New Nano Computer Species
May 5th, 2006
Written By: Adam Sussman
Imagine a computer so small that it can swim around your body and hangout within living cells. Now imagine if you will that this computer is able to act as your own personal doctor, detecting disease and using its preprogrammed medical knowledge to output a therapeutic drug.
This sounds like something you would see in a science fiction movie but the fact is this is very real and is currently being worked on with amazing progress.
There are many names for this technology and the concepts have been around for several decades. I recall about ten years ago one of my professors telling me how he was part of a new startup organization which was researching “Nano Biological Technology”. He described this new technology just as I have above.
Well, it seems scientists have come a long way in ten years. They have currently built a solid foundation for which these biological computers can process simple commands and interact with other living cells. Before you get too excited, they are not yet at the point where these biomolecular machines can run around with a micostethoscope asking cells to cough in a human body but they are at the point where scientist can program molecules to do certain tasks within test tubes.
According to Ehud Shaprio (Professor, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) and Yaakov Benenson (fellow at Harvard University, USA) in a highly detailed Scientific American article;
“We have already succeeded in creating a biological automation made of DNA and proteins able to diagnose in a test tube the molecular symptoms of certain cancers and ‘treat’ the disease by releasing a therapeutic molecule”
As for their sophistication, don’t expect biological computers to replace electronic computers anytime soon. The speed of molecular machines can only process a few hundred operations a second whereas modern day devices can process billions of operations a second.
Every once in a while we get the opportunity to hear about new things that will certainly change the world. These new computer species could possibly change the future of healthcare for everyone. This is definitely one exciting area to follow.
May 9th, 2006 09:33
I’d bet the personal injury lawyers are salivating about the prospects of all of this.
April 29th, 2008 18:21
Efforts for producing artificial photonic crystals are motivated by possible applications in optical filtering and optical computing, or in the design of very compact lasers, and by phenomena such as the spectral manipulation of light by shock waves. However, photonic-crystal-like structures have been developed in several species of butterflies and beetles during their evolution.