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Hi Leo,
Your post brings up a wealth of interesting subjects. I appreciate
the link you offered, and did a bit of research. One of the sites I found was http://ei.cornell.edu/biodeg/bioremed/ .
Fascinating stuff! Bioremediation, phytoremediation...
What this seems to be about is using natural properties of living
organisms, or engineering (sometimes genetically) the properties, to transform
harmful waste substances into benign ones.
In other words, they are using complex systems to try and remediate
the properties of simple systems, and trying to engineer properties into complex
systems in order to do it, without quite understanding the "mechanisms" at work
or the consequences of using living organisms in this way. This isn't quite as
scary as genetically engineering food crops, but it seems to me the potential
exists for inadvertently creating some sort of nasty pathogen, if human sewage
is one of the avenues for using these organisms, along with mutagenic chemicals
or radiation...
In any case, I still think it should, in theory, be easier and
simpler to restrict ourselves to the molecular level of remediation. You
mentioned enzymes and this is one avenue that should be explored.
Another would be simply the reactive capabilities inherent in
certain elements and compounds. Oxygen is extremely reactive, for
example (which is why we are exhorted to eat our "anti-oxidants" all the
time). My knowledge of chemical reactions is not, by any means, extensive-- just
the basic non-chemistry-major stuff plus the accumulated knowledge of following
my own curiosity and asking questions, doing research, etc. But I know that
mixing two "things" together, like chlorine bleach and ammonia, can result in an
explosive reaction, all by itself (not requiring any additional energy to start
the transformation/reaction). I also know that there are ways to control
chemical reactions such that they aren't as explosive. Human metabolic
processes, using sugar for energy, is an example of how much of a difference
this kind of control can make. You can have body heat or a fire; same process
going on, but one is more controlled than the other. Using a buffer in a process
which involves acids can control the effects of the acids, and so
forth.
What I'm thinking is that there should be innumerable ways to
take any dangerous or toxic molecule and figure out a series of steps which
reconfigure it, without needing added energy. Furthermore, because molecular
organization is not complex, we can and do model it in enough detail to
accurately predict the behaviors and outcomes of various interactions, so there
should be "no surprises" of the sort that genetic engineering and use of
living systems is liable to generate.
I also think that various processes humans routinely use to create
materials we need may require a re-think with the whole process geared to what
the waste products would be and the difficulty level of reconfiguring those
waste products. There's more than one way to do just about everything. That fact
can be applied to both our manufacturing and our waste management processes so
that they fit together in ways more productive and healthy all the way around.
It just requires creative application of knowledge and thought, really. That
means "knowing who to ask"-- cuz I don't have the required
knowledge...
If you're a computational chemist, now working in
biology... you might be just the person to bounce ideas off of. Where would
I take this idea from here, in practical terms?
Judith
BioTheory: An E-Journal of General Science in the Rosennean Complexity
Paradigm http://www.rosen-enterprises.com/RobertRosen/BioTheoryLaunch.htm
Website address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com/
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