

Natural protein vs. designed (nano)machines - ph0rque
http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2009/05/natural-protein-vs-designed-machines.html

======
davi
_biology sets lower bounds for what is possible_

I was surprised when I evaluated this to be a true statement. As a biologist
I'm used to marveling at how optimal everything seems in the natural world,
and at how evolutionarily distant organisms converge on the same form given
similarity between ecological niches. But take flight as an example: we can
fly orders of magnitude faster than the fastest flying organism. The upper end
of the biological case _is_ the lower bound of what is possible. The early use
of the biological example was to inform us that flight was possible at all.

More directly related to the topic of the article, this New Yorker piece, on a
new class of therapeutic compounds for correcting protein folding errors:

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/04/090504fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/04/090504fa_fact_groopman)

~~~
Hexstream
"The early use of the biological example was to inform us that flight was
possible at all."

If there had never been any birds, would(n't) we have invented planes
eventually anyway?

~~~
davi
I bet we wouldn't have started thinking about it in the 9th century...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbas_Ibn_Firnas>

------
joe_the_user
"I have an additional speculation: that a protein that was too stable would be
hard to break down and re-use for spare parts, once it gets damaged by
cellular metabolic products (or any of a number of other mechanisms). \---
Drexler suggests that people designing protein machines should not be afraid
to try to do things differently, and better, than biology. I agree."

There's a hidden with this line of reasoning - by the first line of reason, it
quite likely that a highly stable nano-machines would be toxic because it
could not be broken down in the manner of a protein and would thus accumulate
in the body if it operated similarly to a protein. It is just about guaranteed
that any form of nanomachine you create would wide-up spread about the
environment. Could be a problem.

