BIOCOMPUTERS will never replace electronic machines, despite last week’s news that a DNA computer has solved the biggest problem it has ever attempted. But they could have a valuable role inside the human body.
Ravinderjit Braich and Leonard Adleman, the scientist who created the first DNA computer in 1994, used biological molecules to solve a complex logic problem called 3-SAT. The researchers, both at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, synthesised more than a million strands of DNA, each 300 bases long, to encode every one of the possible solutions to the problem. In a series of logical…
