Our Bodies, Our NanoSelves

Replicating Nanomachines
Originally uploaded by jurvetson

This beautiful image comes courtesy of Steve Jurvetson's feed on Flickr. Jurvetson, a venture capitalist who funds nanotech companies, describes this image of a bacterial polysome, which appeared in Cell, as a "9-head programmable nanofabricator."

Jurvetson goes on: "The ribosome reads the digital code of mRNA and manufactures most of what we care about in our bodies from a sequential concatenation of amino acids into proteins. The ribosome is a wonderful existence proof of the power and robustness of molecular machines."

Backgrounder
Molecules, machines and miracles
The business of imagination
Three Nano Kings