IT SEEMED as if we were on the verge of a huge breakthrough in computing.
Twelve years ago, Leonard Adleman used a mixture of DNA molecules in a test tube to solve a simple mathematics problem. Adleman, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, had realised that if a problem could be encoded on DNA strands, molecular tools used by biologists to manipulate DNA could instead be used to crunch numbers.
The idea caught on fast, and there were high hopes that DNA computers could ultimately compete with and even surpass the processing speeds achieved by electronic computers.…
