From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Fri May 30 2003 - 10:00:56 MDT
On Fri, 30 May 2003, Brett Paatsch wrote:
> Extropes, meet the Nanog gene (and protein) named after the
> mythic Celtic land of the ever-young, Tir nan Og.
You got to post this before I found a good ref... Dang it all.
> PS: This *is* good news but, unfortunately, it doesn't mean we'll be
> buying organs off the shelf as commodities in the next couple of years.
Its going to take a bit longer than that. I'd say 10 years optimistic,
perhaps 20 years pessimistic.
The problem is that it takes a decade or more to grow an adult sized
organ. Now it isn't clear precisely what all the limits are here.
Some of them may be nutrient and coolant related so we may be able
to advance these for organs grown in "organ factories".
But you still have the problem of generally a 24 hour cell cycle
for eukaryotic cells. The only way out of that is "whole genome
engineering". A big part of the cycle time is the "S" phase
during which DNA is synthesized. To optimize that you can
(a) decrease the amount of "junk" DNA [Fugu produce vertebrates
with 400 KBases of DNA vs. ~3 GBases of DNA in most mammals];
and (b) increase the density of "origins of replication" in
the DNA (these are the many locations where DNA polymerase
starts copying the DNA when the DNA needs to be replicated).
Then one can also probably decreease the cycle time of the other
phases of cell replication once they are well understood.
Its going to take us a number of years to understand enough
basic cell science and optimize the entire genome so as to
allow minimal organ growth times. You are probably also going
to need personal genome sequencing capability (since you want
your new organs to be self-compatible). People are working
on making that affordable but it will not arrive tomorrow.
Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri May 30 2003 - 10:12:02 MDT