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Invited talk: injecting life with computers

Published: 24 August 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Although electronic computers are the only "computer species" we are accustomed to, the mathematical notion of a programmablecomputer has nothing to do with wires and logic gates. In fact, Alan Turing's notional computer, which marked in 1936 the birth of modern computer science and still stands at its heart, has greater similarity to natural biomolecular machines such as the ribosome and polymerases than to electronic computers. Recently, a new "computer species" made of biological molecules has emerged. These simple molecular computers inspired by the Turing machine, of which a trillion can fit into a microliter, do not compete with electronic computers in solving complex computational problems; their potential lies elsewhere. Their molecular scale and their ability to interact directly with the biochemical environment in which they operate suggest that in the future they may be the basis of a new kind of "smart drugs": molecular devices equipped with the medical knowledge to perform disease diagnosis and therapy inside the living body. They would detect and diagnose molecular disease symptoms and, when necessary, administer the requisite drug molecules to the cell, tissue or organ in which they operate. In the talk we review this new research direction and report on preliminary steps carried out in our lab towards realizing its vision.

References

[1]
Benenson Y., Paz-Elitzur T., Adar R., Keinan E, Livneh Z. and Shapiro E. (2001) Programmable and autonomous computing machine made of biomolecules. Nature, 414, 430--434.
[2]
Benenson Y., Adar R., Paz-Elitzur T., Livneh Z., and Shapiro E. (2003) DNA molecule provides a computing machine with both data and fuel. PNAS, 100, 2191--2196.
[3]
Adar R., Benenson Y., Linshiz G., Rozner A., Tishby N. and Shapiro E. (2004) Stochastic computing with biomolecular automata. PNAS, 101, 9960--65.
[4]
Benenson Y., Gil B., Ben-Dor U., Adar R., and Shapiro E. (2004) An autonomous molecular computer for logical control of gene expression. Nature 429, 423--42.

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cover image ACM Conferences
PPDP '04: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming
August 2004
260 pages
ISBN:1581138199
DOI:10.1145/1013963
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 24 August 2004

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Author Tags

  1. DNA computing
  2. autonomous computers
  3. computer diagnosis and therapy
  4. molecular computers

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