New Device Has the Potential to Copy Life and Fax It to Another Planet
Until the 1980s, the facsimile was unheard of. One can just imagine how people in those days tried to grasp the concept of reproducing a document on the other side of the world in real time. People in this generation will be equally awed to learn the existence of a "fax machine" for living organisms.
That's right, it is now possible to reproduce proteins not just on the other side of the world, but in another planet as well. The process is called "biological teleportation" which has been tested and has been found to actually work. But this type of teleportation is not quite the same as it is on "Star Trek."
"Biological teleportation" works by transmitting DNA over the internet and then recreating it via digital information at another place. Renowned geneticist Craig Venter, one of the pioneers of synthetic biology, built a machine to do this, and it is called the digital-to-biological converter (DBC).
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For this to work, a biological material is coded at one end of the manufacturing line. The genome's digital representation is sent over the internet. The DBC on the other end reads the digital code and recreates the biological item using adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine — chemicals that are the building blocks of life.
The machine has been tested in reproducing the Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEEV). Parts of the virus was sequenced, sent over the internet as a digital code and reconstructed at another end, all without human intervention. Currently, DBC's application is to send vaccines to hospitals so that these can be reproduced on site instead of having them shipped out and stockpiled.
But the space application of DBC is so promising that Elon Musk of Space X has entered the picture. "Getting antimicrobials and vaccines to space is going to be important' and not at the slow pace of rocket ships," Venter said. On the other hand, any material found on another planet with DNA can be sequenced and sent back to earth to be reproduced and studied.
