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The Newest 'Information Technology' Is Actually the Oldest

10/27/2004

By Terry Calhoun

Adding "Wet Drive" Storage to Your Hippocampus

At a recent Society for Neuroscience meeting, a multi-disciplinary and multi-laboratory team from six campuses says it is now "no longer a question of if, but when they will have a silicon implant chip that can allow people with injuries or diseases that destroy their memory functions to utilize silicon technology for extra memory storage. Now, I can't imagine even for a second that once such a thing is available, there will be an inevitable consumer demand for it. Personally, I would never undergo cosmetic surgery to change the shape of my nose or plump up my lips--but I surely would strongly desire an implant that would give me more brain memory space, perhaps even to the point of eidetic memory.

Enjoying Your Cake and Keeping It, Too

Nanotechnologists want to build tools and robots that are as small as the smallest viruses. The biggest problem in that field right now is how to move the molecules around when there aren't physical tools to do that. Recent research at the University of Michigan describes a possible way to create molecular structures with "sticky patches" on them that cause the particles to stick to each other in just the right way to create different shapes like sheets of spheres, chains, rings, and staircase assemblies of a size which can then be physically manipulated into larger but still non-level structures.

Those scientists know that we already do "nanotechnology"--in our bodies. Inside our cells are functional areas that are, functionally, nano-assemblers with instructions encoded to build physical (biological) structures from the raw stuff of elements and molecules. When the researchers can duplicate that--and it is just a matter of time--we may be into an age where I can send my mother a birthday cake by sending digital instructions to a molecular assembly device inside her home computer. It builds her an exact duplicate that she and our family back in Ohio and West Virginia can enjoy, while I keep the original in my home in Ann Arbor.

And then my mother and I each would have the ability to have another cake built just like it--we will be able to eat our cake and keep it, too.

Getting Rid of Physics Envy--Biology as an Information Science

Some researchers are implanting research to apply integrated systems theory to the understanding of the human body--at all levels.

"Systems biologists aim to understand how cells work by seeing biology as a network of systems, consisting of genes written in DNA, which send messages about the cell written in RNA, which provide the recipes for proteins, which do the work of life in our bodies. Understanding the networks will lead to tests that will identify diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and AIDS." Full article here.

This is part of a "digital revolution" in biology that, to biologists, d'esn't mean things like laptops and wireless, but instead the research and practical consequences that are stemming from the understanding that DNA, the recipe for life, is a digital code, and biology is really an information science. Understanding the body in systems theory means that in your future is a commode that d'es thousands of diagnostic tests every time you go to the bathroom, and communicates the information directly into your medical records.

So, the newest stuff that we are calling an information technology is actually billions of years old, and we've gotten to this better understanding of it using the silicon-based information technology that is only a few decades old. Sometimes technology is just amazing.

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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