Can an Electric Car Catch a Cold from a Battery Virus?
by Christine Lepisto, Berlin on 04. 6.08
Photo: Donna Coveney
Any reader of these pages knows that batteries are key to the future of alternative energies. Light, high energy batteries to power electric cars. Cost effective batteries to store solar power at night or wind power when the air is still. So it is an exciting step that MIT has announced a success which could result in the development of batteries with 3 or more times the energy density of current batteries. But their method involves genetically modified viruses. Can an electric car catch a cold?
MIT researchers have persuaded a construction team of viruses to build a super-small battery anode. The researchers altered the genetic instructions of the viruses so that they pick up cobalt oxide and gold when growing their protein coats. This results, effectively, in nanowires which can be aligned on a polymer film to form an anode with extremely high energy density potential.
Is this where luddite and high-tech TreeHugger minds meet in battle? Conservation is needed, but so is science. Genetic engineering raises fears. But using viruses brings advantages which cannot be achieved by physical-chemical methods alone. In this case, the virus controls the build-up of the cobalt oxide and gold molecules very precisely, which is difficult to achieve by other methods. Perhaps even more importantly, the process proceeds at room temperature and ambient conditions. No high energy pressure-cooker chemistry is required. Learning to harness the power of biology, and manage the risks of this new technology, is the exciting challenge for the TreeHuggers of the future.
Professors Angela Belcher, Yet-Ming Chiang, and Paula Hammond (all three pictured) led a team of five additional researchers on this work: MSE graduate students Ki Tae Nam (the lead author), Dong-Wan Kim, Chung-Yi Chiang and Nonglak Meethong, and ChE postdoctoral associate Pil. J. Yoo. A report on the work will appear in the April 7 issue of Science.
Via ::A to Z nano
Image via ::MIT
LOVE electric car possibilities... HATE genetic modification.
Head... might... explode
I'm all for it actually... this sounds great! Though my main concern at this point is the lifespan of these anodes...
This sounds like a fantastic technology; I hope it can be realized in commercial applications.
As an aside, there really isn't a reason to fear genetic modification. Humans have been doing it for almost four thousand years--it's called grafting and breeding. If you eat food of any type, or have a dog, you're living with and consuming genetic engineering.
Genetically engineered organisms (mostly bacteria and mice) are used daily in labs for all sorts of tasks. They never leave the lab, they are not allowed to reproduce freely or to contaminate the environment.
In this case you can control the growth of the viruses in a safe environment and kill them as soon as the electrode structure is built. They are just the biological robots that build the battery.
Those who fear genetic mods are crazy - they are consigning the human race to suffer from disease
and abnormalities forever. Such people are paranoid. A far more practical electrical storage unit already exists and is ready for deployment.
Any improvements would be of minimal significance. And NOTHING will help crappy wind power - it is way too expensive, too much a visual blight on our environment, and with solar thermal and nuclear and geotheral, is totally and completely irrelevant and superfluous. Even wave power is
vastly superior to wind. Only politicians like wind power.
I find it ironic that something like a virus, that can slow us down, may actually speed us up.
Solutions based in biology are our best bet for the future; genetic manipulation is better than lead-acid batteries any day.
I would also be interested to know the lifespan (XnS dVd).
Has anyone read the book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. It's by Janine Beynus. She goes through a whole list of technologies similar to this anode. Nature is full of chemicals and structures that humans simply can't make using conventional, energy intensive methods.
ArthurGlen: You are wrong, I like wind energy.
It is working nicely. While I don't want to see turbines everywhere I certainly enjoy watching them, each kind like a monument, showing humans awareness of their own energy useage...
Really? There's people reading this website that don't understand genetic modification? Holy cow. I'm surprise.
First, no one is against breeding for selective traits. Indeed, that's been done for 10,000 years. Maybe it's led to some dogs with absurdly short legs, and pugs that can't breathe through their noses, but overall that's not what one means when one uses the term "genetic modification."
No, genetic modification is the act of taking a gene expression from something like a brazil nut, and inserting that DNA sequence into something else, like say a soy bean. Now, all of a sudden you could trigger an unexpected allergic reaction, or worse, since you've created a life form that has never heretofore yet existed, you could create an entirely new food allergy.
No, let's talk about viruses, retro viruses, and our inability to you know... solve something like, oh, I don't know, say... AIDs. We certainly have shown that we don't have the ability to master problems that get out of control. Yet, we want to dive head first into possibly creating new ones? Mary Shelly would wonder why she bothered picking up a pen.
And to the ignorant person who says genetically modified stuff is only in labs-- if you live in the US you've been eating genetically modified foods for years. Sorry, hate to break this to you, but the horse is out of the barn.
So you might be saying, well, I guess if we've had 10 years and there have been no problems, what's the worry? Try googling "starlink corn" for starters.
If anyone wants to debate me on this, I say bring it. Because you don't know the first thing about what you think you're talking about.
Well, just be careful not to spill your antibiotics on your batteries when you get back from the pharmacy, I guess.
@stevejust: I am happy to live in Europe, thanks .. anyway you misread me, I never said that any GMO has ever been released in the environment. I just said that lab GMOs are not allowed to move into the environment.
About viruses like the flu virus, and retroviruses like HIV, the problem in fighting them is exactly that they are extremely efficient in genetically re-engineer themselves. They are much more efficient in creating mutations on their genetic code that we can be.
Nature is the first actor in creating genetic mutations. Without genetic mutations there won't be evolution, and viruses and bacteria are the most efficient in this process.
But I feel that this is getting a bit off topic.
To stay in topic, I would like to say that using biological system to engineer nano-structures is an incredible scientific success and it's showing a bright way to go forward for nano-technology.
Viruses are just pieces of RNA. People have so much emotional baggage attached to the word, that's the problem. Not the actual use of that genetic material.
Go biotech!
Alessio, I think your general theory is correct ("Nature is the first actor in creating genetic mutations"), but you're overlooking the very important difference between human-mediated organismal change and nature-mediated change--the span of time over which it happens.
Humans create GMOs over the span of several years. In nature, new/modified organisms take millions of years to evolve--that gives the rest of the ecosystem time to co-evolve. With a human-created GMO, you have an organism with very new and different traits and abilities, and the natural ecosystems haven't had the chance to develop balances for it like predators and population controls.
And you can't discount possible escapes of GMOs into the wild. The more prevalent that this kind of technology gets, the more often escapes will happen--someone will get sloppy. There's eventually going to be some GMO incident that we compare to Chernobyl or Love Canal.
Brian, I think your scenario would be more scary if we weren't already 100% unnatural.
Natural doesn't mean good anyway. In nature, we'd live to be about 20 years old before a violent death or a slow disease.
Do you think buildings are natural? Contraception? Boats, planes, cars? Indoor plumbing? Hygiene, antibiotics, fridges? Look around you. We've been re-designing our environment for a long time, and biotech is just the next step in reducing human suffering.