanites were going to spend long in the body (eg the classic Cyberpunk idea of nanites lying dormant until need to fix a wound type of thing), you could probably get away without it for short jobs as by the time the immune system had geared up enough to seriously impede the work the job would be finished. From what I recall of my biochemistry course it takes several hours at least for the immune system to fully respond, less time for re-infections.

    Stephen

  • Riding a nano-bicycle is much harder than chaining bacteria to benches and oars. One supervisor snapping its flagella and they'll learn quickly enough to keep moving. The necessary breakthrough, flexible carbon tubes for chaining, has already been achieved. Monkey-controlled robots are even now carving tiny oars for the submarines.
  • ????????
    Everything that gets into your blood is coated with your blood. Hopefully your body recognizes virii, bacteria and these subs as foreign, otherwise you're screwed.
  • Bacteria are not cute. Abuse of animals which are not cute doesn't count. For instance, you can abuse a rat and it's ok. Rats are not cute. OTOH hamsters are cute, so don't even dream about abusing one without PETA (that other PETA) screaming bloody murder. Hope it helps.
    --
  • He was saying, what keeps the immune system from attacking the sub. He doesn't expect the sub to be and antibody.
  • There are implications in a "battle with the natural": the more we try to kill bacteria the more they develop resistances to them, but what must not be forgotten is that we are also nature.

    Even though we operate at a different level, our technological "evolution" is not that different from the evolution of bacteria. After all, from their point of view, we're just big masses of bacteria-like things anyway.

    On a side note, this has something to do with the ongoing battles between sysadmins and script kiddies. Even though each side fights in different ways and for different reasons, in the end each side has more or less equal power.

    So what can be done to ensure one or the other's victory? A security expert might say "increased security"(which goes for bacteria too: if you kill them all off, or don't let them in in the first place, how can they evolve?), a casual observer might say "increased awareness and more sensible people".

    Maybe the microbes are not that different from people. If there was no fight there would be no improvement of either.
  • Ah, I see. Pet rats. I tend to classify everything that can be found in a pet shop as a "hamster". If it's furry, that is. If it's not furry, it's either a goldfish or a canard, depending on whether it swims or flies. If neither, it's a "rock".
    --
  • Nano-subs? It makes me think of tiny microscopic metal submarines floating around my bloodstream. launching "drug torpedos". Maybe we can have a re-enactment of WWII. My red blood cells will be the allied convoys, and the "Nono-subs" can be the wolf packs? Sound like fun? Seriously though, I think that this is just another step in the right direction towards medican melding with nature. As stated above, why compete with the most rigurouse stress test of all time? 1,000,000 years of evolution? Grubby
  • It's a fairly well known fact that amoebas and other microscopic unicellular protozoans are too large for the human immune system to deal with. They and other parasites can infect human and other mammalian bodies for decades (sometimes forever), living in the bloodstream itself, and the immune system can not deal with the problem. It is somewhat analagous to a housefly trying to engulf an elephant.

    In fact, there is a serious medical condition (whose name escapes me.. any biologists wanna fill in the blanks) associated with a certain type of amoeba that enters the bloodstream, and crosses the blood-brain barrier (cause it just eats it's way through) and happily munches on brain tissue for ever. There have been perhaps 12 or so cases of this in the US in the past few decades, it is exceedingly rare.

    But the point is, large enough "nano" bots will not even have to worry about the human immune system cells stopping them. They'll be too big.

    But it's nanovaporware!.
    So we'll see...
  • I tend to classify everything that can be found in a pet shop as a "hamster"

    Don't tell me - they're Siberian Hamsters.. and you sold one to a guy named Manuel, who was from Barcelona?

    (John Cleese reference :O)
  • I think he had antibodies and antibiotics mixed up. Read his post.
  • I get what you're saying, however I wouldn't claim it to be lost effort in any sense.

    While nature does not provide the perfect solution, it does provide the one best one that it has tailored up to that point (natural selection). The point to make here however is that humans (and life on Earth for that matter) are the solution to what? All we are is the end result of an evolutionary chain - there are lots of other animals on this planet, and if you like we can say that all they (and us) have really done is promoted the spread of life, adapting to our environment. Now, I know that human progress is very good at designing things and whatnot, but evolution has had one thing that we haven't - billions of years of trial and error!

