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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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MAY 25, 2004
When Business Imitates Life Part 3 of an excerpt from It's Alive discusses how biologists' grasp of life's tiniest elements is shifting the economy's makeup It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business by Christopher Meyer and Stan Davis Chapter 1: Learning from Life Cycles The Next Economic Life Cycle There are two threads here: a greater understanding of the molecules that control chemical and biological functions and the super-miniaturization of manufacturing. They are converging to give us the ability to see, simulate, and manipulate matter at the molecular level. The result is an enormous acceleration in biotechnology, to be followed by the development of novel materials and the takeoff of nanotechnology. Collectively, these three developments are what we call the "molecular economy." On the day we did final proofing of the manuscript for It's Alive, a story appeared in the New York Times headlined "Scientists of Very Small Draw Disciplines Together," and began with by stating that Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology, and Cognitive science "are converging into a new field of science vital to the nation's security and economic clout" They call it NBIC (and it's so new no one knows whether to say "NIB-bick" or "EN-bick,"). The article reported on a three-day meeting in Los Angeles that attracted participants like the National Science Foundation, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, not to mention investors. The Times continued: "The organizers say the greatest opportunities lie in bridging the gaps between the rapidly growing ranks of nanoengineers and researchers in other fields . . . because all the activities of living cells are governed by nanoscale interactions of atoms and small molecules."  Call it NBIC or call it molecular science, it is the convergence at the molecular level that is new, and it's the science driving the next economic wave. At the Xerox PARCs of today, in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Diego, California, scientists have gotten down to "the bottom" of things. Researchers now have the technological prowess to push individual atoms around, to make images of genes in action, and of individual proteins as they fold. At IBM, physicists have managed to slow down light in order to "capture" a photon. At the University of Konstanz in Germany, researchers have created an optical microscope that uses a single fluorescent molecule as its light source. Feats of biological manipulation include genetically modified organisms, highly controversial creations such as corn plants endowed with pest resistance by the insertion of bacterial genes into the corn genome. Scientists, giving new meaning to the term "monkey shines," have monkeyed with the genes of a rhesus monkey to give him a gene for bioluminescence borrowed from a jellyfish.  Zeiss, an optics company headquartered in Germany, has taken the traditional electron microscope, given it a laser-powered "cut and paste" component, and turned it into, essentially, "PhotoShop" for cells. A laser can excise a piece of tissue as small as a chromosome. Then photonic pressure can catapult that chromosome directly into the cap of a microfuge tube. Future applications include transferring drugs or genetic material into cells without needles. Simply cut and paste. This control of the very small arises in part from the desire to make even smaller electronics. IBM has developed a transistor made not of silicon but from a nanotube (a structure made of a handful of carbon atoms) that can compete at lab scale with the leading prototypes of silicon transistors. And Isaac Chuang, a professor at the MIT Media Lab's Center for Bits and Atoms, built a quantum computer that uses the spinning nuclei of atoms to represent the ones and zeros of binary code.
BW MALL
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