Foresights
Organic (DNA) computing
What is it?
Organic or DNA computers – computing devices whose processors are composed of living or organic materials – would appear at first glance to be the stuff of science fiction. Although you cannot currently buy a DNA computer in a main street store, scientists involved in researching the field have succeeded in harnessing the properties of DNA molecules in order to perform complex mathematical computations. Already there are encouraging signs that this 10-year-old fledgling industry may succeed in overcoming the limitations of silicon to produce a new generation of high-performance computers from the building blocks of life itself.
The University of Southern California computer scientist Leonard Adleman first introduced the concept of the DNA computer in 1994. Adleman’s premise was that DNA could be regarded as a form of Turing Machine (a basic form of computer that was able to solve computational problems based on a paper tape moving backwards and forwards through a read/write head) and thus had the computational and storage potential to build a computer. He set about trying to solve the directed Hamilton Path problem (also known as the traveling salesman problem – finding the shortest route between a number of cities going through each city only once) using DNA and a method that effectively conducted trillions of computations in parallel. Many different answers were generated at the same time and isolating results was time-consuming. It took Adleman seven days of lab work to solve the problem for seven cities (14 journeys).
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