    I agree that natures solutions are often limited to their respective environments, this is the key of evolution (being able to adapt to your particular environment), so it is quite obvious that trying to make a bird fly on a 10 g planet would be rather interesting. The point to make here however is that evolution has created some very interesting devices on the cellular, tissue and organ levels. I believe they are simply using the flagella of the bacteria here - there is nothing advanced about a tail that can wiggle - but can we make anything like that yet? Our sensory perception organs are yet to be matched by anything man-made and as for computing power, well, we still can't even understand our own minds.

    I really liked your last line, however I think it would be more coherent if it was presented as the following:

    While early effort will get an immense head start by apdapting existing systems, I believe that in the future superior systems will be designed that bear little resemblance to our present biological ones.

    I guess the concept of completely artificial doesn't make any sense to me. If we make something, it was 'in the end' crafted by the evolution of our biology. Ah well, just my 2 cents...

  • I remember an old movie called Innerspace where they shrunk a guy in a pod and stuck it into Martin Short, so now they wanna do that in real life? It would take a hell of a lot of proof before little robotic minisubs get dispatched into my bloodstream. One day someone is going to make them "web ready" so they can broadcast live to the doctors, and then someone is going to hack them. Wouldn't that make great office cooler talk! Yeah I hacked this GUY last night. LOL

  • The movie "Fantastic Voyage" is just a screen adaptation of the novel by Isaac Asimov [amazon.com].

  • Yeah? but is it a BSD or GPL-type license? And what happens when we fork the codebase? Anyone got the URL for the sourceforgepage?
    --
    If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles

  • We are the Borg
    We will assimilate you
    Resistance is futile

    "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
  • So, is this just another technology which will allow people to consume worse and worse things, with the excuse that it can all be removed from your body anyway?
  • just wait until they start singing: "don't bogart that joint, my friend...pass it over... to me...."
    ;-)
  • ...with an error or +/-100 meters :-)
    (hmmm, it's less nowadays innit?)
  • I hope the Russians aren't thinking of making them...!

    [Happosai]
  • Can this be considered animal abuse? And if so, should we use the alien bacteria from the other story instead?

  • I saw that movie.. (Score:3)

    by VC ( 89143 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @06:01AM (#605144)

    It was called inner space.. [crankycritic.com]

  • This is a cool article. There's one thing I don't understand, though. How do you steer the crazy thing? Wouldn't these subs just move quickly in random directions?
  • ... unlike anything previously seen on earth.

    Or is that a different story?

    Yes, I'm going for the great "funny"/"troll" divide.

    FatPhil
  • What force does it take to resist the force of the blood flow in an artery?
  • There's no way I'm smoking bacteria. Even if they are in submarines.
  • They might be bacteria-powered, but who's going to drive them?

    Sean Connery's getting a bit old for that I think.

  • the Enigma machine was 'borrowed' from Bletchley Park.

    Now they've worked out how to build a miniaturized version to fit in these subs.

  • Re:I saw that movie.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I would agree with the assertion that Dennis Quaid is bacteria, but the source movie is Fantastic Voyage [imdb.com], of which Innerspace is a remake of sorts.
  • First of all, how are they planning to steer these nano-subs. I don't want one of these things inside me taking a wrong turn, and ending up dropping drugs in the wrong place, or even worse, puncturing a capillary, or other body organ.

    Second, how would they retrieve the sub once it finished it's work. I'd hate to think of these things degrading inside my body, and releasing all their chemicals and left-over bio-products.

    Also, what if one of the nano-subs gets transferred to another person through an open wound. It would start delivering its drugs to the wrong person, with potentially serious results. In that same vein, what if the person was in an accident, and during an emergency surgery, the nano-sub was disabled, or accidentally moved to another part of their body. How would the doctors be able to track them? Don't get me wrong, though, I really like this idea. Assuming that they get everything working, this could mean that people could simply have a little port on their body where they get the nano-subs put in, and then could have the drug delivered over a long term period. It could be great for people on continuous medication, because they would only have to get one injection, and then could go on with their life.


