Microsoft wants to engineer bugs as disease fighting nanobots

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 that, so far as I can tell, doesn’t really explain exactly what the idea is here. (Click on the image above and follow the arrow to the patent drawing).

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.