Editing Self-replication (section)

==Fields==
{{refimprove section|date=August 2017}}
Research has occurred in the following areas:

* [[Biology]]: studies of organismal and cellular natural replication and replicators, and their interaction, including sub-disciplines such as [[population dynamics]], [[quorum sensing]], [[autophagy]] pathways. These can be an important guide to avoid design difficulties in self-replicating machinery.
* [[Chemistry]]: self-replication studies are typically about how a specific set of molecules can act together to replicate each other within the set<ref>{{cite book |author=Moulin, Giuseppone |title=Constitutional Dynamic Chemistry |volume=322 |pages=87–105 |year=2011|publisher=Springer|doi=10.1007/128_2011_198|pmid=21728135 |series=Topics in Current Chemistry |isbn=978-3-642-28343-7 |chapter=Dynamic Combinatorial Self-Replicating Systems }}</ref> (often part of [[Systems chemistry]] field).
*[[Biochemistry]]: simple systems of ''[[in vitro]]'' ribosomal self replication have been attempted,<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Li|first1=Jun|last2=Haas|first2=Wilhelm|last3=Jackson|first3=Kirsten|last4=Kuru|first4=Erkin|last5=Jewett|first5=Michael C.|last6=Fan|first6=Z. Hugh|last7=Gygi|first7=Steven|last8=Church|first8=George M.|date=2017-07-21|title=Cogenerating Synthetic Parts toward a Self-Replicating System|url=https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssynbio.6b00342|journal=ACS Synthetic Biology|language=en|volume=6|issue=7|pages=1327–1336|doi=10.1021/acssynbio.6b00342|pmid=28330337 |osti=1348832|issn=2161-5063}}</ref> but as of January 2021, indefinite ''in vitro'' [[Ribosome|ribosomal]] self replication has not been achieved in the lab.  
*[[Nanotechnology]] or more precisely, [[molecular nanotechnology]] is concerned with making [[Nanotechnology|nano]] scale [[assembler (nanotechnology)|assemblers]].  Without self-replication, capital and assembly costs of [[molecular machine]]s become impossibly large. Many bottom-up approaches to nanotechnology take advantage of biochemical or chemical self-assembly.
*Space resources: NASA has sponsored a number of design studies to develop self-replicating mechanisms to mine space resources.  Most of these designs include computer-controlled machinery that copies itself.
* [[Meme]]tics: The idea of a meme was coined by [[Richard Dawkins]] in his 1976 book [[The Selfish Gene]] where he proposed a cognitive equivalent of the gene; a unit of behavior which is copied from one host mind to another through observation. Memes can only propagate via animal behavior and are thus analogous to information [[virus]]es and are often described as [[virus|viral]].
* [[Computer security]]: Many computer security problems are caused by self-reproducing computer programs that infect computers — [[computer worm]]s and [[computer virus]]es.
* [[Parallel computing]]: loading a new program on every node of a large [[computer cluster]] or [[distributed computing]] system is time consuming. Using a [[mobile agent]]s to self-replicate code from node-to-node can save the system administrator a lot of time. Mobile agents have a potential to crash a computer cluster if poorly implemented.