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Will self-replicating 'xenobots' cure diseases, yield new bioweapons, or simply turn the whole world into grey goo?

  • Written by Simon Coghlan, Senior Research Fellow in Digital Ethics, Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne
Will self-replicating 'xenobots' cure diseases, yield new bioweapons, or simply turn the whole world into grey goo?Kriegman et al./PNAS

In 2020, scientists made global headlines by creating “xenobots” – tiny “programmable” living things made of several thousand frog stem cells.

These pioneer xenobots could move around in fluids, and scientists claimed they could be useful for monitoring radioactivity, pollutants, drugs or diseases....

Read more: Will self-replicating 'xenobots' cure diseases, yield new bioweapons, or simply turn the whole...

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