April 29, 2016 • 43 mins
Now that we know all about DNA, let's talk about how we can use it in technology. From diodes to computer storage, we explore the uses of DNA.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, if it
says G T C A C G A C A
(00:21):
G G, then you shouldn't eat trimp or nuts. I'm
Jonathan Stricklin, I'm Lauren Folk, and I'm Joe McCormick. That
was a strange one, But today is going to be
part two of a two part episode we're doing on
d n A. So last time, what did we talk about, y'all?
How we talked about a d n A A lot.
We we talked about the the history of humans knowing
(00:44):
about DNA. We talked about what it is and what
it does, where it might come from, where it may
come from Mail Night, interesting research that we're learning about
DNA in more recent years, and uh, and in ways
we can use it for medical purposes. Yeah, And today
we wanted to look at other ways we could use
DNA as a technology as a tool. And some of
(01:05):
them are ways that you're probably familiar with if you've
ever watched any like police procedural type stuff or anything
like that. But we've got a lot of other uses,
including some pretty mind blowing ones. Actually, I'd say all
of these are mind blowing because DNA as a as
an English literature major who hasn't had any kind of
uh organic chemistry or biology courses in a very long time,
(01:28):
this is all fascinating and terrifying to me because they're
a long molecules. Man, you don't know what they're do
you have nightmares where you're just climbing down the infinite
twisting ladder and you never reached the bottom. I have
nightmares where Mr DNA is chasing me through the kitchen,
and it's not exactly that's it, Mr DNA chasing me
(01:53):
down an endless hallway, over and over. Let's get on
with the show, all right. Okay, well let's start with
the present. We're gonna it into some potential future technological
uses of DNA. But what do we use DNA for
today besides making our own bodies? Ah? Well, it's it's
honestly pretty pedestrian stuff. Okay, maybe maybe not pedestrian, And
(02:13):
that's that's a dismissive word that that belies the wonder
and amazement of stuff like like personal identification. Okay, we
we can take a sample of stuff and tell who
it came from. That's pretty rad I like how you
say stuff. Well, I mean, you know, there's it can
(02:33):
be a bone fragment, it can be some blood, it
can be hair, plus could be your eyeball. Yeah sure. Uh.
And and as as we all know, like in forensics
or paternity tests or historical studies of human remains, like
Richard the third or whatever that is. Uh, is that
the guy that we found under a car part? To
(02:56):
call him? Just checking that I wasn't thinking about something
else anyway. So yeah, yeah, we we can do all
of those things with DNA today, and and it's it's
probably the largest commercial field that we are using DNA
as a tool in currently. Another upcoming one is DNA
sequencing as a branch of consumer health. Uh, because depending
(03:17):
on what country you currently call home, you can either
directly order or have a doctor order genetic tests, um,
you know, tests that sequence your DNA either from a
few specific genes or from your entire genome. And right now,
mostly those tests are being used to tell you your
your likelihood of developing certain diseases like a cancer or
(03:40):
or or heart disease stuff like that. But in the future,
This might be a commonly used way of helping people
make all kinds of honestly pretty mundane lifestyle choices about
like diet and exercise and sleep patterns and sun exposure
and and all kinds of stuff. That's a whole other
episode though, And it's also something that I know some
(04:02):
doctors are a little skittish about because they're worried that
people will go to private companies. In fact, this was
one of the reasons that in America it's been a
big issue of the of the FDA regulating it. Yeah, right,
about going to a company and getting one of these, uh,
these sequences printed out for you to tell you, like
how likely are you to develop these things? Because they're worried.
Doctors are worried that people will start to make medical
(04:23):
decisions without having a full understanding of what it is
they're actually being presented with. Oh yeah, right, Because, as
we were talking about in the previous episode, DNA is complicated.
G and genes are not and we we've said before
on the show jeans are not on off switches that
that necessarily lead to a particular thing, And it's really
your entire genome together with a whole lot of environmental
(04:46):
effects that determine what's going to happen in your body.
So so yeah, I mean, I mean, caution is definitely necessitated,
and it will be interesting to see where it goes,
especially in this near future that's kind of like wild
West we're living in where we have more information then
we know how to read. Another use for DNA though,
Currently is UM is creating recombinant DNA, which is a
(05:11):
a molecule of DNA that's been synthesized in a lab
to include genetic information from more than one organism, and
you know that, the idea being that the resulting organism
will have beneficial properties or capabilities. And the most famous
example of this is is GMO crops genetically modified organisms
that are you know, meant to be eaten by us.
(05:33):
And we we did a couple episodes all about this
back in July, I believe, But but real, real, briefly
about GMOs, y'all. Just because food has been genetically modified
doesn't mean it's bad or dangerous or unhealthy. Yeah, if
you put fish jeans in a tomato, it doesn't necessarily
mean that tomato is going to taste fishy. Ye. Now,
of course That also doesn't mean that it's not possible
(05:56):
to use genetically modified organisms in agriculture that might be
environmentally unsound or something like that. But there's nothing inherently
wrong with the process of modifying an organism's genes in
a laboratory setting, because we do it outside a laboratory
setting already all the time, constantly and unconsciously. Yeah. Um.
(06:17):
Although that that isn't the only use for recombinant DNA techniques.
For for example, you've got bioremediation, which is a long
word that means that we can use we can use
organisms to clean up our messes basically. So okay, So,
for example, researchers have engineered a kind of bacteria that
(06:41):
eat harmful pollutants and excrete harmless by products. Yeah. So
this is like when you spill food on the floor
and you let your dog look it up, except instead
of a dog, it's a whole lot of bacteria, and
instead of food on your floor, it's an oil spill
that's literally ruining the ecosystem of a very large area
and and putting putting adorable penguins in dire danger. Um.
(07:06):
It's also World Penguin Day, as we record this is it,
It really is. It's DNA Day and World Penguin Day,
same day. They have to share, fair enough, I mean penguins.
Penguins are sharing to be fair though. It's National DNA Day,
but World Penguin Day. Hold on, let me blow your mind.
Did you know that all penguins on Earth have DNA
(07:27):
except for one? And his name is Bruce. Bruce, what
do you do? And Bruce? All right, I'm sorry we
got off topic. So yes, you can. You can create
bacteria that are like really efficient at degrading crude oil,
and and so you spray colonies of these suckers over
an oil spill and they help clean the area up. Um.
(07:48):
There's been other projects where researchers created bacteria. Well, okay,
there are bacteria that exist that break down t N
t UM, which I'm not going to say the full
name for because I can't pronounce it um, but but
it's that explosive and it's it's commonly used for example
in land mines and UH, and researchers create added genes
to this type of bacteria that let them that make
(08:11):
them glow when they break down t N t So
you add these suckers to to soil in an area
that you think might contain land mines, and then you
can do like a helicopter survey and see if it's glowing,
and if it is, you know that that you know
a don't go there right now, don't don't walk around
um and and be add more bacteria there and they
(08:32):
can eventually process that t NT. Yeah that's amazing. Yeah,
it almost you could work intuitively. I mean, in a
in a war zone, you might naturally want to avoid
fields that are glowing. Right It's not actually no, right now,
whenever anything's glowing, I'm like, oh, let me go over there.
I bet that has a health potion in it, thinking
(08:54):
like another Ravell. Never mind, we'll use the helicopters. So
so let's let's talk about some other kind of cool
emerging or possibly a slightly futuristic uses of DNA. And
the first one we wanted to talk about is one
I can't wait to hear about because it's near and
dear to my heart. As the host of the tech
(09:14):
Stuff podcast, I really am curious to hear how DNA
could be used as a diode, a little rectifier. Okay,
So in April, some researchers from the University of Georgia
right nearby here in Athens, and uh and Ben Gurion
University in Israel published a paper in Nature Chemistry, and
(09:36):
what this was was describing how they were able to
construct an electrical diode on a single molecule of DNA,
and if the researchers claims in the press are correct,
this would be the smallest diode ever constructed by humans.
I don't know if anybody's disputing that. It seems it
(09:57):
seems legit. Yeah, yeah, anyway, it's the sort of thing
that obviously you have to have the evidence to support
it and everything, But why would you make such a
claim if if you didn't, it's as small as diode?
Come on, what's a diode anyway? So a diode is
an electrical component. You put it in the circuit and
it allows unidirectional flow of current, or actually what you
(10:19):
should say is the current flows in one direction very easily,
but encounters massive resistance if it tries to flow the
opposite direction. And this can be used in a number
of ways. For example, just one is as a fail
safe device so as to prevent damage to equipment if
the current in a circuit gets reversed. Yeah, it's absolutely imperative.
