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April 3, 2006
How Much is That Dragon in the Window?
Mythological creatures here they come! Rogue geneticist and business man GeneDupe is at it again. He believes that one day, we all could have dragons as pets - or any creature we wanted; myth or self-invented. The vehicle to deliver this "miracle"? Virtual cell biology.
Biology has a lot in common with computing since both are about processing information. The general difference is one is biochemical and the other is electronic. His theories about virtual cell biology could allow us to accurately model a cell in every biochemical detail. All animals use the same basic building blocks - mitochondria for energy processing, endoplasmic reticulum for making proteins, and golgi body for protein assembly.
By building an electronic version of these building blocks, GeneDupe's scientists can customize results so that it belongs to a particular species by loading it with a virtual copy of that animal's genome. Since it's all virtual, the whole growth process is accelerated to form an adult.
Here comes the fantastic part; by selectively "breeding" virtual models of real animals (lets say a lizard) and carefully combining it with other animals and then cross breading it's offspring to keep only the wanted mutations - we could end up with a real virtual dragon.
The final step is to make it all happen for real. That means taking a cell, removing it's nucleus and replacing it with a customized one, then let nature do the rest.
Kinda scary but kinda cool since I would LOVE to have me a little pet dragon, but I take it all with a grain of salt. After all, this is the same guy that claimed he could make goldfish with real gold skin cells. He was actually successful. Unfortunately gold is one of the heavier elements and the poor goldfish just sank straight to the bottom.
via Economist
NOTE: If you didn't know, this is just an April Fool's Joke. Yes pretty late but I had a cute picture of a dragon and this article went great with it.
Posted by tranism at 3:24 PM | Permalink
Comments
April Fools!
The "Real Goldfish" was a joke too, which the Economist published last year.
It WOULD be cool, though-- but no such luck.
Posted by: Lou at April 3, 2006 3:49 PM