If you are a Star Trek nerd, you know the reference. In case you are not, I will explain it in due course.
Tonight, I decided to watch the last Daniel Craig Bond film – No Time to Die. I have seen it once or perhaps twice before. I enjoy the Bond movies for the parkour, the intrigue and betrayal, the nefarious plots of world domination, the action, and the strong female characters – Pussy Galore, May Day, Vesper, and the like.
This last Bond flick centers around a rather nasty weapon that is based on nanobots which are tuned to attack persons who have a certain DNA encoding. Ideally, the nanobots attack with surgical precision – killing only a particular individual. In reality, we all share the same genome, and even the most cleverly designed nanobots will probably target a family or a clan or perhaps a race, and you can see how this whole targeting idea can easily go South.
And that brings me back to Parthus – a vegetable that Yuta, a guest aboard the STNG Enterprise, prepares for Riker. The episode, The Vengeance Factor, focuses on a feud between two groups on a distant planet. One group has left the home planet to become pirates, as it were. In the story, Yuta is a carrier of a deadly virus that can only attack the clan that killed her people; the pirates are the targets.
So, in STNG, the lethal agent is a virus. In No Time to Die, the lethal agent is nanobots. The near future and the imagined distant future converge.
Can I interest you in a CRISPR cocktail?