• by Boonsri Dickinson , September 5, 2008

In the future, computer chips will be made from human cells.

Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil once said, "Our computers aren't going to be these distinct rectangular devices we carry around. We are going to merge with them."

Computers and cell phones will be made from human cells instead of silicon. Researchers are trying to make electronics resemble biological systems more closely so they can adapt, self-design, self-assemble and self-repair.

In 1936, computer scientist Alan Turing thought a computer built from atomic components would be able to compute data. The same way computer code is composed of a series of 0's and 1's, DNA stores information in a series of nucleotide pairs of A, T, C and G.

IBM scientists are working with DNA's self-replicating power to create better computer chips. In the next 20 years, IBM hopes to use DNA "to help us build computer chips from the bottom up, where the DNA nanostructures guide the assembly of the individual transistor components," says IBM scientist Greg Wallraff. "The DNA would be removed in the subsequent chip manufacturing steps."

Ned Seeman's claim to fame is that he was the first to think of using DNA to make products. Now the field is more formally called DNA nanotechnology. "We aren't alone anymore. We use [DNA] as bricks and mortar. Other people use it as smart glue," Seeman says.

"Biology is the ultimate manufacturing technology," says MIT computer scientist Tom Knight. If we could replicate devices cheaply, it would change the world, he believes. Biology is reliable and robust. "If you take a laptop and open it up and cut a wire, it will not work anymore. If a person is pricked with a pin, they will not fall over dead. They go on living."

New scientific discoveries that could lead to developing biological computers pop up all the time. Japanese researchers have tried to manipulate the very essence of DNA; the world's first artificial DNA molecule was created when Kyoto University's Kyohei Terao sewed together nucleotide bases to make a complete set of chromosomes using optical tweezers.

Anirban Bandyopadhyay, artificial intelligence scientist at the National Institute for Materials Sciences at Tsukuba in Japan, made a computer that thinks like our brains. He designed a nano-size machine based on the connections of brain cells.

In 1999, William Ditto made a brain-like computer out of leech neurons. "We were able to show that we can do very simple computations with only two neurons connected through a computer interface," says Ditto, a biomedical engineering professor at the University of Florida. He's since given up on leeches but is now building a computer chip that will be able to "compete with every computer chip out there." One way to make computers faster is to make them think more like brains. Our ability to manipulate biological systems is just now starting to mature. "In 20 years' time, computers will be completely different. They might have living components, chaotic components, electrical, optical components, and they will reconfigure themselves based upon what the user is doing this second," just like our brain problem-solves, Ditto says.

"What will be learned is what little we know about how the brain works," says Rob Carlson, an expert on biology as a technology and a principal at Biodesic LLC.

It costs a lot of money to build a new computer chip. Moore's Law - roughly, that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years - is less about technology than it is about finance, because it depends on how long a bank thinks it will take for a company to pay back the costs of manufacturing the chips, Carlson explains. "Biology, on the other hand - costs have been falling. It wasn't possible to do biology in your garage a few years ago, but now it is."

Imagine it's 1908. The vacuum tube used for radio has just been developed, but no one uses it. "This is where biology is now - in a very primitive state," Knight says. "DNA will be the foundational technology of the century.... The fact that DNA doesn't do fast computation is irrelevant," he says.

Half-biological and half-technological innovations are already here. Take artificial limbs used for amputees in the Iraq War. "We will see an interface that allows brains that nature builds to talk to computers that humans build before we will see biological computers," Carlson says.

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