Each week, Bowdoin Chief Information Officer Mitch Davis offers a look at news and trends in technology, gadgets, inventions, or just something worth checking out. It’s called “One Cool Thing.”
Spider Nanobots (Gizmodo.com)
The other night over dinner, Bowdoin Trustee John Gibbons ’64 mentioned that he had just seen pictures of manufactured forms of life, or “nanobots,” assembled from DNA components. I looked around and found a picture along with an article explaining what the scientist did to create these new forms of life. This is beyond cool, and could be the next revolution in manufacturing.
As these machines become increasingly complex, I’m sure there will be some debate about when they become a life form and have rights. Blade Runner comes to mind when I think about where this could be headed.
According to an article on the Web site, Gizmodo: “The robots can walk and turn left or right using their single-strand enzymatic DNA legs. Those legs are biochemically attracted to the components of a longer string of DNA, which is used as a track. Milan Stojanovic—the leader of the study—describes how this works: ‘After the robot is released from its start site by a trigger strand, it follows the track by binding to and then cutting the DNA strands.’ Obviously, the nanobots don’t think on their own. They follow the tracks that scientists prepare for them, and then hand their cargo to the other nanobots. In the experiment, these things build gold structures following different chemical commands.”
