just a thing about teleportation. I took a course in quantum optics, and the guy who had it was leading a group who was in nature because of a teleportation experiment they did. Unless something radical has happened i have not heard off, i think this (and similar) is the teleportationexperiment you are referring to.
What they are teleporting is a quantum state and not matter. In quantum mechanics, there are properties of the system which may be independently measured, but cannot be known fully at the same time - for example the momentum and position of a particle, but in this case it was properties related to something called the spin, which is a longer story.
Anyway, since these properties cannot be measured at the same time (quantum mechanics dictate that once one of them has been measured, the value of the other *must* have been altered), it is not simply possible to measure the two quantum states and then prepare another atom at another location in the same way.
That was before this experiment: Essentially what they did was to transfer the (unknowable) combined quantum properties to a lighpulse, and then use the lighpulse to prepare a different atom in the same state. So regarding to the statement 'the original object must be destroyed' that is not true either: Nothing happened to the original atom, except its quantum state was altered - it must be so because of the quantum no-cloning theorem [no diceplay and no cloning - God is apparently a republican ;-)]. We can actually proove the quantum no-cloning theorem allready: If the state of the original atom was not lost, we could clone the quantum state a lot of times, and then measure the two quantum numbers independently on different atoms and estimate the original, unknowable, quantum state. But i digress :-).
Anyway, that was it. This has really interesting applications in quantum cryptography and possibly for building a quantum computer - and it is interesting to see what quantum properties and on which systems (atoms, electrones, holes in semiconductors, phonons and other pseudo-particles in superconductors) - but as far as i can tell it has nothing to do with teleporting anything biologically. As far as i know, the quantum state of the atoms in a virus matters didly squat as far as its biological function: A virus is a virus is a virus, so what we are interested in is a way to quickly assemble atoms - thats properly more like nanotechnology.
