As a technologist, I have mixed feelings when I see the fascinating details of life. On one hand, mastering this molecular machine would give us literally God-like powers: we could fabricate, grow or heal anything. We could solve all current problems, we could terraform planets using a few milligrams of DNA and literally redefine what it means to be human.<p>On the other, I see the human body as a completely unsecured cybernetic system, that can be so easily tricked to pick up any random bit of programming and insert it into it's own code. There is no forethought or design, no rational defense, just good enough systems that have evolved randomly against non-rational adversaries that happened to emerge out of the protein soup surrounding us.<p>The troubling fact is that mastering the wondrous biomolecular machine necessarily comes with the power to kill every human on the planet. Truly God-like powers.
I think articles like Ken Shirriff's "Cells are very fast and crowded places"[1] are good companions for visualizations like this. It helps to keep in mind that the things moving around in cells are flying around at break-neck speeds if you scale them up linearly.<p>1 - <a href="http://www.righto.com/2011/07/cells-are-very-fast-and-crowded-places.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.righto.com/2011/07/cells-are-very-fast-and-crowde...</a>
Absolutely insane how this is actual reality. That millions of people have died from such a small object that seems to have more creativity and complexity than I’ve ever seen.
The amazing part for me was that virus "code" automatically finds the unrelated host "code" in what is effectively an equivalent of space travel inside a host body, does copy and paste to insert itself somewhere in host code and everything just works! I can't think of any of our computing models that is capable of doing this and so robust at errors.
Makes one really wonder just what, exactly, is out there mindlessly gobbling and reproducing itself in an endless quest to just keep going. Puts human life in perspective too. We're all just mindless gobblers when zoomed out enough.
When I see the animations I can't stop thinking about a Turing machine. How it works in a similar fashion, copying symbols to keep track of the program while generating the result in the process.<p>It will be nice to know if you can build a Turing complete machine using DNA and the cellular mechanisms. <a href="https://www.quora.com/Is-DNA-a-Turing-machine" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Is-DNA-a-Turing-machine</a>
Related to this type of animation, there is a great book called "The Machinery of Life" that talks abut molecular level biology with amazing illustrations. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Life-David-S-Goodsell/dp/0387849246" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Life-David-S-Goodsell/dp/03...</a>
A better animation is the winner of the AutoPACK challenge few years back:
<a href="https://vimeo.com/62635232" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/62635232</a><p>Those guys did an awesome job because:
a) use of brownian motion
b) sick af music.
Living in 2018 is quite a privilege. Most microbiologists who spent their lives trying to puzzle this out won't get to sit back and watch the answer.
This is why I'll never go on tinder or screw around, frightened about getting stds. My friends act like STDs are no big deal and joke around about the times they've contracted chlamydia and gonorrhea etc like it's a cost of doing business (getting laid).<p>I'll stick to long term relationship.
Amazing! So there is self-replicating, self-modifying code (HIV quickly mutates to avoid detection) code, that sometimes jumps into middle of an instruction (GAG proteins being cut into the enveloping proteins).