Bacteria and Nanotechnology : Genetic engineering lessons for the “Masters of the Biosphere”

Excerpt from image under Creative Commons Attribution license. Photographer: juvetson (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson). Accessed 9 March 10.

What is life? According to Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, it is bacteria (111), the first life on the planet, the developers of the metabolic processes that all life depends on to this day. Life is bacterial, or complex forms that evolved from it.

Bacteria altered the Earth, drastically. Our early environment held miniscule amounts of oxygen, before the blue-green bacteria evolved aerobic metabolic processes that caused the release of this toxin – And it was a toxin; many forms of bacteria were destroyed during the millennia of oxidation that followed. The amount of environmental damage produced by these bacteria was far beyond all the damage committed by humans in the last couple centuries – and yet life adapted, and what had once been a poison became a resource. This encourages hope that as a species we might find ways of turning our pollutants into resources . . . or, at least, that other species may do so in the future after our own demise.

So much of our existence is dependent on the actions of organisms that measurable in nanometers – is it any wonder, then, that people might we interested in exploring this realm themselves? Nanotechnology is a term used to refer to a wide variety of only somewhat-related activities: the development of nanometer-thick coatings and materials, progressively smaller mechanical devices, quantum computing, genetic engineering of viruses and bacteria (“synthetic biology”), even the dream of self-replicating molecular machines to complete any task imaginable. While many of these technologies are likely far-future concerns – if they ever can be developed – a study of the metaphors implicit in discussions on these subjects can be very valuable when considering the ways that we think about bacteria, but also life, our own bodies, and the environments and societies that surround us.

These metaphors consist of:

• The computation model of genetics; genetics as information, to be programmed in to a biological machine.
• The designer / engineer model; molecules of all forms serving mechanical functions that are most efficiently harnessed when organized completely by human design.
• The different-scales model; biological processes as a set of complex chemical processes that are the most appropriate and efficient for the particular conditions in which, and the scale at which, biological processes interact.

If a nano-machine can be a machine, a computer-programmable device, and / or a set of biological processes, what does that say about bacteria? What does it say about our bodies, carrying with them (or as part of them?) more bacteria than we have cells? What does it say about the collection of cells that make up our bodies, and therefore about any environment or society in which we might exist? What does it say, if we are more than our bodies, about ourselves?

We can certainly say the following:

• Life is complex, both in its mechanisms and the ways that we might consider its processes. Anything that acts in similar complexity to a life form will need to be considered in an equally complex fashion.
• Scale matters; forces that affect us heavily have less comparative affect on smaller objects (the strong force affects atoms more obviously than does gravity, for example), and vice versa on larger ones.

As de Menezes stated (during an in-class lecture), art – like science – can be a form of thought experiment, an asking of, ‘what if?’. If so, is there much difference between the process of scientific discovery, artistic creation, and the slow evolutionary ‘discoveries’ of life? Maybe it’s just a matter of scale. Maybe the bacteria know something we don’t.

Hopefully we’ll learn it in time.

Class-Assigned Readings

Margulis, Lynn and Dorian Sagan. “Masters of the biosphere”. What is Life? Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995. 87-111.

de Menezes, Marta. “Decon: Deconstruction, Decontamination, Decomposition”. Decon. Ectopia, 2009. 1-28.

Additional References

Atkinson, William Illsey. Nanocosm : Nanotechnology and the Big Changes Coming from the Inconceivably Small. New York : Amacom, 2003.

Drexler, K. Eric. Nanosystems : Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation. NY : Wiley, 1992.

Elliot, William H. and Daphne C. Elliott. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 4th Edition. Oxford : Oxford U Press, 2009.

Feynman, Richard P. “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom : An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics”. <http://zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html>. Accessed 2 March 10.

Kunz, Robert G. and Louis Theodore. Nanotechnology : Environmental Implications and Solutions. Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Interscience, 2005.

Regis, Ed. Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition : Science Slightly Over the Edge. Reading, Mass : Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1990.

UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service. Downsizing Development : An Introduction to Nano-scale Technologies and the Implications for the Global South. NGLS Development Dossier. New York and Geneva : United Nations, 2008.