Diodes are are one of the most basic units in circuitry. Yeah,
(10:44):
and it's sort of similar to to like a solenoid
valve in a in a hose or in an engine
kind of situation, like when when you have any kind
of fluid that you want to go from one place
to another and definitely not go in the other direction.
Uh So, yes, good times, they're exact. Yeah. So so
one again, one of the most basic elements of circuitry.
You're probably really familiar with l e ed s. Those
(11:06):
are light emitting diodes. They actually serve a purpose beyond
just emitting light. They actually they are also kind of
like that that's sort of that that one way street
sign that says electricity go this way, don't go back
the other way. And so why is this relevant to that, Well,
it actually has relevance to computing and to the potential
(11:27):
termination of Moore's law, which we've talked about on on
this show before, so brief refresher Moore's law. It's the
perhaps self fulfilling prophecy of Gordon Moore that the number
of transistors you can fit onto an integrated circuit doubles
every two years or so, eighteen months, two years or
whatever um. And the practical takeaway is that affordable computer
(11:49):
processing power follows an equivalent rate of evolution. Right, So
these days we wouldn't say that in two years time
we're going to fit twice as many uh discreet elements
on an integrated circuit. It doesn't follow that that pathway anymore.
What instead we would tend to say is that the
computers two years from now will be or eighteen months
from now will be twice as as powerful, will be
(12:11):
twice as fast as kind of Moore's law is one
of those things where the definition of Moore's law changes
every few years or so. But the just also, it's
not a law, right, It's not a law it was
it was originally an observation, like you said, it had
more to do with economics than actual computing power. The
idea was that the ability to to uh manufacture chips
(12:33):
that would have more discrete elements on them was going
to become economically feasible over time. So he was really
saying that because of the scale of manufacturing involved in
our ability to innovate, it will allow for what we
didn't have, as you know, the doubling of processing power
every every eighteen months. But we dumb it down a lot.
(12:55):
Talk about our devices in our technoculture depend on this assumption.
Things keep getting hard where it keeps getting faster. Yeah,
you Otherwise you wouldn't have smartphones. You could, they would
do the device would not be large enough to compensate
for the massive amount of processing power you need to
do the stuff your smartphone can do. Right, But you
might be thinking about this now, and you might be thinking,
(13:16):
wait a second, wait a second. So things keep getting smaller? Uh,
you can? You can fit more and more power into
a dense area of of what the computer processing unit is. Eventually,
aren't you going to run into physics problems? Well, yep,
Eventually you are going to reach the limits of what
you can do on a reasonably sized silicon semiconductor chip.
(13:39):
You run into basic physics and chemistry issues. So is
there any way to keep packing electronics and computer power
into smaller and smaller spaces? Could we have electronic components,
including computing components, packed into a single molecule Maybe? And
DNA might be the answer according to this d SO anyway,
(14:02):
the lead author of the study bing Quon Zoo has
pointed to quote the predictability, diversity, and programmability of DNA
as attributes that make it sort of an ideal building
material for nanoscale electronics. You know, electronics that are on
the molecule level. They're tiny. So in this experiment in
the paper I mentioned earlier, Zoo and his colleagues built
(14:25):
a single duplex DNA molecule out of eleven base pairs,
and then they inserted it into a tiny circuit. And
then the team placed a molecule called coraline in between
specific layers of the DNA coil, and with this they
were able to observe the DNA structure doing what a
diode should do, meaning it allowed current to flow one
(14:48):
way but not the other. It specifically, the kernel out
in the circuit was fifteen times stronger one way than
it was the other. So they had built a DNA diode,
or as I like to think of it, bingo diode
DNA MR DNA. Are you going to chase be done
that hallway again? Anyway? So a quote every Night Jenn
(15:09):
a quote Zoo gave to the press. He said, our
discovery can lead to progress in the design and construction
of nanoscale electronics elements that are at least one thousand
times smaller than current components. So I think that's really interesting.
What if one day we have uh, you know, uh,
nanoscale electronics, tiny computing elements, computers that are built out
(15:31):
of organic molecules and DNA, And I mean obviously, like
if we're going to have armies of nano robots, this
is going to be part of it. Yeah, very likely.
I mean you have to get to a point if
you have a robot that has its own ability to
control its own motions as opposed to some sort of
external force, because most of the nanobots that we have
(15:51):
talked about in previous episodes rely on some sort of
external system manipulating their motion, like a electromy metic frequencies
or ultrasonic frequencies or some kind of chemical reaction to
what's going on. Because because the way that we've been
designing them, obviously the researchers say, we could never possibly
have an energy source, right, So smaller energy control that's
(16:13):
small to be within something like that, So fascinating, very
cool stuff. And uh, I just love the idea that
we could eventually have computers that could get a computer
virus that could potentially be a real virus. Uh. One
of the other things that we've talked about on this
show before is the idea of programmable matter. Yeah, the
(16:34):
idea of having having just just stuff that you would
then send some sort of command to and it would
take whatever shape or form are not just form factor
but function that you need it to do. Yeah, And
it's funny because one of the main inspirations for stuff
like this is going to be organic matter like proteins.
You know, proteins can fold and refold themselves to take
(16:56):
on shapes that they need to do their function. And
so if you have programma, will matter the matter should
be able to maybe reshape itself or rearrange itself, either
by moving different components around or by changing the shape
of the components to make different overall forms. Right the
(17:17):
way that the basic molecule collagen is the stuff that
makes your bones and your skin and structures and your
eyeballs and all kinds of different tissues in your body,
And it's the same basic protein, but it folds itself
up into all kinds of different shapes. So, uh, well,
there's a group of researchers from Northwestern University who have
been looking at using DNA along with gold nanoparticles to
(17:40):
create different shapes, and it's kind of interesting how they're
doing it. So what they're doing, they're essentially coding these
gold nanoparticles with small strips of DNA. So you can
think of it as but just one half of a
DNA strands. So you imagine splitting that that ladder down
the middle and you've got one half of the strand
(18:01):
on these gold nano particles. By introducing them to the
other half, the complementary half of that DNA strand, they
can cause the gold nano particles to take all sorts
of different crystalline shapes. So this is a very tiny,
tiny version, this nano sized version of this pluripotent material
that we've talked about in the past. So it's not
(18:22):
something that you would use to make a giant armchair.
You're not gonna have the golden throne for your Game
of Thrones party. It's not gonna happen. But it's possible
that this sort of approach could lead to uh advances
in optics. So, for example, when you're designing something a lens,
let's say, uh, you want to be able to control
(18:45):
exactly what kind of light can pass through that lens.
By shaping these crystalline structures at the right distance from
one another. You can control for that you can allow
it to or you can you can design such way
that allows certain types of light, like certain colors of
light to pass through, but not others, because you can
you can be fine tune those spaces so well that
(19:07):
certain wavelengths of light are the only ones allowed through,
which is really kind of fascinating when you think about it,
and it creates all sorts of different possibilities, including stuff
like a um advanced laser optics. So really an interesting idea,
not necessarily something that we're going to see as a
practical application in our daily lives, but when you talk about,
(19:29):
you know, sort of this high end tech approach, it's
really an interesting possibility. Okay, does does anyone have anything
that is a little bit more like ground level practical
something that could potentially change the way that we that
we do live our lives. Well, all right, we've we've
talked in the past about how antibiotics are pretty amazing,
but they're also something that we've depended upon, so heavily
(19:51):
that we may have shot ourselves in the foot a
little bit. And by shot ourselves in the foot a
little bit, I mean given rise to potential really dangerous
bacteria that we cannot defend ourselves against because they are
resistant to antibiotics. So we're creating the bacterial equivalent of Doomsday,
where you just continue destroying them over and over again
(20:12):
until they become invincible. Yeah, by foot we mean face,
and by face we mean immune system. Right, So in
our batman versus superman versus bacterial infection, the bacterial infection
has got a big leg up on everybody else right now, because,
like we said, it leads to this this kind of
superbug situation where you have bacteria that can infect a
(20:35):
person and antibiotics will have no effect against them because
the bacterial the bacteria have already developed an immunity to
that antibiotic. Uh So, one other approach we could use
is using DNA to create viruses that target bacteria. So,
in other words, we make a bug to kill a bug.
So I have to remind you that viruses and bacteria
(20:55):
are not the same thing, and they're not really They're
very dissimilar organically speaking. So the virus would insert viral
DNA into the bacterial cell, and that viral DNA might
do one of a couple of different things. It might
shut down the bacteria's ability to resist antibiotics. So in
other words, this could be like uh Obi Wan sneaking
(21:16):
in and turning off that that that tractor beams so
the millennium falcon can escape, except in this case we're
talking like more like a force field. So maybe it's
more like Return of the Jedi where they have to
go to the force moon of Indoor and destroy the
ground based force field that's protecting the death Star that
is fully operational up over in orbit at any rate
I know I could go, So then you could do that,
(21:40):
or it could even just kill the bacterial cell, like
just just let's just bypass all that, or just render
it harmless. Um So, these are all the basic things
that this viral genome could do if it were designed properly. Um.
