MIT Making Computer Parts from DNA

Rei writes "Following in the footsteps of Lynn Conway's pioneering work on VLSI that allowed ordinary students to create their own processors, a group of MIT professors have almost completed doing the same thing using DNA, known as synthetic biology. While not all of the components of a basic computer are working yet, there is hope that some day ordinary students may be able to design living computers, producing everything from novel drugs to seeds that sprout into treehouses."

Comments

Re:Humans playing God?

[MillionthMonkey]

There are efforts to construct living creatures (all prokaryotic) de novo from nothing but inert chemicals and information from sequence databases. If these efforts are successful in creating a viable organism from nonliving sources, it should rightly shake our thinking in a number of fundamental ways.

• First of all, if we succeed in creating life from non-life (and only non-life), we demonstrate that a process of abiogenesis is physically (i.e. kinematically and thermodynamically) possible. Abiogenesis has never been directly observed, only inferred from our existence.
• If we can demonstrate abiogenesis, we also demonstrate a weaker possibility- if it's possible to create life from chemicals, it's possible to create life from matter that is no longer alive (i.e. dead).
• We also demonstrate that abiogenesis may have happened before. After all, if we can make a bacterium from scratch, it isn't as farfetched to suggest that bacteria might have arisen from natural processes. Our technology is constrained by nature.
• There is also a large class of interesting biological questions one might finally answer. For example, your DNA is right-handed and your proteins are levorotary. This is common to all life on earth. Nobody knows if a biochemistry based on left-handed DNA and dextrorotary proteins is viable or not. Some people say things twist the way they do because of chance in the way they evolved; others say things have to be this way because of the weak nuclear force or something. If we can create a "normal" bacterium from dead chemicals off the shelf, we can create a mirror image version, and directly observe how well our mirror-image bacteria digest sugars of either chirality.