#4 - Creating Humans

I know I told others within the program that I would stick to IT related innovations, but I've secretly been harboring a deep fascination with and researching the concept of manufacturing humans.  Sounds crazy?  I think it is.  But the more I looked into the idea, the more I realized that it's actually feasible today. Now, I'm not a biologist, geneticist, or bioengineer so I won't get into the nitty-gritty details of the following innovations, but if you look at them as a whole, I hope you realize as I have, that we've already designed/created everything we need to build a living, breathing, and thinking production line human being. 

It all began with a discussion regarding an innovation from the first round of the course blogs. Someone in the class presented the concept of 3D organ printing. Though we were all amazed by the technology, I began to wonder "why stop there?" The scene from "The Fifth Element"where the "Divine One" is recreated from the DNA of an existing cell began running through my mind; if you haven't seen the movie, here's the scene that I'm referring to (caution: minor nudity): 

In doing research, I've found that there's actually amazing similarities between creating IT products and humans (this article is starting to sound creepy).  For example, humans like computers run on hardware.  These physical components provide mechanical and electrical signaling that we both use and need in order to transport signals and process the data and actions that we want to move, see, and hear.  For humans, this is already being created with technologies and innovations such as 3D organ printing (ears, liver, heart, etc.), skeletal (bone) replication, skin generation from existing cells, and the recent amazing work that has been done in creating muscular tissue in a lab.   

For the most part, the creation of the physical (hardware) components of the human body has been the easiest to manufacture; no offense to bioengineers.  The bigger hurdle has been on the "software" side of humans; improving the DNA code. Now I should clarify that we've "technically" had the genetic code of humans for the past eight years after the Human Genome Project completed their 13 year project to map the DNA of humans.  The issue has been that for the past eight years, it's taken us a while to understand and decipher the elements of the code. Today, science is at the point where we not only understand DNA gene sequencing (i.e., the combination of amino acids that makeup eye color, height, male pattern baldness, etc.), but we're actually improving and modifying the genes of living organisms. In fact, gene "design" or "coding" is now done on computers much like how we code software; we are designing the operating system of life on computers. Another element in this puzzle is that a new innovation that self-replicates and changes the structural composition of DNA (much like the complex DNA structure of the "Divine One" in the movie) means that we can add even more genes and "reengineer" the human body to be in theory "better" than currently/naturally possible. We are creating humans for a lack of better words "….perfect."  

Now I don't know all of the implications and legal restrictions in manufacturing humans, but the point that I wanted to make is that the technology already exists today. The current patent laws regarding bioengineering means that these technologies are "owned" by corporations, so it will take the consolidation and/or partnerships between companies before a human can be manufactured.  This raises the highly sensitive debate of "when does life begin," but I ask, if we've already created all of the components necessary for life, whats the next step? It appears that we're heading in that direction already, but nobody seems to be putting the pieces together or looking at the long term implications. When will today's "Divine One" be created?  Why not tomorrow? 

#3 - Five-Nanometer Silicon Oxide Switches

Okay - I chose this new technology for two reasons. First, my inner geek just fell in love with the concept of utilizing nanotechnology for advancing material science and manufacturing, and second, because I believe that manufacturing innovations don't get as much credit as end user centric innovations such as software. With that said, this posting will discuss the expansion of semiconductor data bandwidth as a result of advancements in silicon oxide switching (transistors).

I assume that most of us within the IT industry are familiar with Moore's law. If not, Moore's law states that ‘the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every 24 months.” That means chips get more complex, faster, and smaller every two years. This law has been true within the semiconductor industry for the past 40 years and up to now, has hit a roadblock. The reason for this roadblock is that there have not been any recent innovations in semiconductor manufacturing to allow the addition of more and smaller transistors within a single processor. You might not have noticed the roadblock, but if you look at processors in computers today, you’ll notice that the trend for companies like Intel is to stack processors with multiple cores (processors within processors).  The reason for this is that manufacturing technologies cannot create a processor core smaller than today’s core, so semiconductor companies are now stacking (in a three-dimensional stack) their smallest processors as a workaround. 

However, since this blog is about innovation, there is an invention out of Rice University that not only allows processors to be created smaller, but will actually improve the fastest production processor data bandwidth (memory capacity) from 32GB to 1TB. This completely goes against Moore’s law as this is more than a doubling of transistors per processor; it’s an increase of 3,025%!!!!  Jun Yao is the credited inventor of the tiny five nanometer wide silicon oxide switch, which is conceptualized in the picture below.

The Silicon Oxide Chip Jun Yao/Rice University

Jun claims his invention came about by looking where the semiconductor industry was not. In fact, the solution was in front of everyone’s eyes. For the past 20 years, the industry has been focusing on reducing the physical strands of graphite transistors. Jun noticed that processors are already made of silicone, which also conducts electricity well, ….. so why not make a switch out of silicon?  (One up for thinking outside the box!) In any case, the trials proved successful beyond Jun’s expectations and now the industry is flooding Rice University and Jun’s team with grant money to continue their research. The current chip that is being tested has already exceeded 1TB of data bandwidth. 

So what does this mean for us users?  I don’t know. One thing that comes to mind is the impact of the computer manufacturing industry in the late 1990’s; there was a small wave of technology improvements in manufacturing that created more powerful processors, servers, etc. This explosion of powerful infrastructure components allowed now popular technologies such as virtualization to take hold and revolutionize the IT industry. Because an invention such as Jun’s is at the front of any technology wave, the impact cannot really be predicted and only truly understood by looking back years later. One can only speculate, but perhaps with more powerful processors, data centers will become even smaller, and cloud computing will become cheaper and more feasible with smaller and MUCH more powerful processing capabilities. Thin clients anyone?