As a bonus, that approach can be tailored so that
(22:00):
it targets specific types of bacteria. The virus have protein
markers on them that search for other specific protein markers,
and they will ignore anything that doesn't fit that description. Right,
So it's almost like a cell seeking missile in a way. Well,
if you design in such a way where it's it's
looking for this harmful bacteria, it will leave all the
(22:21):
helpful bacteria alone. Oh that's really great because these days,
I'm sure that that all y'all have experienced it. When
you take an antibiotic, uh, you wind up with kind
of an upset stomach for a few days because in
addition to clearing out whatever infection you're trying to get
rid of, that antibiotic is probably also destroying your microbiome,
which is good for like digesting food, exactly right. So
(22:44):
this would be potentially a gentler approach and it would
affect more dangerous bacterial strains. So it's a double win
if we can make it work. But one of the
other things I wanted to talk about. In fact, this
was the basis of a video episode of Forward Thinking,
and Lauren, you wrote the script and it was phenomenal.
It's just a really cool idea is using DNA. I
(23:05):
mean DNA it's all about holding information, right, it's information
that makes us who we are. But we can use
DNA to hold other types of information too, and not
just a little a whole lot of information. Yeah, and
the train of thought here is that, Okay, we've got
really amazing storage materials and technologies for data these days,
(23:28):
but they have some downsides. And Okay, so you know,
like like we've got we've got hard disk drives, which
is you know, probably what's in your laptop or or
your desktop computer, which work by magnetizing a faro magnetic
film on a disc. And uh and the data is
encoded in the changes in the direction of magnetism. Okay. Um,
if you remember floppy disks or like like you know,
(23:49):
five and a quarter inch floppies anything like that, they
used similar technology. This is why it was so much
fun to drag a magnet over somebody's floppy disk. Oh uh, man,
you or you were a mean middle schooler. I'm just kidding.
I'm sure. No, No, Joe, you are truly the best
of all of us. I didn't think that you would,
although now I wonder. I'll wonder every day anyway. That's
(24:14):
also basically what makes a magnetic tape work, like like
in cassette tapes or in not cassette tapes, because as
it turns out, magnetic tape is not only used by
kitchy hipster bands to uh to sell their albums these days.
It's actually the highest capacity type of memory available on
the market because you can encode so much information into it. Um.
(24:36):
Then there's also there's flash memory, uh, iterations of which
are what's in your phone and your USB stick and
like maybe your fancy, silent running computer. Um. And they
work by the grace of wizards. Uh No, I mean
probably not, but honestly I understand them really poorly. Jonathan
fact check me on this. Basically, like a flash memory
(24:56):
creates minute changes in voltage through transistors and then reads
those minute changes in order to tell you stuff. Yeah,
that's one form of flash memory. But yes, you are correct,
which they there are different types where some require constant power.
As soon as they lose power than everything gets white.
And then there are some that are persistent. Obviously, this
(25:19):
would be more in the persistent realm, because you're talking
about things like like thumb drives and stuff where you
don't have a constant amount of battery attached. Yeah. Sure, um.
And then of course we have optical discs, CDs and
DVDs in Blu ray which encode data and in tiny
pits and ridges and then they scan those with a
laser and that's how you figure stuff out. UM. So yes,
(25:42):
all rad but downsides. First of all, they're they're pretty delicate.
You don't want to jostle them around too much, or
in the case of your your optical discs, you don't
want to you know, scratch a huge key across them
or something like that, because that will ruin them real fast.
You don't want to get them too hot or too cold,
and the data in them will corrupt over time. UM.
(26:04):
Your your hard drives, your flash drives, your your burn
CDs can all corrupt in as little as five years,
and magnetic tape can corrupt in as little as fifteen
to thirty years. UM. Also, even though they can carry
an impressive amount of information, especially if you remember those
five and a quarter inch floppies and look at that
in comparison to your cell phone and think about how
(26:25):
old you are. Um, the technical limits of those materials
aren't all that high when you start to consider how
much data we're creating every day, right, which is an unbelievable, massive, huge,
enormous other adjectives amount of data. I mean, it's it's
(26:49):
so big that it is impossible for me to get
a handle on it. It is an amount so vast
as to dwarf my sense of perspective every day. It's
a massive amount of spying they're doing on you. We'll see.
That's the other problem, right, It's not just that we're
creating a huge amount of data. We also need to
make use of that data. And meanwhile, you have to
(27:12):
put the data somewhere. And storage is a big thing.
It's a it's a big issue. You want a storage
medium that's going to be UH safe and secure. You
want it to be uh to last a nice long time.
You wanted to be really efficient at storing a massive
amount of data in a small amount of space. And
like you you're saying, Lauren, the options we have are limited,
(27:35):
sometimes in multiple uh features all at once, you know.
So what's the solution. Well, strangely enough, this episode is
about DNA. So baby, Hey, it's DNA, that's right, Yeah, yeah,
DNA can be used for for data storage. It's hardy,
it's half life, it's like five dred years, so it
can it can potentially store data for like centuries, and
(27:57):
it can encode so much data. You guys, um in
the video episode that I wrote about it, I did
a whole bunch of wacky math and uh okay. So
so d na's theoretical limit is more than an exhibite
of data per cubic millimeter. An exhibite is a billion gigabytes.
(28:20):
A cubic millimeter is a fraction of a drop, like
to ten thousands of a teaspoon. So for a an
incredibly small physical volume, you can hold an enormous amount
of digital information. Yeah. Um. In order to get that
much information into magnetic tape, which is the densest storage
(28:40):
medium available for purchase today, you'd need a hundred million
cubic millimeters of space, which is like fifty two liter
soda bottles as opposed to the fraction of a drop. Right,
Even optical disk storage at its theoretical limit would still
require five two leader soda bottles worth of space. And again,
(29:03):
since we're talking about creating this massive amount of information
every single day, if you want to be able to
store the information, particularly if you plan on doing something
useful with it, like parsing through all that data because
you're a nosy spy, uh, you want to have the
most compact efficient means of data storage possible, because you're
going to run out of space otherwise, or you're going
(29:24):
to have to figure out how long do I hold
onto this data before I wipe it so I can
hold onto the next match of data because another enormous
amount is coming tomorrow. Yeah, um so so okay. So
here's how the process works of encoding data into DNA.
You get some computer scientists and some bioengineers. Uh, you
(29:44):
get them in the same room together, and you get
them to design a system for encoding data in the
nuclear basis the nucleotides of DNA and and these building
blocks can basically be used like ones in zeros or
you know, since there's four block box, you can use
base four instead of binary, which is the approach that
a team out of the University of Washington in collaboration
(30:06):
with Microsoft Research chose recently. The bioengineers can synthesize DNA, uh,
you know, sticking the nucleotides together in a sequence into
in order to encode your data. Um that this recent
team even included little I D tags in the DNA
sequences in order to make the data random access, like
(30:26):
your hard drive is random access, which means that you
have like a whole soup of information kind of like
stuck on there, but you can pull out whatever bit
of information you want at any time. And uh, and
so here you can have a whole vial of DNA
and and you can still find whatever you need quickly. Right,
Instead of having to read through the entire amount of
(30:49):
data that has been encoded in that string, you can
zone in on the specific string that's relevant to whatever
it is you need, which is incredibly important. Right. It's
kind of like anyone who's who's played uh, just just
a video game where you're playing something where it's it's
reading from memory that that stuff is very responsive, and
then you move into a new area where it has
(31:10):
to consult the read off of the disk. Right, then
it slows everything down. Well, it's very important that we
have this random access memory approach because otherwise, if you
had this massive amount of data stored, it would still
be very frustrating if it took you, you know, two
days to find the specific part of the information you
needed because it was buried so far deep in that
(31:31):
DNA strand right that that is less useful scientifically speaking, um, Right,
because in order to read the data that's written in
your DNA. You just sequence the DNA and then decode
the data. And and in the downsides here are that
it's currently so expensive to synthesize and sequence d N
A and also it takes time, um like at least
(31:52):
ten hours to to sequence your DNA so that you
can get your data out of it. Um. But this
recent team thinks that it could so easily be made
cheaper and faster, especially you know, if there's a financial
incentive to do so. Um you know which there is,
and not only for data storage, as we discussed in
the previous episode. All Right, so we've talked about DNA
being used as diodes, We've talked about DNA being used
(32:15):
to target bacterial infections, DNA being used for data storage,
DNA being used as a beverage, DNA chasing me down
an endless hallway. What other uses, uh, could we see
DNA applied toward in the future. Well, here's one that
I think is pretty interesting. So we've talked before about
building organs in the lab, and they're they're multiple ways
(32:38):
you can look at this. You can look at like
the organ on the chip concept, or you can just
talk about building organs actually as in like three D
printing organs that would be uh, that would eventually be
used as donor organs were not quite fully there yet. Um.
