Saturday, May 12, 2007

Peter Watts brings our attention to this biotech gem:

The Uplift Protein





A prefrontal-cortex protein involved in learning and memory. There's this one variant that's peculiar to us Humans, 45 amino acids longer than the standard model handed out to other primates, and a team of Chinese researchers have just nailed the gene that codes for it. And the really cool part? Utterly ignoring all those some-things-man-was-not-meant-to-know types, they spliced the causal mutation into chimpanzee DNA, which then started to synthesise the type-II variant. No word yet on how far they let that stretch of code iterate. No word on how many months away we are from building chimps with human-scale intelligence.


Hey, you know how DARPA's really into battle robots? What do you want to bet a hyperchimp could outperform even the smartest gun-toting autonomous vehicle?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, boy. As if we didn't have enough bizarre shit to worry about. Visions of the Chinese origins of the "Planet of the Apes".

Or, super-monkies armed to the teeth raging across a future Middle-Eastern war zone. How delightful. 8^/

Mac said...

Or, super-monkies armed to the teeth raging across a future Middle-Eastern war zone. How delightful.

Well, *I* thought so. ;-)