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Enzyme Computer Could Live Inside You

dylanduck writes "New Scientist reports the creation of an enzyme-based computer that performs AND and XOR calculations, and combinations of the two, based on the presence or absence of specific chemicals. If they can be engineered inside living cells, they could measure a patient's metabolism and deliver just the right amount of drug at just the right spot, the researchers reckon. I'm worried about the viruses." Ba-dump *chink*.

3 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Kurzweil's vision by CRCulver · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Raymond Wurzveil has been writing for years now on the coming merger of man and machine (as in his highly recommended book The Age of Spiritual Machines ). The general idea is that eventually our minds will be transferrable to silicon and external means of storage, but this idea of humans being augmented with biological computing is an interesting short-term solution. I wonder if he'll make some comment about it.

  2. Re:Well, I see potential by AndroidCat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What they need is a protection system so that if the computer doesn't get regular external "handshakes", it'll shut itself down. (This is not for your safety, understand. This is so that the VIAA [Viagra Implant Association of America] can get its large licence fee.)

    --
    One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
  3. Excuse me, but you're already a DNA computer by the+Haldanian · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Apologies, pished, but after someone spotted that there was more RNA interacting in the body than DNA it was messenger for; why aren't people noting that we already run bio-computation devices.

    Forget the why, we're already lousy at that bit. Why not? If there's a gain for little loss, nature tends to grasp and experiment along those courses. An RNA computer that computes and records in next-gen DNA is an ultimatley sensible thing for Nature to do. Not that hard either.

    Never mind the gigantic neural hash lookup algorithm that we call intuition...

    Humans annoy me. They won't accept there's a question *until* they have an answer.

    Pfah!

    *Hic*