<I>Well, for one thing, a mechanical device can be controlled in real time or remotely overridden if things go awry.</I>
Chemicals can be destroyed via chemicals if something goes awry (you read too much scifi), they self assemble, the have no 'mechanical faliure', and there are many of them just in case one does fail. I doubt any nanobots could be controlled in real time, that would just add to expence and complexity. With chemicals, the results are predictable, after several hundred tests, nothing can go awry because all chemicals are virtually the same, as opposed to machines. You are trying to use high tech words. Well first of all, if I am correct, anaphase is the last step before telophase, where all the chromosomes separate, am I correct so far? Now, durring cell division, all the DNA is bound up in chromatids, so no protein synethis occurs, that all happens in prophase. What a retrovirus (such as AIDS) could do is simply insert a new gene into a body cell/bacterial cell to either make it immune or make it harmless, respectively. Like it or not (and I really can't see a reason not to), genetic engineering is the technology of the future.
<I>And if you start messing about with bioagents that rely on reverse transcriptase for effectiveness, what scope for
correction do you have after the process has begun? After anaphase you would have very little ability to repair
damage. </I>
Really, this makes no sense to me. Effectiveness of what? What process has already begun? Why do you have very little ability to repair?
<I>Also, if the defect that the bioagents were introduced to repair an non-congenital or nongenetic disorder, couldn't
the potentially damaging operands introduced into the recombinant dna be passed to offspring? </I>
Ok, I admit, you remember your 8th grade biology from last year. Now, explane it in terms I will understand. You don't impress me if I don't have a clue what you're saying. Now, what I think this means is will there be any side effects from the inserted DNA? Right? No. Simply put, why would there be? The flu is a nongenetic disorder, yet don't you think it could be cured with gene therapy?