Archetype Now

Words: Dr Rajgopal NIDAMBOOR

It would be apt to say that technology is more than a process, a body of knowledge, also something beyond it — a collection of artefacts — just like biology’s ever-expanding context, where scientists are deciphering challenges inherent to taking biology to the next level as a form of human technology.

You’d think of it as the science of biological systems, juxtaposed by the technology used to manoeuvring them. As Robert L Carlson observed, “The development of new mathematical, computational, and laboratory tools will facilitate the engineering of biological artefacts — up to and including organisms and ecosystems (in the real world)” This is more than what meets the eye when one looks at a fascinating, panorama — synthetic biology.

“Synthetic biology,” as Shimyn Slomovic, et al, put it “employs a forward-engineering approach to create new molecular function. In the field’s earliest stages, engineering principles guided the design and construction of synthetic gene regulatory circuits, such as toggle switches and ring oscillators which quickly led to the development of logic, sensor, counter, and timer elements. These capabilities continue to grow in complexity and now include biomolecular circuits that can interrogate both intra- and inter-cellular spaces and, in response, direct downstream activity of other engineered components, as well as endogenous cellular elements.”

They add, “Although there is not a clear consensus regarding a definition of the boundaries of synthetic biology, it is widely accepted that squarely within them is the aspiration to use synthetic circuitry and other engineered components to create novel functions inside cells. In the context of diagnostics, synthetic biology design efforts are typically focused on building sensors that are coupled to a measurable output. These circuits are the outcome of the engineered assembly of natural molecular components, which have been rewarded with survival for their functional performance through aeons of natural selection. Biology is enriched with an incredible molecular diversity of sensors and regulators that help maintain organism homeostasis, find resources, and avoid deleterious stresses. Synthetic biologists are beginning to draw on this diversity of sensors and regulatory elements, incorporating them into gene networks and applying their own design criteria of selection for use within novel synthetic architectures. [This] rationale is being applied to confront the growing need for novel diagnostic tools and capabilities.” 

Yet, the argument prevails — in a related context. Our technology of biological chemistry, in its totality, needs analyses, while the technology of biological computation remains somewhat ‘unfathomed.’ Interestingly, the likeness of engineering with biomechanics is itself rich enough to supply extraordinary insights into biological chemistry and bio-computation. Prokaryotes, for example, are biochemical geniuses, directing basic chemistry to making their living and also identifying their roles, although they do extraordinarily little orchestration with external mechanical forces.

Some thinkers observe that the absence of structural metals, in biology, is proof enough that animals would be far better off if only they had them. You’d, perhaps, not concur with such a premise, though you’d be somewhat lured to. Here’s another analogy. The pliability of metals explains for their elevated toughness, but organisms have found other routes to attain it. And, if ‘elasticity’ underlines the usage of metals in human technology, there’s nothing like a mechanism at work that would allow an animal to mend a deformed tooth, or correct a scarred face.

The argument that the metals we use in our technology — iron and aluminium — were ignored by evolution, because of their poor presence in seawater, therefore, holds no great weight when investigated from the geological standpoint. Three billion years ago, when free oxygen was a scarce commodity, iron and uranium were delicately soluble, so much so that the great iron deposits on our living planet are evidence of the ‘crystallisation’ of iron that helped oxidative photosynthesis to come of age.

The inference? As we come to grips with the rapidly-expanding fields of biotechnology and nanotechnology, cultivated comparisons of the duo are cock-a-hoop to transforming the way we look at either archetype and also human life—in the future.

And, for all the good reasons.

Dr RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR, PhD, is a wellness physician-writer-editor, independent researcher, critic, columnist, author and publisher. His published work includes hundreds of newspaper, magazine, web articles, essays, meditations, columns, and critiques on a host of subjects, eight books on natural health, two coffee table tomes and an encyclopaedic treatise on Indian philosophy. He is Chief Wellness Officer, Docco360 — a mobile health application/platform connecting patients with Ayurveda, homeopathic and Unani physicians, and nutrition therapists, among others, from the comfort of their home — and, Editor-in-Chief, ThinkWellness360.

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