DNA Strands Modified Into Tiny Fiber-Optic Cables

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on the latest idea from researchers trying to make microcomputers use photons in place of electrons — to make optical interconnects from strands of DNA. Mixing DNA strands with the right dye molecule upgrades them into wires for light, like microscopic optical fibers, able to absorb photons at one end and transmit them to the other. One of the neat things about using DNA is it is the right scale to play nicely with existing and future chip lithography. Quoting: 'The result is similar to natural photonic wires found inside organisms like algae, where they are used to transport photons to parts of a cell where their energy can be tapped. In these wires, chromophores are lined up in chains to channel photons.'"

Comments

Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

We had this ability already built into our biology and we instead use chemical signals for our nervous system? It is a pity we didn't have an intelligent designer (one with degrees in electrical engineering and physics).

The organisation of life

[Kupfernigk]

This is yet more evidence, if it was needed, that there is something about carbon chemistry that facilitates the emergence of life. Once you have a DNA or RNA molecule, organisation and replication of small molecules seems to emerge almost from nowhere. This evidence that even a concept as significant as photon collecting and channelling could emerge out of a largely self-organising process is quite extraordinary, because it starts to answer the objections of Creationists to, for instance, the evolution of light sensitivity. Given the sheer vastness of geological time, the range of environments on even a minor planet going around a mid-rank star, the opportunities for something to get started are enormous. It's a kind of corollary to Murphy's law: in a sufficiently large system, given long enough, practically anything possible is going to happen at some point.

This of course is not evidence for or against any kind of theology in general, because theology is a much more diverse (and interesting) subject than the Creationists and IDers would have you believe. But it does look as though the question "how did life get started", which is vague and ill defined, is gradually resolving down to the question "under what circumstances can ribose nucleic acids form spontaneously, and how many other small molecules can we find which can spontaneously arrange themselves in the presence of ribose nucleic acids?" which is testable.