Interview with Greg Bear
Excerpt:
In Blood Music (1985) you explore nanotechnology with nanobots gone horribly wrong and when reading Silicon Times e-Book Review I couldn’t help drawing parallels…. Do you sometime get deja-vu moments when something you’ve written about suddenly almost is a reality?
Bear’s accurate representations of virus-driven biologically-based cause and effect predicted what is now portrayed in the context of failed energy-dependent ecological adaptation. Nanotechnology is being used for repair that typically links femotosecond blasts of virucidal UV light from the innate immune system to supercoiled DNA, which protects all organized genomes from viral latency until something goes horribly wrong.
Accumulated unrepaired virus-driven DNA damage links mutations to all pathology, but theorists typically don’t read the science fiction published by people like Greg Bear who fact-checks his representations with people who actually work in the lab. Most theorists still seem to think they can link mutations to evolution.
My comment to sffworld.com:
Greg Bear’s “raw insight” is unparalleled among novelists and unmatched by those who have since linked angstroms to ecosystems in all living genera and those who have linked viral latency to all pathology.
“…viral latency is responsible for life-long pathogenesis and mortality risk…” Paul M. Lieberman “Epigenetics and Genetics of Viral Latency” http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chom.2016.04.008
For comparison, “Darwin’s Radio” and “Darwin’s Children” exemplified how ecological adaptation occurs in the context of biophysically constrained energy-dependent protein folding chemistry. Starting with the representations in “Blood Music” to arrive at the potentially apocalyptic demise of specific human populations in “Quantico” established Bear’s works as those that should be required reading by all serious scientists who would like to learn how cell type differentiation occurs.
My comment to sffworld.com:
Greg Bear’s “raw insight” is unparalleled among novelists and unmatched by those who have since linked angstroms to ecosystems in all living genera and those who have linked viral latency to all pathology.
“…viral latency is responsible for life-long pathogenesis and mortality risk…” Paul M. Lieberman “Epigenetics and Genetics of Viral Latency” http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chom.2016.04.008
For comparison, “Darwin’s Radio” and “Darwin’s Children” exemplified how ecological adaptation occurs in the context of biophysically constrained energy-dependent protein folding chemistry. Starting with the representations in “Blood Music” to arrive at the potentially apocalyptic demise of specific human populations in “Quantico” established Bear’s works as those that should be required reading by all serious scientists who would like to learn how cell type differentiation occurs.