“I am going to the store to pick up a container of Spanish. Would you like one?”
In the same way we pick up yogurt, a bacteria infested treat with probiotic benefits. We will eventually be able to purchase probiotic food laced with Synthetically engineered machines that impart us with cool new features like speaking a new language. Cognitive Enhancers exist currently but are taken in pill format and are probably not very healthy in the long run.
Just like Melange, “The Spice” from Dune that enhanced the user to the point of mutating a select few with the ability to fold space was basically worm poop.
These new abilites might be added by Sythetic Biology or Genetic Modification to foods by living organisms like L.Bulgaricus, S.Thermophilus, and bifidobacterium, bifidus regularis.
Bacteria has already been modified to fight cancer, fight cavities, combat HIV, take pictures, produce sweetners, make biofuel and do math.
Perhaps this technology might be obtainable on the black market first, like the maggot infested aphrodisiacal cheese from Sardinia Casu Marzu.
The folks that will eventually bring us this technology are being fostered currently through programs like iGEM and their knowledge is being collected at places like The Parts Registry.
iGem is a yearly competition to create synthetic bio-machines from BioBricks, or life building blocks.
The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGem) is the premiere undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition. Student teams are given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Working at their own schools over the summer, they use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells.
Broader goals of iGEM include:
- To enable the systematic engineering of biology.
- To promote the open and transparent development of tools for engineering biology.
- And to help construct a society that can productively apply biological technology.
The new-ish field of study that is developing on the groundworkk of Genetic Modification is called Synthetic Biology.
Synthetic Biology is fundamentally about the union of Biology and Engineering, and the following video explains it in a short and concise manner.
here is a list of subfields from a survey of Synthetic Biology.
- Genome Design and Construction
- Applied Protein Design
- Natural Product Synthesis
- Creation of Standardized Biological Parts and Circuits