Cognisant
Prolific Member
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- Yesterday 5:48 PM
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- Dec 12, 2009
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Does anyone know much about this?
I'm aware of rats and other small to medium sized animals being selectively bred in labs, various microbes being developed by exposure to increasingly harsh conditions, and plants being altered by way of grafting, how else is it done?
It interests me that with sufficient time and money it seems feasible to use the mechanisms already in nature to evolve an animal, plant, insect or microbe into something specific, especially considering how efficient biology can be, consider the power to weight ratio of human muscle or how we can do all the stuff we do on a measly 8700kg or less.
I'm particularly interested in the idea of creating a symbiote that can take DNA from several cells, cross reference it, and then use that amended DNA to correct cellular degeneration in its host. Bear in mind I am talking out of my ass here, but cellular degeneration does seem to be an issue of maintaining data integrity and that's something we're damn good at in computer science, so if we could apply that knowledge to biology perhaps we could slow aging a bit, maybe even eleminate it on a cellular level.
I'm aware of rats and other small to medium sized animals being selectively bred in labs, various microbes being developed by exposure to increasingly harsh conditions, and plants being altered by way of grafting, how else is it done?
It interests me that with sufficient time and money it seems feasible to use the mechanisms already in nature to evolve an animal, plant, insect or microbe into something specific, especially considering how efficient biology can be, consider the power to weight ratio of human muscle or how we can do all the stuff we do on a measly 8700kg or less.
I'm particularly interested in the idea of creating a symbiote that can take DNA from several cells, cross reference it, and then use that amended DNA to correct cellular degeneration in its host. Bear in mind I am talking out of my ass here, but cellular degeneration does seem to be an issue of maintaining data integrity and that's something we're damn good at in computer science, so if we could apply that knowledge to biology perhaps we could slow aging a bit, maybe even eleminate it on a cellular level.