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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."
Based on not reading the article, is that probably there is not really an analogy with computing figured out in detail. Yet.
As a fellow uninformed member of the /. community, I'd like to second your notion and move for a vote.
All those in favor of calling Drew Endy nasty names, say "I"
If you want some more detailed explanation, I would suggest reading about what Craig Venter's take on it is. He is one of the principal researchers on the Human Genome Project, and has taken the time to write a book for the layman to grasp the magnificence of what he has found.
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Speed-Light-Double-Digital/dp/0670025402
This book was released October 17, just a few days ago...
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
At its lowest level, the hardware we use today to store data is prone to errors. Your HDD functions perfectly well misreading data hundreds of times a second. You don't even notice until it becomes especially bad; when the errors overwhelm the ability to check and correct the data. A certain amount of errors are expected, and correctable. The simplest method is a simple checksum. Report the intended length of the message you're sending and the receipient then checks to make sure at least the length is correct. Then you can build in redundancy and error correction through more sophisticated means. These problems have largely been solved in the abstract, so they're not dependent on any particular media.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
but can it mine bitcoins?!
With electronic signal amplification, a very small change in electrical flow is sufficient to open and close gates that control massive rivers of electrons. “The biological transistor, what we call a ‘transcriptor,’ does the same thing.
He has formally donated the transcriptor and biological logic gates to the public domain via the BioBrick Public Agreement. That means anyone is free to use them. A similar declaration for the biological Internet is in process.
The only piece of biocomputer technology Stanford and Endy have patented is the biological digital memory.
“Some other groups have patented technologies claiming to accomplish a similar goal,” explains Endy. “If we have a patent, we can assure the technology is free and available to all simply by not pursuing our patent rights. But if we don’t have a patent, someone else could claim the technology and restrict its use.”
finally someone that invents a great technology and understands that patents stifle innovation!
bold tag! :)
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His analogies to computer engineering are mostly false, as biology operates according to physical and chemical rules. Not Ohm's Law. Not digital logic. You can engineer biology to mimic digital logic, but it's truly analog governed by biomolecular interactions and stochastic dynamical processes.
(human) brains are both analog and digital simultaneously.
even if you argue it's really all analog, the fact that you can mentally process digital logic means that you are digital computer... with lots of extra features. :)
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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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.