Biological System Controls Factory
Professor Ogunnaike, 1994

Links
NSF
http://www.wired.com
book references

Professor Ogunnaike, under the strictest corporate secrecy (DuPont, Wilmington), began research in 1994 to utilize biological systems as control systems in factories.
He received a NSF grant to do this in 1997. In 2004 he created a research group at the University of Delaware in the Chemical Engineering Department to further this research. It's focus is on Control and Systems Theory, Systems biology, and Product engineering.

The problem with chemical processes is that they are hard to make. Take a scrambled egg. You mix it up and apply heat. After a couple of minutes you have a scrambled egg. The egg was a gooey mixture and then, suddenly without doing anything special it becomes a scrambled egg. Keep doing what you were doing for a couple of seconds longer and it is no longer edible.

Chemical factories are the same. Making Teflon is worse. There is obviously a process written down somewhere but it still involves people that know how to make Teflon watching the pot. To make Teflon you need to boil monomenors and catalysts, keeping the temperature and pressure just right. To control temperature they have a water jacket around the tank. To control pressure they inject nitrogen into the tank. This affects the temperature also. So you start a feedback system that is hard to control.

Biological systems do something similar, blood pressure remains relatively the same. Even though many things, activity, other chemicals, different heart rates can introduce change into the system, the body adjusts and keeps the blood pressure constant. This is called the baroflex. At the DuPont lab they learned how to wire up a rat's brain, analyze the input and output.
They also know how to input the data directly into the nerves.

After that they modeled up the baroflex system and plugged in a detailed simulation of the plant's control system. The simulated baroflex did better than current control systems.

And that is as much as they will admit they did. There are a couple of papers written on this, on how it could be done and utilizing methods learned from this simulation. So the question remains, will research continue with the reproduction of neurological systems in silicone, or will they branch off into a "wetware" version where the biological systems are directly hooked up to the control systems.
 
Why include this in the timeline?
The Book, "New Media, 1740-1915" got me thinking that new media is really expressions of paradigms of cultural importance. I think that if this area takes off, the merging and utilization of neurological systems with electronics, it will definitely become an area for new media.

Submitted by
Guillermo Acevedo

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