"There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?"

I will, Mr McGuire.

WIKI: The word "plastic" derives from the Greek plastikos meaning to mold or to shape.

The internet is done, my friend. Over. We're just moving the furniture in, and rearranging the decor. Over the next few years, the internet can only do two things. As Homer Simpson might say:

1. Be more faster.

2. Be more everywhere (Homer can't say ubiquitous).

But plastic, now there's a future. I keep this popsci article on artificial life in my back pocket.

Protocells:

(Quick trivia: throw potassium and calcium channels in there and you've got a heart cell).

Two guys I track, as sort of early adopters in the field are Steen Rassmusen and Craig Venter. Rasmussen works with NASA, and Venter runs a, um, a Private Protocell Venture? Both are pursuing the same goals.

Assembling the primordial soup into something that eats, sleeps and.......reproduces. Life stuff.

Rasmussen coordinates the international effort at Protocell.org. Venter wants to patent the little bug.

Thanks to google books, you can read parts of Vital Dust, a sort of forerunner to this whole protocell effort. God's Debris, indeed.

"The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon".

-- Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon Extraordinary to
Queen Victoria, 1873