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A team of Stanford engineers has made a simple computer inside a living cell, where it could detect disease, warn of toxic threats and, where danger lurked, even self-destruct cells gone rogue.
The startling achievement, unveiled in Friday's issue of the journal Science, takes us to a new frontier -- where nature's instruction manual is being programmed to deliver information long-concealed within our bodies.
"We're going to be able to put computers inside any living cell you want," said lead researcher Drew Endy of Stanford's School of Engineering. "Any place you want a little bit of logic, a little bit of computation, a little bit of memory -- we're going to be able to do that."
The creation completes 10 years of work and represents the final chapter of Stanford researchers' quest to build the biological computer. It is the latest step in the new field of synthetic biology where -- one gene at a time -- engineers strive to design organisms unlike anything made by Mother Nature.
These tiny computers could deliver true-false answers to virtually any biological question...
The startling achievement, unveiled in Friday's issue of the journal Science, takes us to a new frontier -- where nature's instruction manual is being programmed to deliver information long-concealed within our bodies.
"We're going to be able to put computers inside any living cell you want," said lead researcher Drew Endy of Stanford's School of Engineering. "Any place you want a little bit of logic, a little bit of computation, a little bit of memory -- we're going to be able to do that."
The creation completes 10 years of work and represents the final chapter of Stanford researchers' quest to build the biological computer. It is the latest step in the new field of synthetic biology where -- one gene at a time -- engineers strive to design organisms unlike anything made by Mother Nature.
These tiny computers could deliver true-false answers to virtually any biological question...