But but we're making headway with a lot of this technology,
and it's useful for lots of reasons, Like one of
(32:59):
the big ones is harm free research. You can test
the effects of a drug or study the progression of
a disease on a living organ without actually damaging a
living person. So assembling these lab organs it it shouldn't
be impossible, right, because it happens in nature. The cells
in your body can do it. They can divide and
self as symbol into a kidney or a liver, So
(33:22):
why shouldn't they be able to do the same thing
in a controlled laboratory environment. They should. It's just not
very easy at all and uh and so one of
the things that we try to do is what we
just mentioned, three D printing in organ like three D
printing in a lab environment, depositing cells upon one another
to eventually spit out a whole organ. But that's not
(33:44):
as easy as it sounds. You encounter multiple problems. One
of them is it's hard to get the cells to
stick in the right place. Number two is it's hard
to print with enough precision. Ideally, what we'd want is
single cell resolution, you know, upping the resolution on your printer.
In this case, it would be upping the resolution until
you print one cell at a time, and that's not
(34:05):
easy to do, right. And then on top of that,
it's hard to keep cells from being damaged or killed
in the printing process, right because if you just end
up with a bunch of dead cells in your brand
new organ you don't have a very useful organ want
it for right, Well, we are not shooting the next
(34:28):
episode of Game of Thrones, so we don't have a
need for visceron just to throw around everywhere. But interestingly,
d NA plays a role other than encoding the building
blocks to make cells in a solution that was proposed
in a paper called program Synthesis of Three Dimensional Tissues
in Nature Methods. And in this paper, the authors describe
(34:51):
a method of constructing three D quote organoid like structures
using the help of a kind of d N a
vel crow that allows DNA coded cell structures to stick
to gel coded surfaces and to each other. And the
method they have is is called d N A programmed
assembly of cells or d pack uh, And it goes
(35:13):
like this. The cells for creating the organoid structure get
pieces of single stranded DNA inserted into their outer membrane,
so you've gotta sell and you stick these little d
NA hairs all over the outside of it. So this
means the cells are coded in DNA molecules that act
sort of like code locked velcro h. They'll stick to
(35:35):
DNA strands on the outside of other cells, but only
the ones that have the right code sequences and lock
up with the complementary. So what you can make with
this is cells that are coded to stick to exactly
the other cells you want them to and not stick
where you don't want them to. That's very clever. Yeah,
(35:55):
it's very interesting, and so hopefully what they're saying is
that this will help us build these organoid structures in
the lab that will eventually aid in things like tissue
specific cancer research. I just like the word organoid makes
me think of like it's like some sort of he
Man villain. But I have one last, one last future
(36:17):
use of of d n A. That's pretty hot. You
guys are gonna like it. How hot? Is it? Like
more than a hundred degrees celsius hot so hot, hot
enough to boil water. Yeah, I'm talking about using DNA
and a method that would allow engineers to build better
facilities to harvest uh geothermal energy and converted into electricity.
(36:42):
And you think, hell, what, how could DNA do that.
I was really confused when I started reading the article
because as I was reading the article, I was thinking,
I don't see where DNA comes into hear at all. Connection. Yeah,
so here's the connection. Here's here's what the scientists we're
working with. Um uh So a scientist or a grad student.
(37:04):
You're in jong uh energy researcher. Stanford grad student was
talking about using nanotracers. Grad students can be scientists, but nanotracers, well, well,
grad student because not not fully outside a graduate school yet,
but still has this idea about nano tracers used for
(37:25):
geo thermal surveying. So what what he did was they
took nano tracers and naro tracers. You can just think
of as it's a substance that you're pumping into a
geo thermal reservoir to kind of see where it's connected
to other wells, geo thermal wells in the area. If
you have nano tracers popping out of one well, you're
(37:45):
pumping them into another well, you say, oh, these two
are connected. But the problem is that if you have
a pretty complex geo thermal reservoir system, you can't really
be sure if you're if you're injecting nanotracers and mall locations,
which nanotracers belong to which pump sites. Right, So if
(38:05):
you're injecting the men that like five different sites and
you're getting nanotracers out of a well, unless there's some
way to identify those nanotracers, you cannot be certain that
they came from a specific injection site. Thus, you can't
really say we've mapped this out and we know that
these two points are connected. I might be one of
the other points that are connected. But DNA could help
(38:27):
solve that problem. So what the researchers are suggesting is
that you should encode the nanotracers with DNA and give
them like a little name tag and identifier, so you
know these nanotracers specifically are belonged to this injection site
because it has this specific DNA sequence encoded in the nanotracer.
(38:47):
That would allow the researchers to create a more accurate
geothermal map and help engineers decide the appropriate place to
set up a facility or to inject water into the
reservoir to break up rocks to get better access to
geothermal energy. And in some of their experiments, you know,
they haven't put this to practical use. They've done it
in the lab to make sure that this would actually work. Um,
they use some some sand and they heated the sand
(39:10):
to see if they used uh strands of DNA, if
the strands could hold up under the conditions that they
would encounter out in the field. They saw that the
DNA could remain intact after encountering temperatures as high as
three d two degrees fahrenheit or a hundred fifty degrees celsius,
which would be similar to what they would encounter if
(39:31):
you were actually pumping them into these geo thermal reservoirs.
So it's kind of interesting they wouldn't They don't directly
allow you to convert geo thermal energy into electricity, but
they give more tools to the people who are who
want to tap into that power and convert it into electricity.
And according to the researchers, they anticipate that with a
(39:54):
conservative estimate, they said that in the future, we will
rely on geo thermal energy to provide five percent of
of the world's electricity, which sounds like a small amount
until you start to actually look at numbers and see
how much five percent accounts for, and it's enormous. So
and of course every bit you can take away from
(40:15):
fossil fuels is a big help in other areas. Oh, absolutely, yeah,
And and that's oh, that's it's so fascinating. I love
these these approaches that people are using to take DNA
and and and use it as an actual tool. I mean,
we are a man the toolmaker, but but this is
it's so it's so great that we're taking this this
tiny thing that makes up ourselves that we only really
(40:36):
started to get a handle on within the past century,
and and we're we're bending it to our own power. Well,
I mean we uh. It's sort of the most fundamental
level you can go to when you're talking about bio mimetics, right,
well maybe not actually you can probably go to proteins maybe,
which would be even simpler. But I mean, when you're
talking about making technology or machines based off of principles
(40:59):
that we see employed nature. These are the most fundamental
machines out there. There's machines that make all the other machines, right.
I don't think when Friedrich Mesher was looking at all
that PUS he was thinking, you know, I bet someday
we're gonna store information in the stuff that's in this
stuff that I don't even know the name for yet.
(41:21):
I bet he wasn't thinking that. And I bet if
we took the way back machine, we prove ourselves right.
But we've run out of time. I wanted to go
back to the PUS party so badly. Even the way
back machine it's got, it's still recharging from our last jaunt,
so we're not going to be jumping in there anytime soon. Well,
this has been a fun journey to go on with
(41:42):
you guys, with the DNA molecule and with PUS. Yes,
it's been. It's been educational, I will say now it's been.
It's been really fascinating. And who knows what other potential
applications we will find for DNA in the future. And
of course there are all the other ones that we've
talked about in previous episod Those things like uh, you know,
genetic medicine, that sort of stuff. The really looking at
(42:05):
how we can use tools like Crisper in order to
manipulate UH genes so that we can improve our health
or perhaps even enhance ourselves in some ways, which of
course is as a totally separate subject that has its
own massive ball of ethical concerns attached to it, But
(42:28):
all of it is is coming back to this, this
long chain molecule and uh really fascinating stuff. So guys,
if you have any questions about Dinah, that's how I'm
going to say it from now on, Thank you, Joe H.
Then you should write us and send those questions, or
if you have any suggestions for future episodes. You've got
an idea, you want to know how X will work
in the future, or maybe there's some emerging technology you
(42:50):
want to hear more about. Right us, let us know.
Our email address is fw thinking at how Stuff Works
dot com, or drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook.
At Twitter, we are f W thinking. Just search f
W Thinking in Facebook search bar will pop right up
and leave us a message there and we will talk
to you again really soon for more on this topic.
