Todd Bishop at TechFlash has discovered that Microsoft is into global health, in a weird way.
As Todd reports, Microsoft has applied for a patent for “Adapting Parasites to Combat Disease.”
The patent application has this goofy stickman drawing (below) that, so far as I can tell, doesn’t really explain exactly what the idea is here.
But the gist of it appears to be that scientists would engineer a parasite to make it into a programmable nanobot that could be used to combat disease in the human body. Todd quotes from the application:
By modifying or making a parasitic organism that can be programmatically controlled by a stimulus external to the altered parasitic organism, the parasitic organism can be a powerful tool in delivering therapeutic compounds. …
Okay then. Hope it works better than Windows movie maker. Here’s the drawing that went with the patent application:
