NSG/ Meeting Announcement

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From: Fred Hapgood <fhapgood@j7FArTZ69T_5LcbxdDSVM8ai-2Ac3pcUPVl-VfoSiMWkqyiaYJ6j5FDV-rJuYdbQzGoM1o3dLXMdWkRwtA.yahoo.invalid>

Meeting notice: The 99.10.5 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at 
the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the 
corner of Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't 
recognize us, ask the manager.  He'll probably know where we are. 

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Suugested topic: 

	Roads to NT: Time to declare a winner? 


In 1986 Drexler outlined a couple of different paths to NT, 
defined as the construction of a general-purpose self- 
replicating programmable molecular assembler.  (There are of 
course other definitions.) One development arc ran through an 
ever more capable biotechnology; another, through building an 
assembler ab novo, first by using smart molecular CAD/CAM 
systems, and then making and assembling the parts with synthetic 
chemistry or some pick-and- place system built out of arrays of 
STM tips or both.     

While both these development strategies have the same end, they 
differ in mode and tempo.  The biotech route was imagined as  
snaking through hundreds of thousands of different projects, each 
with its own near-term goal, almost none of which would be 
primarily focussed on assemblers.   The theory was that 
assemblers would just emerge out the steady stream of 
improvements developed to deal with a constantly expanding 
universe of applications.  

By contrast, the ab novo strategy would look much like a single 
coherent research project, one in which people were thinking 
about assemblers as such right from the start.  The ab novo 
strategy had the advantage of illustrating and dramatizing the 
concept unambiguously, and perhaps for that reason most of the 
conversation about NT, with its interest in pushing atoms around 
on surfaces or building up designs for graspers and rod logic, 
seems to assume that as the preferred path of development.  

However it is perhaps time to come to terms with the fact that 
over the last 10 years or so the biotech strategy has opened what 
looks like an immense lead over ab novo in the assembler races.

In more detail, the assemblers-through-biotech agenda runs as 
follows: Phase I: transplanting naturally evolved genes among 
nonconspecific organisms; II: developing new genes (i.e., coding 
the nucleotides directly); and III: rebuilding the biological 
cell so as to support a steadily larger repetoire of reactions 
and elements.  Dig a bit into III, the theory goes, and before 
you know it you have an assembler sufficiently general-purpose 
for victory to be declared.   

While certainly full of question marks, this is a relatively 
clear road map, especially as compared to any available for ab 
novo, which has as yet no good, or even bad, idea of what an 
assembler will look like or how it will be built.   The progress 
of biotech as measured against this map seems quite impressive.  
Phase I, with perhaps 10,000 plant biotech development projects 
(some estimates run much higher than that) now underway, is 
expanding dramatically in several sectors (food, research, drugs, 
specialty materials, and even information technology: using 
biological organisms as environmental monitors).

Further, a number of research projects are buzzing into phases II 
and III above.  While noone is using the equivalent of an 
assembly language for sequencing as yet (though rational drug 
design is not far off), genes are now routinely made by 
stitching together bits of sequences taken from many different 
genes (taken in turn from many different species) via artificial 
recombination. [Nature v.391, n.6664, (1998): 288-291; 
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United 
States of America, v.94, n.9, (1997): 4504-4509.]  This is 
clearly Phase II work. Another example is inducing mutagenesis, 
transplanting the mutants into host organisms, filtering the host 
population for an improvement in the desired property, growing a 
new population out of the best of the breed, introducing yet 
another cycle of mutations, and so on.   
(http://www.che.caltech.edu/groups/fha/Enzyme/directed.html)

There seem to be fewer Phase III projects, but the work on 
improving the control and computational capacities of cells  now 
underway in Tom Knight's Microbial Engineering Lab 
(http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/tk/tk.html) qualifies. (See also 
Ralph Merkle's "Biotechnology as a route to nanotechnology" at 
http://www.merkle.com/papers/bionano.html.) 


The ab novo track crosses many interesting subjects, and there is 
every reason to continue to keep an interest in it.  However to 
the degree that one is focussed on the issue of assembler 
development, it may be a waste of time to pay attention to much 
outside of biotech.  Biotech is cheap, the pool of expertise and 
investment is growing rapidly, the number of potential 
applications is very large, work is underway in many 
jurisdictions, and the tools at hand for distributing information 
as it emerges could hardly be more powerful.  It may bring us to 
the doors of NT long before those of us trained to think in terms 
of an ab novo assembler project have been expecting it.


		-- Fred Hapgood





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