(43:16):
In the Future of Technology, visit forward thinking dot Com,
brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, if it
says G T C A C G A C A
(00:21):
G G, then you shouldn't eat trimp or nuts. I'm
Jonathan Stricklin, I'm Lauren Folk, and I'm Joe McCormick. That
was a strange one, But today is going to be
part two of a two part episode we're doing on
d n A. So last time, what did we talk about, y'all?
How we talked about a d n A A lot.
We we talked about the the history of humans knowing
(00:44):
about DNA. We talked about what it is and what
it does, where it might come from, where it may
come from Mail Night, interesting research that we're learning about
DNA in more recent years, and uh, and in ways
we can use it for medical purposes. Yeah, And today
we wanted to look at other ways we could use
DNA as a technology as a tool. And some of
(01:05):
them are ways that you're probably familiar with if you've
ever watched any like police procedural type stuff or anything
like that. But we've got a lot of other uses,
including some pretty mind blowing ones. Actually, I'd say all
of these are mind blowing because DNA as a as
an English literature major who hasn't had any kind of
uh organic chemistry or biology courses in a very long time,
(01:28):
this is all fascinating and terrifying to me because they're
a long molecules. Man, you don't know what they're do
you have nightmares where you're just climbing down the infinite
twisting ladder and you never reached the bottom. I have
nightmares where Mr DNA is chasing me through the kitchen,
and it's not exactly that's it, Mr DNA chasing me
(01:53):
down an endless hallway, over and over. Let's get on
with the show, all right. Okay, well let's start with
the present. We're gonna it into some potential future technological
uses of DNA. But what do we use DNA for
today besides making our own bodies? Ah? Well, it's it's
honestly pretty pedestrian stuff. Okay, maybe maybe not pedestrian, And
(02:13):
that's that's a dismissive word that that belies the wonder
and amazement of stuff like like personal identification. Okay, we
we can take a sample of stuff and tell who
it came from. That's pretty rad I like how you
say stuff. Well, I mean, you know, there's it can
(02:33):
be a bone fragment, it can be some blood, it
can be hair, plus could be your eyeball. Yeah sure. Uh.
And and as as we all know, like in forensics
or paternity tests or historical studies of human remains, like
Richard the third or whatever that is. Uh, is that
the guy that we found under a car part? To
(02:56):
call him? Just checking that I wasn't thinking about something
else anyway. So yeah, yeah, we we can do all
of those things with DNA today, and and it's it's
probably the largest commercial field that we are using DNA
as a tool in currently. Another upcoming one is DNA
sequencing as a branch of consumer health. Uh, because depending
(03:17):
on what country you currently call home, you can either
directly order or have a doctor order genetic tests, um,
you know, tests that sequence your DNA either from a
few specific genes or from your entire genome. And right now,
mostly those tests are being used to tell you your
your likelihood of developing certain diseases like a cancer or
(03:40):
or or heart disease stuff like that. But in the future,
This might be a commonly used way of helping people
make all kinds of honestly pretty mundane lifestyle choices about
like diet and exercise and sleep patterns and sun exposure
and and all kinds of stuff. That's a whole other
episode though, And it's also something that I know some
(04:02):
doctors are a little skittish about because they're worried that
people will go to private companies. In fact, this was
one of the reasons that in America it's been a
big issue of the of the FDA regulating it. Yeah, right,
about going to a company and getting one of these, uh,
these sequences printed out for you to tell you, like
how likely are you to develop these things? Because they're worried.
Doctors are worried that people will start to make medical
(04:23):
decisions without having a full understanding of what it is
they're actually being presented with. Oh yeah, right, Because, as
we were talking about in the previous episode, DNA is complicated.
G and genes are not and we we've said before
on the show jeans are not on off switches that
that necessarily lead to a particular thing, And it's really
your entire genome together with a whole lot of environmental
(04:46):
effects that determine what's going to happen in your body.
So so yeah, I mean, I mean, caution is definitely necessitated,
and it will be interesting to see where it goes,
especially in this near future that's kind of like wild
West we're living in where we have more information then
we know how to read. Another use for DNA though,
Currently is UM is creating recombinant DNA, which is a
(05:11):
a molecule of DNA that's been synthesized in a lab
to include genetic information from more than one organism, and
you know that, the idea being that the resulting organism
will have beneficial properties or capabilities. And the most famous
example of this is is GMO crops genetically modified organisms
that are you know, meant to be eaten by us.
(05:33):
And we we did a couple episodes all about this
back in July, I believe, But but real, real, briefly
about GMOs, y'all. Just because food has been genetically modified
doesn't mean it's bad or dangerous or unhealthy. Yeah, if
you put fish jeans in a tomato, it doesn't necessarily
mean that tomato is going to taste fishy. Ye. Now,
of course That also doesn't mean that it's not possible
(05:56):
to use genetically modified organisms in agriculture that might be
environmentally unsound or something like that. But there's nothing inherently
wrong with the process of modifying an organism's genes in
a laboratory setting, because we do it outside a laboratory
setting already all the time, constantly and unconsciously. Yeah. Um.
(06:17):
Although that that isn't the only use for recombinant DNA techniques.
For for example, you've got bioremediation, which is a long
word that means that we can use we can use
organisms to clean up our messes basically. So okay, So,
for example, researchers have engineered a kind of bacteria that
(06:41):
eat harmful pollutants and excrete harmless by products. Yeah. So
this is like when you spill food on the floor
and you let your dog look it up, except instead
of a dog, it's a whole lot of bacteria, and
instead of food on your floor, it's an oil spill
that's literally ruining the ecosystem of a very large area
and and putting putting adorable penguins in dire danger. Um.
(07:06):
It's also World Penguin Day, as we record this is it,
It really is. It's DNA Day and World Penguin Day,
same day. They have to share, fair enough, I mean penguins.
Penguins are sharing to be fair though. It's National DNA Day,
but World Penguin Day. Hold on, let me blow your mind.
Did you know that all penguins on Earth have DNA
(07:27):
except for one? And his name is Bruce. Bruce, what
do you do? And Bruce? All right, I'm sorry we
got off topic. So yes, you can. You can create
bacteria that are like really efficient at degrading crude oil,
and and so you spray colonies of these suckers over
an oil spill and they help clean the area up. Um.
(07:48):
There's been other projects where researchers created bacteria. Well, okay,
there are bacteria that exist that break down t N
t UM, which I'm not going to say the full
name for because I can't pronounce it um, but but
it's that explosive and it's it's commonly used for example
in land mines and UH, and researchers create added genes
to this type of bacteria that let them that make
(08:11):
them glow when they break down t N t So
you add these suckers to to soil in an area
that you think might contain land mines, and then you
can do like a helicopter survey and see if it's glowing,
and if it is, you know that that you know
a don't go there right now, don't don't walk around
um and and be add more bacteria there and they
(08:32):
can eventually process that t NT. Yeah that's amazing. Yeah,
it almost you could work intuitively. I mean, in a
in a war zone, you might naturally want to avoid
fields that are glowing. Right It's not actually no, right now,
whenever anything's glowing, I'm like, oh, let me go over there.
I bet that has a health potion in it, thinking
(08:54):
like another Ravell. Never mind, we'll use the helicopters. So
so let's let's talk about some other kind of cool
emerging or possibly a slightly futuristic uses of DNA. And
the first one we wanted to talk about is one
I can't wait to hear about because it's near and
dear to my heart. As the host of the tech
(09:14):
Stuff podcast, I really am curious to hear how DNA
could be used as a diode, a little rectifier. Okay,
So in April, some researchers from the University of Georgia
right nearby here in Athens, and uh and Ben Gurion
University in Israel published a paper in Nature Chemistry, and
(09:36):
what this was was describing how they were able to
construct an electrical diode on a single molecule of DNA,
and if the researchers claims in the press are correct,
this would be the smallest diode ever constructed by humans.
I don't know if anybody's disputing that. It seems it
(09:57):
seems legit. Yeah, yeah, anyway, it's the sort of thing
that obviously you have to have the evidence to support
it and everything, But why would you make such a
claim if if you didn't, it's as small as diode?
Come on, what's a diode anyway? So a diode is
an electrical component. You put it in the circuit and
it allows unidirectional flow of current, or actually what you
(10:19):
should say is the current flows in one direction very easily,
but encounters massive resistance if it tries to flow the
opposite direction. And this can be used in a number
of ways. For example, just one is as a fail
safe device so as to prevent damage to equipment if
the current in a circuit gets reversed. Yeah, it's absolutely imperative.
Diodes are are one of the most basic units in circuitry. Yeah,
(10:44):
and it's sort of similar to to like a solenoid
valve in a in a hose or in an engine
kind of situation, like when when you have any kind
of fluid that you want to go from one place
to another and definitely not go in the other direction.
