Computing Inside a Living Cell

First time accepted submitter Rozanne writes "The new issue of Stanford Medicine magazine has a story on Stanford professor Drew Endy's creation of microscopic computers out of biological components for use inside living cells. His work is a mash-up of molecular biology and computer engineering: Instead of a computer made of silicon, metal and plastic, it's a computer made of DNA, RNA and enzymes. Endy says biologists are typically confounded at first when he explains how the computers work and how they could be used."

Comments

Re:Endy is no longer the leader in this field

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yeah. I don't know enough about his work to comment, but when I read the part about how all this computational stuff is just too confusing for those poor biologists, my bullshit alarms went off. Speaking as a bioinformaticist, whose job it is to bridge the bio/CS gap all the time, I've observed that computer scientists often have at least as hard a time grasping biology as biologists have grasping computer science. Endy's kind of smugness does no one any good.