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"Science Fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Ideator | ||
| A computer device specifically made to help model genes and proteins for identification. |
In this novel, Bear describes the future of the children created in Darwin's Radio. There is a lot of future thinking about the study of microbiology; it comes up as the protagonists try to study an illness that affects these children.
| Everything on and around the benches was hooked up to a small, square, bright red Cenomics Ideator, a dedicated computer capable of 3-D imaging and real-time gene and protein description and identification. There was more than a wealth of equipment here: what Dicken saw as he walked around the room amounted to obscene overkill for a typical school medical facility. He had visited labs in rich biotech firms that wouldn't have been able to compete. "Wow," Dicken said in awe... he walked between the benches, then paused to reach out with his gloved hand and stroke the Ideator. He had his riverboat. He had everything he needed to track the virus back up the river of disease to the far, frozen north - to its sleeping, glacial form. |
| Technovelgy from Darwin's Children,
by Greg Bear. Published by Del Rey in 2003 Additional resources -
|
In looking around for anything else on this item, I did find what appears to be a (failed) computer-aided design product called an Ideator.
I found a very cool tool called ProtoShop (nicely backformed on Photoshop, the image manipulation tool). Here's what it does:
Our work focuses on providing an interactive, visual tool - dubbed ProtoShop - to rapidly create many initial configurations for a given amino acid sequence, which are then submitted to an optimization algorithm...
One of the grand challenges in computational biology is the prediction of the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its chemical makeup alone. A protein's primary structure, i.e., its amino acid sequence, is directly encoded in its DNA sequence; this, however, is a purely one-dimensional structure that does not directly encode a three-dimensional shape...
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