Uh So, yes, good times, they're exact. Yeah. So so
one again, one of the most basic elements of circuitry.
You're probably really familiar with l e ed s. Those
(11:06):
are light emitting diodes. They actually serve a purpose beyond
just emitting light. They actually they are also kind of
like that that's sort of that that one way street
sign that says electricity go this way, don't go back
the other way. And so why is this relevant to that, Well,
it actually has relevance to computing and to the potential
(11:27):
termination of Moore's law, which we've talked about on on
this show before, so brief refresher Moore's law. It's the
perhaps self fulfilling prophecy of Gordon Moore that the number
of transistors you can fit onto an integrated circuit doubles
every two years or so, eighteen months, two years or
whatever um. And the practical takeaway is that affordable computer
(11:49):
processing power follows an equivalent rate of evolution. Right, So
these days we wouldn't say that in two years time
we're going to fit twice as many uh discreet elements
on an integrated circuit. It doesn't follow that that pathway anymore.
What instead we would tend to say is that the
computers two years from now will be or eighteen months
from now will be twice as as powerful, will be
(12:11):
twice as fast as kind of Moore's law is one
of those things where the definition of Moore's law changes
every few years or so. But the just also, it's
not a law, right, It's not a law it was
it was originally an observation, like you said, it had
more to do with economics than actual computing power. The
idea was that the ability to to uh manufacture chips
(12:33):
that would have more discrete elements on them was going
to become economically feasible over time. So he was really
saying that because of the scale of manufacturing involved in
our ability to innovate, it will allow for what we
didn't have, as you know, the doubling of processing power
every every eighteen months. But we dumb it down a lot.
(12:55):
Talk about our devices in our technoculture depend on this assumption.
Things keep getting hard where it keeps getting faster. Yeah,
you Otherwise you wouldn't have smartphones. You could, they would
do the device would not be large enough to compensate
for the massive amount of processing power you need to
do the stuff your smartphone can do. Right, But you
might be thinking about this now, and you might be thinking,
(13:16):
wait a second, wait a second. So things keep getting smaller? Uh,
you can? You can fit more and more power into
a dense area of of what the computer processing unit is. Eventually,
aren't you going to run into physics problems? Well, yep,
Eventually you are going to reach the limits of what
you can do on a reasonably sized silicon semiconductor chip.
(13:39):
You run into basic physics and chemistry issues. So is
there any way to keep packing electronics and computer power
into smaller and smaller spaces? Could we have electronic components,
including computing components, packed into a single molecule Maybe? And
DNA might be the answer according to this d SO anyway,
(14:02):
the lead author of the study bing Quon Zoo has
pointed to quote the predictability, diversity, and programmability of DNA
as attributes that make it sort of an ideal building
material for nanoscale electronics. You know, electronics that are on
the molecule level. They're tiny. So in this experiment in
the paper I mentioned earlier, Zoo and his colleagues built
(14:25):
a single duplex DNA molecule out of eleven base pairs,
and then they inserted it into a tiny circuit. And
then the team placed a molecule called coraline in between
specific layers of the DNA coil, and with this they
were able to observe the DNA structure doing what a
diode should do, meaning it allowed current to flow one
(14:48):
way but not the other. It specifically, the kernel out
in the circuit was fifteen times stronger one way than
it was the other. So they had built a DNA diode,
or as I like to think of it, bingo diode
DNA MR DNA. Are you going to chase be done
that hallway again? Anyway? So a quote every Night Jenn
(15:09):
a quote Zoo gave to the press. He said, our
discovery can lead to progress in the design and construction
of nanoscale electronics elements that are at least one thousand
times smaller than current components. So I think that's really interesting.
What if one day we have uh, you know, uh,
nanoscale electronics, tiny computing elements, computers that are built out
(15:31):
of organic molecules and DNA, And I mean obviously, like
if we're going to have armies of nano robots, this
is going to be part of it. Yeah, very likely.
I mean you have to get to a point if
you have a robot that has its own ability to
control its own motions as opposed to some sort of
external force, because most of the nanobots that we have
(15:51):
talked about in previous episodes rely on some sort of
external system manipulating their motion, like a electromy metic frequencies
or ultrasonic frequencies or some kind of chemical reaction to
what's going on. Because because the way that we've been
designing them, obviously the researchers say, we could never possibly
have an energy source, right, So smaller energy control that's
(16:13):
small to be within something like that, So fascinating, very
cool stuff. And uh, I just love the idea that
we could eventually have computers that could get a computer
virus that could potentially be a real virus. Uh. One
of the other things that we've talked about on this
show before is the idea of programmable matter. Yeah, the
(16:34):
idea of having having just just stuff that you would
then send some sort of command to and it would
take whatever shape or form are not just form factor
but function that you need it to do. Yeah, And
it's funny because one of the main inspirations for stuff
like this is going to be organic matter like proteins.
You know, proteins can fold and refold themselves to take
(16:56):
on shapes that they need to do their function. And
so if you have programma, will matter the matter should
be able to maybe reshape itself or rearrange itself, either
by moving different components around or by changing the shape
of the components to make different overall forms. Right the
(17:17):
way that the basic molecule collagen is the stuff that
makes your bones and your skin and structures and your
eyeballs and all kinds of different tissues in your body,
And it's the same basic protein, but it folds itself
up into all kinds of different shapes. So, uh, well,
there's a group of researchers from Northwestern University who have
been looking at using DNA along with gold nanoparticles to
(17:40):
create different shapes, and it's kind of interesting how they're
doing it. So what they're doing, they're essentially coding these
gold nanoparticles with small strips of DNA. So you can
think of it as but just one half of a
DNA strands. So you imagine splitting that that ladder down
the middle and you've got one half of the strand
(18:01):
on these gold nano particles. By introducing them to the
other half, the complementary half of that DNA strand, they
can cause the gold nano particles to take all sorts
of different crystalline shapes. So this is a very tiny,
tiny version, this nano sized version of this pluripotent material
that we've talked about in the past. So it's not
(18:22):
something that you would use to make a giant armchair.
You're not gonna have the golden throne for your Game
of Thrones party. It's not gonna happen. But it's possible
that this sort of approach could lead to uh advances
in optics. So, for example, when you're designing something a lens,
let's say, uh, you want to be able to control
(18:45):
exactly what kind of light can pass through that lens.
By shaping these crystalline structures at the right distance from
one another. You can control for that you can allow
it to or you can you can design such way
that allows certain types of light, like certain colors of
light to pass through, but not others, because you can
you can be fine tune those spaces so well that
(19:07):
certain wavelengths of light are the only ones allowed through,
which is really kind of fascinating when you think about it,
and it creates all sorts of different possibilities, including stuff
like a um advanced laser optics. So really an interesting idea,
not necessarily something that we're going to see as a
practical application in our daily lives, but when you talk about,
(19:29):
you know, sort of this high end tech approach, it's
really an interesting possibility. Okay, does does anyone have anything
that is a little bit more like ground level practical
something that could potentially change the way that we that
we do live our lives. Well, all right, we've we've
talked in the past about how antibiotics are pretty amazing,
but they're also something that we've depended upon, so heavily
(19:51):
that we may have shot ourselves in the foot a
little bit. And by shot ourselves in the foot a
little bit, I mean given rise to potential really dangerous
bacteria that we cannot defend ourselves against because they are
resistant to antibiotics. So we're creating the bacterial equivalent of Doomsday,
where you just continue destroying them over and over again
(20:12):
until they become invincible. Yeah, by foot we mean face,
and by face we mean immune system. Right, So in
our batman versus superman versus bacterial infection, the bacterial infection
has got a big leg up on everybody else right now, because,
like we said, it leads to this this kind of
superbug situation where you have bacteria that can infect a
(20:35):
person and antibiotics will have no effect against them because
the bacterial the bacteria have already developed an immunity to
that antibiotic. Uh So, one other approach we could use
is using DNA to create viruses that target bacteria. So,
in other words, we make a bug to kill a bug.
So I have to remind you that viruses and bacteria
(20:55):
are not the same thing, and they're not really They're
very dissimilar organically speaking. So the virus would insert viral
DNA into the bacterial cell, and that viral DNA might
do one of a couple of different things. It might
shut down the bacteria's ability to resist antibiotics. So in
other words, this could be like uh Obi Wan sneaking
(21:16):
in and turning off that that that tractor beams so
the millennium falcon can escape, except in this case we're
talking like more like a force field. So maybe it's
more like Return of the Jedi where they have to
go to the force moon of Indoor and destroy the
ground based force field that's protecting the death Star that
is fully operational up over in orbit at any rate
I know I could go, So then you could do that,
(21:40):
or it could even just kill the bacterial cell, like
just just let's just bypass all that, or just render
it harmless. Um So, these are all the basic things
that this viral genome could do if it were designed properly. Um.