    Just my $0.02
  • We'll have submarines in our blood, destroyers and linkors in our urine, and sea mines in our saliva. Should be able to start a world war III simulation right in your bed.
    How will we save the submarine crew in case of another Kursk? (BTW the most prevalent theory about Kursk tragedy is still the one including a collision with a foreign submarine, possibly US seawolf)

  • They don't retreive it... (Score:4)

    by Dan Hayes ( 212400 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @06:40AM (#605154)

    Second, how would they retrieve the sub once it finished it's work. I'd hate to think of these things degrading inside my body, and releasing all their chemicals and left-over bio-products.

    They don't retreive it - the flagella only have the energy to keep going for an hour or so, and then they die. I'd assume that they would have thought of this problem - plenty of stuff already gets filtered out of your bloodstream anyway, so I doubt it would be that difficult to design a non-toxic solution.

    Also, what if one of the nano-subs gets transferred to another person through an open wound.

    Again, because they have such a short lifespan this isn't a problem. They're not going to be able to do any damage - after all the whole reason for this is precision targetting of drugs rather than saturation, so there won't be that many of the things in your body at any one time.

  • Nature's engineering (Score:4)

    by Dan Hayes ( 212400 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @06:09AM (#605155)

    This is the sort of thing I think we'll be hearing a lot more of in coming years - a marraige between our increasing ability to design and manufacture things at a sub-microscopic level and Nature's vast wealth of tried and tested designs for all kinds of systems.

    It makes far more sense for scientists to utilise a design that is commonly found in Nature than it is to design their own. After all, evolutionary pressures mean that the propeller design of bacterium like salmonella has undergone a far more rigorous selection procedure than even the most quality-conscious engineering team will ever adhere to. Why waste so much effort in designing a likely-inferior system?

    It makes a lot of sense to adapt existing systems to our purposes rather than designing everything from scratch. You can bet that prototypes would be a lot further away than a year without this synthesis of man and Nature. Very interesting indeed.

  • This [bbc.co.uk] has just been reported.

    Och aye!

  • It makes a lot of sense to adapt existing systems to our purposes rather than designing everything from scratch. You can bet that prototypes would be a lot further away than a year without this synthesis of man and Nature.

    So what you're saying is that Nature is Open Source.

    I like it.

  • I don't want one of these things inside me taking a wrong turn, and ending up dropping drugs in the wrong place, or even worse, puncturing a capillary, or other body organ.

    Good point. Why, just last week, I punctured more capillaries than I could count when I accidentally sat on a thumbtack. The experience was horrible and frightening enough in and of itself, but the worst came when my insurance provider just laughed and hung up on me when I tried to file a claim!

    $ man reality

  • what if the bacteria mutated? I really don't like the thought or that. Or if it malfunctioned and released all the treatment at once
    how do they intend to control its behavour i wonder?
    How will it protect itself from other benine ( for us) bacteria living inside us. If anything attempted to destroy it the treatment would be realised?
  • I can see it now...

    "RIAA using extraterrestrial bacteria to propel nano-subs in bloodstream to delete memories of MP3s..."
    --

  • I expect this tech also to be used to clean lungs from tar in the future.
  • You're probably thinking of Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis otherwise known as PAM, this is caused by the organism, Naegleria fowleri (causing death in around a week) or acanthamoebic keratitis (GAE) (causing death in around a week to 1 year).

    PAM is usually caught by swimming and inhailing icky water. GAE is normally only found in people with compromised immune systems. They have also been found in people using "home made" contact lens solution!

    There only a few cases a year of either infection a year the USA, about 100 in the past 25 years.

    For more fun diseases check out the "Bad Bug Book" at the Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition http://http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~mow/chap29.html

    -Fooby
  • Hey, I have to work today and I'm in the U.S.A. Course, I'm all alone, so I can use all the bandwidth for myself, for really important things (like downloading gigs of pr0n and mp3s) and not have all those Word docs and Excel spreadsheets clogging up the network.
  • Your immune system is designed to react to organic intruders, not synthetic ones. Modern medicine inserts (and leaves in) countless synthetic products into patients, including: screws, plates, needles, threads, pacemakers, sponges :), etc.

