Biological computers

03 Oct 1994 12:00

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In three senses:

1. Living things --- or parts thereof --- which in some sense do computations already. Presumably most of this happens in nervous systems. I've just read a very convincing illustration of this,

   Bill Baird, "Nonlinear Dynamics of Pattern Formation and Pattern Recognition in the Rabbit Olfactory Bulb," Physica 22D (1986) 150-175

   and feel keenly my wasted youth, since Dr. Baird is in the Berkeley Biophysics dept...
2. Computers could be made from organic materials --- cultured nerve or immune cells, for instance. High Technology ran some articles on this oh, nearly ten years ago, but since then I've heard nothing about it, until Adleman started using DNA on the travelling salesman problem.
3. Computers could have designs inspired by biology, like neural networks or evolution. (Recommended: Sejnowski and Churchland, "Computation in the Era of Neuroscience," in Metropolis and Rota (eds.), A New Era in Computation (MIT, 1992).)

To read:
• Martyn Amos, DNA Computation [Ph.D. Thesis, University of Warwick, 1997]
• Yaakov Benenson, Binyamin Gil, Uri Ben-Dor, Rivka Adar and Ehud Shapiro, "An autonomous molecular computer for logical control of gene expression", Nature 429 , (2004)
• Dennis Bray
  • "Protein molecules as computational elements in living cells", Nature 376 (1995): 307--312 [PDF scan]
  • Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell
• Michael Conrad, "Molecular Computing," Advances in Computers 31 (1990): 235--324
• Richard Lipton and Eric Baum (eds.), DNA Based Computers
• Michael S. Livstone, Danny van Noort and Laura F. Landweber, "Molecular computing revisited: a Moore's Law?" Trends in Biotechnology 21 (2003): 98--101
• Gasper Tkacik, Curtis G. Callan Jr. and William Bialek, "Information capacity of genetic regulatory elements", arxiv:0709.4209
• Daniel Wilhelm, Jehoshua Bruck, and Lulu Qian, "Probabilistic switching circuits in DNA", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 115 (2018): 903--908