As a bonus, that approach can be tailored so that
(22:00):
it targets specific types of bacteria. The virus have protein
markers on them that search for other specific protein markers,
and they will ignore anything that doesn't fit that description. Right,
So it's almost like a cell seeking missile in a way. Well,
if you design in such a way where it's it's
looking for this harmful bacteria, it will leave all the
(22:21):
helpful bacteria alone. Oh that's really great because these days,
I'm sure that that all y'all have experienced it. When
you take an antibiotic, uh, you wind up with kind
of an upset stomach for a few days because in
addition to clearing out whatever infection you're trying to get
rid of, that antibiotic is probably also destroying your microbiome,
which is good for like digesting food, exactly right. So
(22:44):
this would be potentially a gentler approach and it would
affect more dangerous bacterial strains. So it's a double win
if we can make it work. But one of the
other things I wanted to talk about. In fact, this
was the basis of a video episode of Forward Thinking,
and Lauren, you wrote the script and it was phenomenal.
It's just a really cool idea is using DNA. I
(23:05):
mean DNA it's all about holding information, right, it's information
that makes us who we are. But we can use
DNA to hold other types of information too, and not
just a little a whole lot of information. Yeah, and
the train of thought here is that, Okay, we've got
really amazing storage materials and technologies for data these days,
(23:28):
but they have some downsides. And Okay, so you know,
like like we've got we've got hard disk drives, which
is you know, probably what's in your laptop or or
your desktop computer, which work by magnetizing a faro magnetic
film on a disc. And uh and the data is
encoded in the changes in the direction of magnetism. Okay. Um,
if you remember floppy disks or like like you know,
(23:49):
five and a quarter inch floppies anything like that, they
used similar technology. This is why it was so much
fun to drag a magnet over somebody's floppy disk. Oh uh, man,
you or you were a mean middle schooler. I'm just kidding.
I'm sure. No, No, Joe, you are truly the best
of all of us. I didn't think that you would,
although now I wonder. I'll wonder every day anyway. That's
(24:14):
also basically what makes a magnetic tape work, like like
in cassette tapes or in not cassette tapes, because as
it turns out, magnetic tape is not only used by
kitchy hipster bands to uh to sell their albums these days.
It's actually the highest capacity type of memory available on
the market because you can encode so much information into it. Um.
(24:36):
Then there's also there's flash memory, uh, iterations of which
are what's in your phone and your USB stick and
like maybe your fancy, silent running computer. Um. And they
work by the grace of wizards. Uh No, I mean
probably not, but honestly I understand them really poorly. Jonathan
fact check me on this. Basically, like a flash memory
(24:56):
creates minute changes in voltage through transistors and then reads
those minute changes in order to tell you stuff. Yeah,
that's one form of flash memory. But yes, you are correct,
which they there are different types where some require constant power.
As soon as they lose power than everything gets white.
And then there are some that are persistent. Obviously, this
(25:19):
would be more in the persistent realm, because you're talking
about things like like thumb drives and stuff where you
don't have a constant amount of battery attached. Yeah. Sure, um.
And then of course we have optical discs, CDs and
DVDs in Blu ray which encode data and in tiny
pits and ridges and then they scan those with a
laser and that's how you figure stuff out. UM. So yes,
(25:42):
all rad but downsides. First of all, they're they're pretty delicate.
You don't want to jostle them around too much, or
in the case of your your optical discs, you don't
want to you know, scratch a huge key across them
or something like that, because that will ruin them real fast.
You don't want to get them too hot or too cold,
and the data in them will corrupt over time. UM.
(26:04):
Your your hard drives, your flash drives, your your burn
CDs can all corrupt in as little as five years,
and magnetic tape can corrupt in as little as fifteen
to thirty years. UM. Also, even though they can carry
an impressive amount of information, especially if you remember those
five and a quarter inch floppies and look at that
in comparison to your cell phone and think about how
(26:25):
old you are. Um, the technical limits of those materials
aren't all that high when you start to consider how
much data we're creating every day, right, which is an unbelievable, massive, huge,
enormous other adjectives amount of data. I mean, it's it's
(26:49):
so big that it is impossible for me to get
a handle on it. It is an amount so vast
as to dwarf my sense of perspective every day. It's
a massive amount of spying they're doing on you. We'll see.
That's the other problem, right, It's not just that we're
creating a huge amount of data. We also need to
make use of that data. And meanwhile, you have to
(27:12):
put the data somewhere. And storage is a big thing.
It's a it's a big issue. You want a storage
medium that's going to be UH safe and secure. You
want it to be uh to last a nice long time.
You wanted to be really efficient at storing a massive
amount of data in a small amount of space. And
like you you're saying, Lauren, the options we have are limited,
(27:35):
sometimes in multiple uh features all at once, you know.
So what's the solution. Well, strangely enough, this episode is
about DNA. So baby, Hey, it's DNA, that's right, Yeah, yeah,
DNA can be used for for data storage. It's hardy,
it's half life, it's like five dred years, so it
can it can potentially store data for like centuries, and
(27:57):
it can encode so much data. You guys, um in
the video episode that I wrote about it, I did
a whole bunch of wacky math and uh okay. So
so d na's theoretical limit is more than an exhibite
of data per cubic millimeter. An exhibite is a billion gigabytes.
(28:20):
A cubic millimeter is a fraction of a drop, like
to ten thousands of a teaspoon. So for a an
incredibly small physical volume, you can hold an enormous amount
of digital information. Yeah. Um. In order to get that
much information into magnetic tape, which is the densest storage
(28:40):
medium available for purchase today, you'd need a hundred million
cubic millimeters of space, which is like fifty two liter
soda bottles as opposed to the fraction of a drop. Right,
Even optical disk storage at its theoretical limit would still
require five two leader soda bottles worth of space. And again,
(29:03):
since we're talking about creating this massive amount of information
every single day, if you want to be able to
store the information, particularly if you plan on doing something
useful with it, like parsing through all that data because
you're a nosy spy, uh, you want to have the
most compact efficient means of data storage possible, because you're
going to run out of space otherwise, or you're going
(29:24):
to have to figure out how long do I hold
onto this data before I wipe it so I can
hold onto the next match of data because another enormous
amount is coming tomorrow. Yeah, um so so okay. So
here's how the process works of encoding data into DNA.
You get some computer scientists and some bioengineers. Uh, you
(29:44):
get them in the same room together, and you get
them to design a system for encoding data in the
nuclear basis the nucleotides of DNA and and these building
blocks can basically be used like ones in zeros or
you know, since there's four block box, you can use
base four instead of binary, which is the approach that
a team out of the University of Washington in collaboration
(30:06):
with Microsoft Research chose recently. The bioengineers can synthesize DNA, uh,
you know, sticking the nucleotides together in a sequence into
in order to encode your data. Um that this recent
team even included little I D tags in the DNA
sequences in order to make the data random access, like
(30:26):
your hard drive is random access, which means that you
have like a whole soup of information kind of like
stuck on there, but you can pull out whatever bit
of information you want at any time. And uh, and
so here you can have a whole vial of DNA
and and you can still find whatever you need quickly. Right,
Instead of having to read through the entire amount of
(30:49):
data that has been encoded in that string, you can
zone in on the specific string that's relevant to whatever
it is you need, which is incredibly important. Right. It's
kind of like anyone who's who's played uh, just just
a video game where you're playing something where it's it's
reading from memory that that stuff is very responsive, and
then you move into a new area where it has
(31:10):
to consult the read off of the disk. Right, then
it slows everything down. Well, it's very important that we
have this random access memory approach because otherwise, if you
had this massive amount of data stored, it would still
be very frustrating if it took you, you know, two
days to find the specific part of the information you
needed because it was buried so far deep in that
(31:31):
DNA strand right that that is less useful scientifically speaking, um, Right,
because in order to read the data that's written in
your DNA. You just sequence the DNA and then decode
the data. And and in the downsides here are that
it's currently so expensive to synthesize and sequence d N
A and also it takes time, um like at least
(31:52):
ten hours to to sequence your DNA so that you
can get your data out of it. Um. But this
recent team thinks that it could so easily be made
cheaper and faster, especially you know, if there's a financial
incentive to do so. Um you know which there is,
and not only for data storage, as we discussed in
the previous episode. All Right, so we've talked about DNA
being used as diodes, We've talked about DNA being used
(32:15):
to target bacterial infections, DNA being used for data storage,
DNA being used as a beverage, DNA chasing me down
an endless hallway. What other uses, uh, could we see
DNA applied toward in the future. Well, here's one that
I think is pretty interesting. So we've talked before about
building organs in the lab, and they're they're multiple ways
(32:38):
you can look at this. You can look at like
the organ on the chip concept, or you can just
talk about building organs actually as in like three D
printing organs that would be uh, that would eventually be
used as donor organs were not quite fully there yet. Um.
