PHAGE WAR
3.4 billion years of weapon evolution
As I have brought up before in my previous posts Nature engineers a yin and yang balance to prevent any species from becoming a cancer. The grass eaters would keep foliage in balance and predators would keep grass eaters in balance and so on. Even within us a protein agonist would start a process and another protein antagonist will be there to end it. To maintain equilibrium. If we can stably maintain equilibrium like we see during our youth, we can theoretically live forever. The oldest balancing war has been raging from 3.4 billion years and at a mammoth scale between two of the largest populations on Earth: bacteria and viral bacteriophages or Phages: more Phages than stars in our galaxy. Bacteria can multiply rapidly and even though they are invisible to human eye they can crowd out every other species were it not for the Phages that constantly destroy them. It’s ridiculously unbelievable how a tiny invisible bacteria with a few thousand genes can construct super intelligent engineering weapons like CRISPR to rapidly edit genes of their invading enemy to destroy them before they are destroyed. Phages keep building weapons to outsmart bacterial defense and bacteria keeps generating more novel defenses to protect itself. The Phage than evolves to overcome that defense. This has been going on and on for billions of years. I want my start up to build unique massive gene insertion technologies inspired from the Phage wars. What genes do I want to insert? Each of the species that have survived on Earth have been gifted unique evolutionary adaptations. Dinosaurs became apex predators and dominated over all other species in their time. Humans, the gift of intelligence which allows us to dominate the planet now. But there are other species that have adaptations that are uniquely superior: like Planar worms can restore and older senescent cell back to youthful configuration or Ginkgo Biloba tree can stabilize their genome/epigenome which permanently keeps them in youth. It may take thousands or even millions of years for us to acquire such adaptations. Instead I want to trigger evolutionary jumps by adopting these rare adaptations into humans. Whether I will succeed or not we have to see. In the meanwhile this is my first post in the age of AI so I have used it to share my wonder of the Phage war. Enjoy:
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