Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

Click here for contact details,other articles and personal details

The future of bacteria

Ian Pearson, May 2003

The most publicised work in genetic modification to date has been in making crops that are resistant to pests or weedkillers, have a better shelf life or taste, or that can grow in conditions where unmodified organisms would be unable to thrive. Reaction to the technology has often been negative. Many people are even more concerned by future prospects of customised children. However, one of the most significant areas of future development will be in using proteins within living cells to assemble nano-structures such as small molecular clusters or tiny electronic circuits (ribosomes assemble amino acids into specific proteins trillions of times a day in each of our bodies). The next decade will see enormous effort concentrated in working out the precise mechanisms used by the many biological proteins, and will give us many tools for this kind of assembly. Meanwhile, development of molecular switches is accelerating, along with molecular sensing technology, as is of course the use of carbon nanotubes to act as wires linking the switches and sensors. Such bottom up assembly is often hailed as the natural replacement for today's lithography, which is becoming increasingly difficult as feature sizes fall. So far however, the assembly has been assumed by most people to be done by tiny machines, not by biological cells. If bacteria can be genetically modified to do the assembly of circuitry, it will be a major breakthrough. Another would be that the circuitry could actually stay inside a bacterium, and be powered by the bacterium's own biological powerhouses, the mitochondria. In a decade or two, there could well be bacteria that enclose fully functioning electronic circuits. Even though the circuitry within each cell might be limited, self organisation could link many bacteria together into useful computing, storage or sensing devices. These bacteria would self replicate quite naturally, with their computing power growing organically. It might become possible to grow very large and powerful computers in this way, without the traditional problems of power supply and heat dissipation directly taken care of by nature. Using an evolutionary design methodology, it might be possible to program large cluster for consciousness. It is a frightening thought, but in the far future, your yoghurt might be much smarter than you are!