DailyDirt: There Will Be Blood… And DNA And Stem Cells
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Biotechnology takes time to grow and develop new stuff, but every so often, there’s a big leap. And then it still takes time to verify results and perform rigorous double blind medical studies. Science fiction and CSI TV shows make it seem like we’ll be re-growing body parts and curing every disease before the next commercial break. Unfortunately, biology rarely moves that fast. Here are just a few cool biotech projects that won’t be available at your local drug store anytime soon, but these sci-fi-sounding projects are closer to reality now.
- Artificial human blood could be mass produced someday soon, providing a nearly limitless supply of type-O blood. This process could solve a lot of medical problems, but it could also bring out the vampires…. [url]
- The DNA laser printer can print custom strands of DNA — to arbitrary lengths and with 100% accuracy. It doesn’t quite match the sophistication of biological DNA synthesis, but being able to (cheaply!) create long stretches of custom DNA will make some biological studies a bit easier to do. [url]
- Surprisingly, it’s not that difficult to obtain pluripotent stem cells from mice. Putting blood cells from a young mouse in a mildly acidic solution for about 30 minutes seems to do the trick — but researchers are still trying to figure out exactly how this trick works so that they might be able to do it with adult human cells. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: biology, biotech, blood, dna, health, medicine, stem cells, synthetic biology
Comments on “DailyDirt: There Will Be Blood… And DNA And Stem Cells”
Biotime
Actually, Dr West of Biotime (BTX) can take your cells and make them into pluripotent stem cells even with long telomeres so that they are young again.
Sorry to burst the bubble but Haruko Obokata’s work into stem cells are under scrutiny for Scientific Misconduct.
http://www.newsweek.com/haruko-obokata-who-claimed-stem-cell-breakthrough-found-guilty-scientific-239000
whoa, wait, printable DNA?
This sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. I’ll just print myself up an army of invincible warrior creatures to take over the world!
Re: whoa, wait, printable DNA?
At first you will only have an army of invincible warrior babies, which you have to feed, raise and educate/train.
Unless someone develops some kind of dna memory transplant thingy.
Cloning is only feasable for organs, as they don’t need a mind of their own to work, it is organic machinery if you will.
If you can upload/download consciousnesses/minds/training, you’re in a whole other league of evil geniuses.
At least it’is nice that they are developing TruBlood.