Hmmm …. Where have we heard of this kind of thing before?
It’s not just marketing when I say that all the data points in my novels are real; the fiction is how they’re put together. And of course the characters … mostly.
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“Breakthrough device heals organs with a single touch” – not quite. The (breathless) article to which you referred is not the only one that misrepresents what was actually done. Guess it doesn’t matter if it helps attract funding? This has also been driven by the exaggerated explanation of Dr. Chandan Sen, for example, “With this technology, we can convert skin cells into elements of any organ with just one touch”. Nonsense. I have read the paper and some of the references. There are no magical nano-bots involved. And certainly no “one-touch” anything. Any cell regeneration or change is achieved by injecting biomolecules designed for the purpose. The chip they speak of and the nano-channel etc is simply this: a nanometer-sized channel (in essence functioning as a very thin needle) that is used to deliver the nano-sized biomolecules. That’s it. Transfection is simply the introduction of DNA or some other biomolecule into cells – nanotransfection is transfection with nanometer-sized biomolecules (obviously delivered through a nanometer-sized “needle”) And they also stick a positive and negative electrode into the person (mouse) to zap the area with an electrical field to activate the delivery of the biomolecules. Very simplified but that’s it. They, as have others, have developed a device to deliver very precise quantities of a substance to a cell. The nano part is simply that the channel that the substance flows through into a cell has a width measured in nanometers – no nano-bots!
Below is a quote from one of their papers that says the same thing:
“Many transfection techniques can deliver biomolecules into cells, but the dose cannot be controlled precisely. Delivering well-defined amounts of materials into cells is important for various biological studies and therapeutic applications. Here, we show that nanochannel electroporation can deliver precise amounts of a variety of transfection agents into living cells. The device consists of two microchannels connected by a nanochannel. The cell to be transfected is positioned in one microchannel using optical tweezers, and the transfection agent is located in the second microchannel. Delivering a voltage pulse between the microchannels produces an intense electric field over a very small area on the cell membrane, allowing a precise amount of transfection agent to be electrophoretically driven through the nanochannel, the cell membrane and into the cell cytoplasm, without affecting cell viability. Dose control is achieved by adjusting the duration and number of pulses. The nanochannel electroporation device is expected to have high-throughput delivery applications”.
So, do you see this as something bad?
Could Nimrod have used something similar to become Gibborim?
Coming soon to right hands and foreheads near you…