ForrestGump
- Science
This Germ Could Save Your Life
Its a drizzly morning on New Yorks Upper East Side, and Rockefeller University microbiologist David Thaler is sipping a double espresso amid the retro-hippie pillows and dangling paper stars of Java Girl, a favorite haunt of the neighborhoods brainiac Nobel laureates, aging poets and famous entertainers. Thaler somehow manages to embody all three—a long, graying ponytail curling down the middle of his back, wire-frame glasses askew over expansive brown eyes, and a schnozz to rival an Einstein, Ginsberg or Allen. Thaler is one of the leading cheerleaders for a new field of biotechnology aimed at engineering the bacteria inside us to deliver drugs, destroy tumors, actively fight infection, and even vaccinate against their disease-causing kin.
2.5.2008 at 08:10pm - Comment by ForrestGump“I honestly think people are more comfortable with the idea of nano-robots scurrying through their bodies than they are of deploying bacteria,” Thaler muses. “But when you think about it, you cultivate your lawn. You’d probably like to cultivate your internal landscape.” Well said. After we can overcome the hurdles of human timidness toward the implementation of modified bacteria in our bodies, there seems to be an entirely open and new scope of research in terms of productive bacteria. Instead of trying to create new cures and treatments for age old problems, why not manipulate something already in existence and change harmful bacteria into helpful bacteria?
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