11:50 AM Anita Goel
Information Processing & Physical Intelligence in Nanomachines that Read/Write DNA
Convergence of fundamental physics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.
About 15 years ago got interested in the reading and writing machines in DNA. There are many mysteries about this process — how is it modulated by the environment? Is it a complex adaptive system? Got interested in the physics of this machine and this process. How can we control that machine? Could we introduce precision control?
A divergence. Medicine is practiced at the level of chemistry and microbiology. Physicists don’t know much about physics. How can these two worlds be brought together?
Can we develop a conceptual framework for developing nano-tools — knobs and controls to harness these nanomachines for a number of practical applications?
Precision controls have been introduced. Applications:
Converting energy efficiently at the nanoscale
Storing information in DNA
Computing
Gene RADAR — enables real-time point of care diagnosis. Handheld pathology lab — take a sample and get a result.
Several nanomachines within DNA. One of these uses a template to replicate the sequence.
Tools for single molecule detection and manipulation.
Anita closes her talk with some audience provocation / interaction.
Are nanomachines intelligent?
Audience answer: No.
Nanomotor might be thought of as a Maxwell Demon? Second law of thermodynamics — we go from order to disorder. Can we go the other way?
On the nanoscale, you can’t get a free lunch but you can get a cheaper lunch.
Feyman calculated in 1999 — if you stored all of human information into DNA you could store it in a box less than a millimeter thick. These nanomotors make 10/15th computational steps to take one step forward.
Intelligence = Information extracted / Information Present
Need a new framework that brings matter, energy, and consciousness into one framework.
Life, mind, and consciousness are emergent phenomena — get enough complexity and you get those things.
What if information, consciousness, and mind are something pervasive, more primal, and even more fundamental than matter, energy or even space time?
Refernces to John Archibald Wheeler — It from Bit.
11:15 AM Ellen Heber-Katz
The MRL mouse – how it regenerates and how we might do the same
Some mice can grow back more parts than others. Have found some mice that can grow back limbs, restore holes punched in ears.
Have looked at genetics. Have looked at the biology. Inflmation is key. Some part of the anti inflmatory reponse is related to the regeneration process. Anti-inflammatory drugs block the regeneration process
MRL mouse has mitochondria sitting on top of the nucleus. Resembles a stem cell.
Ear cells are very rapidly growing.
Have identified what may be the regeneration gene. Does regenration lead to immortality? Not currently, the MRL mouse dies of tumors related to an inflammatory autoimmune disease. Now working on separating tumors and inflammation from regeneration.
Question: why did we evolve away from regeneration — went with scar tissue instead? It is incorrectly believed that scarring is faster. May have to do with evolving away from the autoimmune / inflammatory problems.
10:40 AM Lance Becker
Modifying the Boundary between Life and Death
We used to have a clear bright line bwetween life and death. What we see now is an increasingly flexible boundary between the two.
We are “death” phobic. People don’t like the word — don’t like to talk about it. But if we’re going to prolong life, we need to understand death better.
What is death?
We don’t know much about it. We don’t understand its processes very well.
A more fundamental question — when is death? Did research some time ago on heart cells. Deprived them of oxygen for an hour — looking for when they died. Cells deprived of oxygen did not die. Cells died when oxygen was restored to them.
This occurs with brain cells and many other types of cells in the body.
This is intentional death — it’s a very active process. Mitochondria are key to this. We know that their function is energy. But apparently they also have a cell death switch built in. When you have no oxygen in your body, electrons build up in the mitochondria. When oxygen is reintroduced, the presence of those electrons is the signal to throw the death switch.
Cooling helps inhibit that process — “A cold heart can save your brain.” But cooling is a very time-dependent process. And our coolants aren’t good.
Working on developing a “slurry” to cool patients in a matter of minutes. Normally take about 8 hours to cool a person down.
“Mostly dead is slightly alive.”
That’s a good summary of what we know about the boundary between life and death.
Uncontrolled reperfusion — no oxygen for an hour. Lethal for animals. Controlled reperfusion with a cocktail — 6/6 test subjects survive.
Emergency room doctors trying to save lives are all about restoring oxygen to all parts of the body that aren’t getting it.
The border between life and death can be modified. We don’t know what the time window is. It could be that there is no point of death. We ned to understand and monitor mitochondria better — key to preventing death from many dieases (Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer).