Posts Tagged ‘dentures’
“The rewards for biotechnology are tremendous – to solve disease, eliminate poverty, age gracefully. It sounds so much cooler than Facebook.”*…
It’s hard to tell precisely how big a role biotechnology plays in our economy, because it infiltrates so many parts of it. Genetically modified organisms such as microbes and plants now create medicine, food, fuel, and even fabrics. Recently, Robert Carlson, of the biotech firm Biodesic and the investment firm Bioeconomy Capital, decided to run the numbers and ended up with an eye-popping estimate. He concluded that in 2012, the last year for which good data are available, revenues from biotechnology in the United States alone were over $324 billion.
“If we talk about mining or several manufacturing sectors, biotech is bigger than those,” said Carlson. “I don’t think people appreciate that.”…
What makes the scope of biotech so staggering is not just its size, but its youth. Manufacturing first exploded in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. But biotech is only about 40 years old. It burst into existence thanks largely to a discovery made in the late 1960s by Hamilton Smith, a microbiologist then at Johns Hopkins University, and his colleagues, that a protein called a restriction enzyme can slice DNA. Once Smith showed the world how restriction enzymes work, other scientists began using them as tools to alter genes…
The whole story at “The Man Who Kicked Off the Biotech Revolution.”
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As we clean our petri dishes, we might recall that it was on this date in 182 that Charles M. Graham was issued the first U.S. patent for artificial teeth. The record, and its details, were lost in the Patent Office fire of December, 1836. Dentures or false teeth had been around for eons. There is evidence Etruscans in what is today northern Italy made dentures out of human or animal teeth as early as 7000 BC; George Washington owned four separate sets of dentures (though none were wooden, despite a myth to that effect). But Graham was the first to patent his approach.
Digital wrongs…
Readers experience DRM– digital rights management– everyday, as a feature of the software they use and the entertainment they consume; it turns out that one doesn’t buy the services and experiences one thinks one’s buying; one rents them– on restrictive terms specified by the provider. Those providers take their rules very seriously indeed: they monitor their customer’s behavior for transgressions, sue their customers whenever they suspect a violation (c.f., here and here, for instance), and work surreptitiously with governments to extend their controls abroad (e.g., here).
Their success-to-date hasn’t gone unnoticed by those selling atoms as opposed to bits. Monsanto, for example, patents its seeds and licenses them to farmers, so that those farmers can’t use the seeds from their crops to replant– as for centuries they have– they must repurchase (or relicense). And like the litigious software and entertainment giants, Monsanto aggressively protects its interest through law suits.
Where might all of this end? A group of eight designers competing in The Deconstruction, gave us a peak:
The DRM Chair has only a limited number of use before it self-destructs. The number of use was set to 8, so everyone could sit down and enjoy a single time the chair.
A small sensor detects when someone sits and decrements a counter. Every time someone sits up, the chair knocks a number of time to signal how many uses are left. When reaching zero, the self-destruct system is turned on and the structural joints of the chair are melted…
[TotH to Hexus]
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As we decide to stand up, we might recall that, while dentures date back (at least) to the Etruscans circa 700 BCE, it was on this date in 1822 that Charles M. Graham of New York City received the first US patent for artificial teeth.
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