    Your immune system is normally triggered by the presence of protein-based entities in your blood. The little nanosubs appeared to have the bacterial parts completely encased in the synthetic subs. Your immune system would probably just ignore it.

  • BBC also reports on Nanocopter s leave the drawing board [bbc.co.uk].

    These aren't bacteria-powered, but use ATP, also note that as opposed to the "nano subs", these ones aren't just simulated, but actually built, although with a low success ratio and it will take "years" to make them work inside living cells.

  • These motors will never be strong enough or fast enough to go "upstream" in the blood. This will only go downstream.
  • In the picture it looks as if the flagellas are 'swimming' against the rotors that drive the propeller shaft. Is this not akin to attempting to ride a bicycle by sitting on it and pushing forwards on the handlebars? Surely the force needs to be applied externally, ie. from the submarine body? or am I stupid?
  • Salmonella can quite often kill without treatment. However, it is typically a debilitating disorder, rather than a lethal one, with modern medicine involved. Plus I would hope that they would select a non-pathogenic "wild strain", although why they didn't choose to make a customised mutant one is beyond me.
  • His whole paragraph is basically wrong. He lacks basic immunology knowlege and concepts.

    And to boot al of his comments are modded up to 2 which doesn't make sense to me either.

    See my other post for a reasonable explanation of what might happen and what is wrong with his (roman_mir) explanation.
  • Salmonella lasts in your body up to a couple of weeks (And the spores can survive for months.) Your immune system seems to either ignore it or is completely outclassed. For a live demonstration of this, order the Chicken Crema at this mexican joint I ate at a few weeks ago...

    Someone had to put all that chaos there!
    ______ "Our 'n about"
    \_bi_/

  • Let's get a few things straight
    1 Bacteria only go with the bloodflow, they cant swim fast enought to go against the stream... Have you ever seen a science movie where you see the red blood cells go whizzing by?.. Pretty fast - you can barely see them, yet when you look in a reguklar microscope you can easily track the bacteria... Bacteria can cruise around in your lymphatic system, but that's another issue.

    2 The idea is to deliver a locally high concentration of a drug, or radioactive isotope to a specific area of the body, so that the systemic effects are lessened. The most comononly used methods used are
    1 direct injection
    2 make the drug/isotope "sticky" - hook it up to a part of an engineered antibody, or use chemical trapping, etc. This way it goes thru the whole body and winds up concentrating in the desired area.
    3 Make the drug active inly in certain areas.

    In order to use these little subs, some sort of steering system (chemotaxis) needs to be added on, or else they need to be made sticky so that they grab onto the site when they pass it by. Traveling outside the blood stream is probably out of the question, since the bacteria would have to fight their way thru every cell layer/membrane.

    I don't see how adding a little propellor gives you any advantage.

  • What do you classify frogs as? those are in pet stores.
  • What exactly would happen to me when thousands of salmonella or E. Coli are pumped into my blood?

    And furthermore, how would they know where to go?

    And even further more, what would possibly prevent them from dying by simple starvation?

    I believe these questions were the first to be addressed by these researchers, but the article isn't close to giving us real information.

    Flavio
  • They'll be fitted with GPS, obviously.
  • Somehow the though of E. Coli and Salmonella bacteria having drag races in my vains gives me the creeps. What if one of them takes a wrong turn?
  • You know, I can't wait to try these things out... Using a deadly bacteria to cure a probably more benign bacteria seems a little bit extreme if you ask me.

    But then again, it would be pretty cool to have mothers saying "Don't eat off him, you might get salmonella!"

    You know... just like eggs.
    ---
  • Speaking of submarines - juse make sure they don't name one as "Kursk" :) it's bound to explode and sink! :)

    Then the official explanations will be that it colided with an unknown NATO submarine... :)

    --
  • There's food in the subs.

    Well, salmonella food.

    Not turkey and pumpkins.

  • Its sole job is to seek out and destroy foreign organisms in the body. At the very least, I would expect it to attempt to immobilize and then flush out this nano-sub, if it could not destroy it. We've all read Fantastic Voyage, and know the problems those guys had with antibodies... (not to base my theories on a scene in a novel or anything:)

    If the only way to avoid this is by taking harsh immuno-suppressant drugs, there had better be huge benefits for me before you can convince me to have these things injected into my bloodstream. That said, cool tech!
  • This is just another step to becoming Borg, y'know.

