Someday he envisions cancer centers storing giant banks of premade T cells to match the patients' bone marrow and tumor types.

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Another industry giant, Germany's Q-Cells, filed for bankruptcy last April.

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The MIT electrochemist thinks it is possible to build giant batteries using 50-100 fewer individual cells this way than would be possible with a conventional battery array, reducing cost and complexity.

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Infrastructure heating ducts, lighting, pipes, solar panels is as visible as the occasional work of art, like Englishman Daniel Chadwick's "Superorganism, " a giant mobile of transparent discs with solar-powered cells that provide movement depending on available sunlight.

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In the mean time, silicon solar manufacturers, from silicon producers to those who take the silicon and turn it into cells and then panels, have built many more giant factories.

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But building a giant battery using dry-cell technology would require thousands of individual cells - about the size of a soft drinks can - to be strung together in a massive installation.

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They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build manufacturing plants--giant bio-vats that hold millions of gallons of cultured mammal cells--in order to develop new protein drugs to treat cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer's.

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Instead, in 1939 the two researchers exiled themselves to Plymouth, where the Marine Biological Association has a laboratory, and turned to the nerve cells of squid a species that has what are known as giant axons.

ECONOMIST: Andrew Huxley | The