From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Nov 27 2002 - 12:45:34 MST
On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, Peter C. McCluskey wrote:
> I suspect that the simulations that will be most relevant to early
> assemblers will be even less accurate than GROMACS, and that a fair
> amount of trial and error in the labs will be needed to come up with
> something that works.
Now come on Peter -- Montemagno already has rotary nanotech motors
that he can turn on and off. What would be interesting to know is
how much lab work was required to figure out how to add a zinc
binding site to jam the motor to turn it off. There are no
shortage of zinc binding site prototypes to draw on in biology
if you want to add one to a protein that doesn't have one.
There is even an entire company (Sangamo) that is in part devoted
to engineering them.
I agree that trial and error may be necessary -- that seems to me
to be built into the engineering process at least for now. But
what is different is the scale and the parallelism -- if Montemagno
wanted to randomly mutate his protein to "discover" which proteins
zinc atoms were able to stop he could do 1500+ experiments of
that type at the same time (given available technology). While
completely exploring that phase space is a huge task -- some
semi-intelligent guessing as to what to mutate would limit the size
of the task considerably.
I think what many fail to consider is that as the size scale decreases
the costs fall, the parallelism rises and the experimental approaches
that can be used become much different (and more productive).
Now perhaps simulations may be the way to go -- but you are assuming
that the costs of developing real nanotech parts and running experiments
on them does not decrease below the cost of the simulations (which I
presume are running on non-nano electricity). It isn't clear that is
how it may play out.
Robert
(And yes E. Shaun, if you are watching over my shoulder, I'm aware I
may be over the posting limit today. Bad Robert! But the topics
do seem discussion worthy.)
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