    Someone must have thought of this by watching Star Trek Voyager.

    Looking at this, I can see how we become the Borg.

    We buy into all of this technology because it all looks so damn cool. Nanaprobes, the enhancement of the brain network interface, etc.

    There are certain elements to this that will be very attractive. And others that make 1984 a childrens story for pre-schoolers. At least it will be interesting, right?

    Sign me up right now!

    feh ...

  • At least they'll be able to cure you because they'll know what made you sick: the medicine.
  • The sub is coated in the blood of the patient, so it doesn't appear foreign.
  • A report I just heard on the radio said one in ten get ill - due to superbugs and poor hygiene (reuse of equipment, etc.).
  • The one year estimate is for *prototypes*. Now, while people in the computer business have a tendency of confusing prototypes with the final product, that's not the case outside our field.

    A prototype in one year looks pretty much a viable estimate. All technologies involved are well known, and it's "just" a matter of combining them.
  • You didn't see a real rat, then. Maybe those that you know are, but those that I know are definitely not. They are scary. One of them nearly killed a member of my family. Two of them would certainly kill him.

    IF I EVER SEE YOU I WILL KICK YOUR ASS!

    I'll drop you a note when I'm in England next time.
    --

  • Why waste the effort? Because Nature does not select the best design, just the design that is good enough. Would you say that human beings, or any other life form existing today, are perfect or even high quality? Immensely complicated, yes. Very efficiently assembled, yes. But the best solution. I don't think so.

    Also, Nature's "design solutions" often fall apart when applied to a problem that was not in the original scope of the solution. I doubt bacteria have been "designed" to push little carts around.

    While early effort will get a head start by apdapting existing systems, I do not doubt that in the future superior systems will be designed that are completely artificial

  • "They are focusing on a wild strain of Salmonella typhimurium because of its efficient mobility and relatively long lifespan of about an hour without food."
    So they don't entend to let them eat anything
    That mightn't be to bad, as long as they are sure they can't eat anything in us....:)
    "However, they are still hunting for bacteria with even more favourable traits. Sequeira says that feeding the bacteria to extend their life is not an option, because reproduction would gum up the system. However this wouldn't be an issue if only the flagella were used."
    About here i started thinking about jurassic park and how...." nature will always find a way "... hmm.
  • very poor ^^^
    To err is human,
    To really screw up, you need a computer!
  • > Using a deadly bacteria to cure a probably more benign bacteria seems a little bit extreme if you ask me.

    This is the principle on which most vaccinations are based - Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccine came from his observation that cowmaids, who caught the less deadly cowpox, did not get smallpox. The use of deadly bacteria is going on already - not just in this case, but others.

    And I had salmonella sandwiches for my lunch [or that might have salmon - I can't remember].
  • Isn't salmonella the cause of many deaths around?

    I don't think salmonella kills, but it's a huge source of food poisoning.

    Both salmonella and E. coli are found in intestines from birds and mammals, and E. coli are by far the most studied bacteria. I don't know why these are specially interesting to dump into one's bloodstream, though.

    Flavio

  • This is totally preposterous idea. How on earth will these submarines know what belongs to your body and what does not? In case of a virus your body produces billions of cells called markers and killers. In the first ten seconds of invasion a billion markers will be released and will die but will return information to your body about the invador. The next batch of markers will be ready to do the actual marking of foreign organisms in your body. They will attach themselves to the virii and will mark the virii for the killers to destroy them. In case when your body does not have a good immune system (due to your own choice of your lifestyle and due to the economics and the capitalist system that forces enterprises to use bad chemicals, hormons and lots of antibiotics to produce your food) you will start throwing nuclear bombs into your organism (various pills, antibiotics etc). These things kill EvErYtHiNg in your body, no matter if it is of your own production or is an invador. That's another reason why antibiotics are dangerous, they disable your own immune system.

    Basically, these subs are just another form of pills, but with fancier and more expensive packaging.

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