The Age of Living Machines

Susan Hockfield, BvtnLib 660.6 HOC, 2019

Good book. It would be better if it wasn't shoehorned into the "episode visit interview chapter" style common to most recent science journalist books. Perhaps this is "inspiring writing partner" Toby Lester's work.

Hockfield is a professor of neuroscience and MIT president emerita (2004-2012).

The "nanoparticle" buzzword appears frequently; measurements rarely, measurement errors never.

Angela Belcher, abalone shells calcium carbonate in fiber matrix),

• p33 electric car battery manufacture 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide
• p47 2006-2009 made button cells.
• No information on watt-hours per gram or number of cycles, frustrating

Peter Agre, aquaporin, one pore is 3 billion water molecules per second

• KHL A liter of water is 3e25 water molecules, so processing 1 liter per second requires more than 1e19 pores
• Suggests using osmotic pressure to move water out of waste and into concentrated detergent
• Aquaporin A/S 2005 Denmark: Peter Holme Jensen, Østergaard Jensen, Claus Hélix-Nielsen (Maribor Slovenia)
• p68 embed membrane spheres in 200 nm membrane sheet on top of porous support sheet.

• some (slow) water filter products

Sangreeta Bhatia, iron oxide nanoparticles (what size???) attached to proteins that bind to cancer blood vessel proteins, encapsulated in PEG (polyethylene glycol) shield, with a protein cut by tissue specific enzymes (2016) (2019) that causes the nanoparticles bind to each other and cluster near "cancer enzymes" that cancer cells use to open up spaces in normal tissues. This led to fluorescent proteins that can be activated by cancer enzymes and appear in urine (2014), Glympse Bio.

Jim Ewing, Hugh Herr (biomechatronoics) artificial limbs and bioamplifiers, EmPower. I'm reminded of OHSU work decades ago, stopped because of fear of potential lawsuits involving users of nerve-amplifying devices. Development by Hidur Einarsdottir and Kim De Roy at Össur in Reyjavik Iceland, RHEO KNEE™.

Danforth Plant Science Center St. Louis 750 sf "growth house" (my decrepit greenhouse is 864 sf), 180 meters of conveyor belts that transport RFID-tagged, individually-gene-sequenced plants through stations that water, fertilize, measure, and photograph them. Elizabeth Kellogg PNAS 1998, Relationships of Cereal Crops .... TERRA-REF, Cassava nutritional improvements.

Cheating Malthus: Nordhaus 2018, ... Carrying Capacity ...