DNA computing… Be afraid. Be very afraid. Your brain could end up being used as raw material in the mass production of supercomputers. Be flattered. Be very flattered.

Whatever your viewpoint – whether you want to donate your brain to science after you “shuffle off this mortal coil”, or whether, like Genghis Khan, keep your burial place secret for fear of grave robbers – this article will look at new developments in DNA computing being reported on the web.

An interesting article in Nature Nanotechnology describes how a computer made partly from DNA is able to talk, although its conversation is limited to “yes” and “no” when asked questions for which it has already been given the answers. And even then, it communicates by switching on a light, colour-coded to mean either yes or no.

So, for example, the computer was told that, “All men are mortal”, and, “Socrates was a man”. Then it was asked, “Was Socrates a man?” and it answered “yes” by way of switching on a green light. It may seem simplistic at the moment, and might remind some people of the “infinite monkey theorem”, which states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. But in human-computer interaction terms, the question and answer session with the computer is considered a significant milestone.

The team that developed this computer is working at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and has been developing DNA-based computation systems for a number of years, including “computers” that can diagnose and treat cancers autonomously.  The team leaders, Tom Ran and Ehud Shapiro, told the BBC that by “using more sophisticated biochemistry, we were able to implement simple logic programs, which are more akin to the way people program electronic computers”.

There’s no question that far more advanced DNA-based, bio-molecular computing is already being deployed in certain parts of the world, but in terms of mass production and commercialisation, it is still a long way off. But judging by how quickly robots became all-pervasive in the car industry, this particular DNA computing-based brave new world will emerge soon enough. It is not clear from the reports I’ve read, however, where the DNA is coming from.

None the less, scientists at IBM on the other side of the world, at the California Institute of Technology have created a computer chip that utilises what they describe as “synthetic DNA molecules”. The approach could pave the way to creating tiny circuits that could form the basis of smaller, more powerful computer chips, according to the report on ZDNet.

“The DNA acts as scaffolding where millions of carbon nanotubes could be deposited and self-assembled into precise patterns that stick to the DNA molecules, and may provide a way to overcome the challenges of common techniques to manufacturing of sub-22 nanometre chips. The fastest PC chips today are manufactured using a 45 nanometer process,” explained the writer, Chris Jablonski.

IBM has, as one might expect, always stayed at the forefront of technology, despite having lost some key commercial opportunities over the years, particularly in respect to the operating system saga, in which Bill Gates of Microsoft retained the rights to DOS, which ran on IBM computers and, later on, in its new guise as Windows, is the operating system for most of the computers in the world today. That could all have been IBM’s market.

IBM has also sold off its computer-making business to the Chinese, who re-branded it Lenovo, when everyone expected them to retain the IBM brand and benefit from its image. But IBM has been hard at work researching new ideas, one of which is the idea of a 3D viewer, a sort of 3D browser, which would allow its users to play different massively multiplayer online games made by different companies. No doubt they hope the 3D viewer, or its technology, will become as widely accepted as the Flash format is for 2D animation and movies.

But to help move the masses towards a 3D online future, in which serious number-crunching is involved, computers have to become far more powerful – without becoming any bigger. Preferably, they’ll become smaller, less energy-hungry and hopefully less noisy and hot. All without getting more expensive. This is the aim of the people working in DNA computing, bacterial computing, which is a sub-branch, and quantum computing, which is a related branch, and the manufacturers who are waiting to make money out of it all.

bacterial computers, dna computers, IBM, Lenovo, nanotechnology Hide