Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
Blood Music (1985) by Greg Bear, originally published as a novelette in the SF magazine Analog, portrays the frightening experiment of a biotechnologist who creates nanobots out of his lymphocytes and injects them into his body. As expected, they multiply, change…
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In what seems more the plot of a SF novel than a scientific discovery, a new strand of DNA has recently been engineered in a lab (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v509/n7500/full/nature13314.html). The headlines have defined it “alien DNA”, technically a misnomer for what the…
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Prey (2002) is a novel by Michael Crichton, and, as others of the same author, presents unintended consequences of newly discovered technologies and scientific wonders. In this case, nanotechnologies, genetic engineering and swarm intelligence get the spotlights. Fascinating and scary.