But but we're making headway with a lot of this technology,
and it's useful for lots of reasons, Like one of
(32:59):
the big ones is harm free research. You can test
the effects of a drug or study the progression of
a disease on a living organ without actually damaging a
living person. So assembling these lab organs it it shouldn't
be impossible, right, because it happens in nature. The cells
in your body can do it. They can divide and
self as symbol into a kidney or a liver, So
(33:22):
why shouldn't they be able to do the same thing
in a controlled laboratory environment. They should. It's just not
very easy at all and uh and so one of
the things that we try to do is what we
just mentioned, three D printing in organ like three D
printing in a lab environment, depositing cells upon one another
to eventually spit out a whole organ. But that's not
(33:44):
as easy as it sounds. You encounter multiple problems. One
of them is it's hard to get the cells to
stick in the right place. Number two is it's hard
to print with enough precision. Ideally, what we'd want is
single cell resolution, you know, upping the resolution on your printer.
In this case, it would be upping the resolution until
you print one cell at a time, and that's not
(34:05):
easy to do, right. And then on top of that,
it's hard to keep cells from being damaged or killed
in the printing process, right because if you just end
up with a bunch of dead cells in your brand
new organ you don't have a very useful organ want
it for right, Well, we are not shooting the next
(34:28):
episode of Game of Thrones, so we don't have a
need for visceron just to throw around everywhere. But interestingly,
d NA plays a role other than encoding the building
blocks to make cells in a solution that was proposed
in a paper called program Synthesis of Three Dimensional Tissues
in Nature Methods. And in this paper, the authors describe
(34:51):
a method of constructing three D quote organoid like structures
using the help of a kind of d N a
vel crow that allows DNA coded cell structures to stick
to gel coded surfaces and to each other. And the
method they have is is called d N A programmed
assembly of cells or d pack uh, And it goes
(35:13):
like this. The cells for creating the organoid structure get
pieces of single stranded DNA inserted into their outer membrane,
so you've gotta sell and you stick these little d
NA hairs all over the outside of it. So this
means the cells are coded in DNA molecules that act
sort of like code locked velcro h. They'll stick to
(35:35):
DNA strands on the outside of other cells, but only
the ones that have the right code sequences and lock
up with the complementary. So what you can make with
this is cells that are coded to stick to exactly
the other cells you want them to and not stick
where you don't want them to. That's very clever. Yeah,
(35:55):
it's very interesting, and so hopefully what they're saying is
that this will help us build these organoid structures in
the lab that will eventually aid in things like tissue
specific cancer research. I just like the word organoid makes
me think of like it's like some sort of he
Man villain. But I have one last, one last future
(36:17):
use of of d n A. That's pretty hot. You
guys are gonna like it. How hot? Is it? Like
more than a hundred degrees celsius hot so hot, hot
enough to boil water. Yeah, I'm talking about using DNA
and a method that would allow engineers to build better
facilities to harvest uh geothermal energy and converted into electricity.
(36:42):
And you think, hell, what, how could DNA do that.
I was really confused when I started reading the article
because as I was reading the article, I was thinking,
I don't see where DNA comes into hear at all. Connection. Yeah,
so here's the connection. Here's here's what the scientists we're
working with. Um uh So a scientist or a grad student.
(37:04):
You're in jong uh energy researcher. Stanford grad student was
talking about using nanotracers. Grad students can be scientists, but nanotracers, well, well,
grad student because not not fully outside a graduate school yet,
but still has this idea about nano tracers used for
(37:25):
geo thermal surveying. So what what he did was they
took nano tracers and naro tracers. You can just think
of as it's a substance that you're pumping into a
geo thermal reservoir to kind of see where it's connected
to other wells, geo thermal wells in the area. If
you have nano tracers popping out of one well, you're
(37:45):
pumping them into another well, you say, oh, these two
are connected. But the problem is that if you have
a pretty complex geo thermal reservoir system, you can't really
be sure if you're if you're injecting nanotracers and mall locations,
which nanotracers belong to which pump sites. Right, So if
(38:05):
you're injecting the men that like five different sites and
you're getting nanotracers out of a well, unless there's some
way to identify those nanotracers, you cannot be certain that
they came from a specific injection site. Thus, you can't
really say we've mapped this out and we know that
these two points are connected. I might be one of
the other points that are connected. But DNA could help
(38:27):
solve that problem. So what the researchers are suggesting is
that you should encode the nanotracers with DNA and give
them like a little name tag and identifier, so you
know these nanotracers specifically are belonged to this injection site
because it has this specific DNA sequence encoded in the nanotracer.
(38:47):
That would allow the researchers to create a more accurate
geothermal map and help engineers decide the appropriate place to
set up a facility or to inject water into the
reservoir to break up rocks to get better access to
geothermal energy. And in some of their experiments, you know,
they haven't put this to practical use. They've done it
in the lab to make sure that this would actually work. Um,
they use some some sand and they heated the sand
(39:10):
to see if they used uh strands of DNA, if
the strands could hold up under the conditions that they
would encounter out in the field. They saw that the
DNA could remain intact after encountering temperatures as high as
three d two degrees fahrenheit or a hundred fifty degrees celsius,
which would be similar to what they would encounter if
(39:31):
you were actually pumping them into these geo thermal reservoirs.
So it's kind of interesting they wouldn't They don't directly
allow you to convert geo thermal energy into electricity, but
they give more tools to the people who are who
want to tap into that power and convert it into electricity.
And according to the researchers, they anticipate that with a
(39:54):
conservative estimate, they said that in the future, we will
rely on geo thermal energy to provide five percent of
of the world's electricity, which sounds like a small amount
until you start to actually look at numbers and see
how much five percent accounts for, and it's enormous. So
and of course every bit you can take away from
(40:15):
fossil fuels is a big help in other areas. Oh, absolutely, yeah,
And and that's oh, that's it's so fascinating. I love
these these approaches that people are using to take DNA
and and and use it as an actual tool. I mean,
we are a man the toolmaker, but but this is
it's so it's so great that we're taking this this
tiny thing that makes up ourselves that we only really
(40:36):
started to get a handle on within the past century,
and and we're we're bending it to our own power. Well,
I mean we uh. It's sort of the most fundamental
level you can go to when you're talking about bio mimetics, right,
well maybe not actually you can probably go to proteins maybe,
which would be even simpler. But I mean, when you're
talking about making technology or machines based off of principles
(40:59):
that we see employed nature. These are the most fundamental
machines out there. There's machines that make all the other machines, right.
I don't think when Friedrich Mesher was looking at all
that PUS he was thinking, you know, I bet someday
we're gonna store information in the stuff that's in this
stuff that I don't even know the name for yet.
(41:21):
I bet he wasn't thinking that. And I bet if
we took the way back machine, we prove ourselves right.
But we've run out of time. I wanted to go
back to the PUS party so badly. Even the way
back machine it's got, it's still recharging from our last jaunt,
so we're not going to be jumping in there anytime soon. Well,
this has been a fun journey to go on with
(41:42):
you guys, with the DNA molecule and with PUS. Yes,
it's been. It's been educational, I will say now it's been.
It's been really fascinating. And who knows what other potential
applications we will find for DNA in the future. And
of course there are all the other ones that we've
talked about in previous episod Those things like uh, you know,
genetic medicine, that sort of stuff. The really looking at
(42:05):
how we can use tools like Crisper in order to
manipulate UH genes so that we can improve our health
or perhaps even enhance ourselves in some ways, which of
course is as a totally separate subject that has its
own massive ball of ethical concerns attached to it, But
(42:28):
all of it is is coming back to this, this
long chain molecule and uh really fascinating stuff. So guys,
if you have any questions about Dinah, that's how I'm
going to say it from now on, Thank you, Joe H.
Then you should write us and send those questions, or
if you have any suggestions for future episodes. You've got
an idea, you want to know how X will work
in the future, or maybe there's some emerging technology you
(42:50):
want to hear more about. Right us, let us know.
Our email address is fw thinking at how Stuff Works
dot com, or drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook.
At Twitter, we are f W thinking. Just search f
W Thinking in Facebook search bar will pop right up
and leave us a message there and we will talk
to you again really soon for more on this topic.
(43:16):
In the Future of Technology, visit forward thinking dot Com,
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Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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