Computer scientists at the Technion (Haifa, Israel) have developed and actually constructed a molecular transducer:
“Scientists developed and constructed a molecular transducer, which is an advanced computing machine. This molecular computer was built entirely of biomolecules, such as DNA and enzymes that can manipulate genetic codes. This unprecedented device can compute iteratively, namely, it uses the output as a new input for subsequent computations. Furthermore, it produces outputs in the form of biologically meaningful phenomena, such as resistance of bacteria to various antibiotics…the ever-increasing interest in biomolecular computing devices has not arisen from the hope that such machines could ever compete with their electronic counterparts by offering greater computation speed, fidelity and power or performance in traditional computing tasks”, explained Prof. Keinan.
The main advantages of biomolecular computing devices over the electronic computers arise from other properties. As shown in this work and other projects carried out in our lab, these systems can interact directly with biological systems and even with living organisms. No interface is required since all components of molecular computers, including hardware, software, input and output, are molecules that interact in solution along a cascade of programmable chemical events.”
This is an amazing development. This new type of computer will, instead of calculating the myriad computational tasks which regular computers do (but they could be designed to do that too, apparently), but has been designed for work in the chemical and biological world. New antibiotics, for example, could be designed and made to combat resistant organisms.
Now, instead of merely sequencing genes, the pathological genes responsible for some rather terrible diseases could be sequenced and corrected simultaneously, paving the way for gene therapy. This also means the production of biological substances for many uses in bio-technology. Imagine chemotherapy delivered specifically to the ill cells, avoiding side effects almost completely. Maybe even processing the "bad" DNA and curing the cancer completely.
When you look at it, actually all biological systems are biocomputers where DNA creates ways of processing materials from one to another serving the needs of the organism. Now it seems, there’s a way to actually program molecules to do the same outside the body…miniaturizing the whole process of the computation, and controlling the course of the computation.
To make this more realistic, let’s take actual metabolic diseases which happen because of mutations in DNA causing an ineffective enzyme to be produced (depending on the gene and enzyme, a different disease occurs), as in the picture below:
Now, imagine a simple device which processes the DNA of the ill person, and corrects it so that it can produce an effective enzyme (numbers 1-9 above). This is then injected using now, molecular “letter envelopes” with specific keys for tissue specific receptors on them could be programmed into the DNA of the computer chip and the envelopes with the healthy genes could be “mailed” to the cells lacking the needed enzyme/s. After the new, healthy genes entered the cells, the disease caused by the accumulation of the various substances would be cured as soon as those genes started making RNA to create the healthy/functional enzymes.
This is the future of medicine. This is what I dreamed of in 1969.