Seeker

by Douglas E. Richards

what biological machinery had managed to do on Earth for billions of years. When a human sperm and egg came together to form a single cell, this cell possessed the programming and technical capabilities needed to self-assemble an entire human, the perfect example of nanofabrication in practice. This single cell used raw materials found in its environment to quickly produce an identical cell, which then became four, which then became eight—eventually multiplying into the trillions. And each duplication event along the way required a cell to find the molecular constituents of its DNA and assemble a perfect copy, three-billion letters long, something it did with astonishing fidelity. Then, as if having a single cell direct the manufacture of trillions of others wasn’t impressive enough, these identical cells would begin to specialize along the way. Following the dictates of a complex set of instructions, some miraculously transformed into eye cells, some into brain cells, some into heart cells, some into muscle cells, and so on. The automated self-construction of a human being from a single cell, including a working brain hundreds of billions of neurons strong, was a staggering, mind-boggling feat of engineering. But since nature made this look relatively easy, it was largely taken for granted. Those who celebrated mankind’s engineering genius as being incomparable, raving about the magic of a 3D printer capable of creating tiny plastic action figures, almost never considered...