OT- Electronics, biology: twins under the skin
This could become very big. I recommend reading the whole article. It is pretty interesting.
By Chappell Brown
EE Times
February 09, 2004 (7:33 AM EST)
Like the twin strands of a double helix, electronics and biotechnology are joining forces in a technological explosion that experts say will dwarf what is possible for either one of them alone.
Hints of this pairing can be seen in the economic recovery that's now taking hold. One peculiarity that hasn't grabbed many headlines is biotech's role in pulling Silicon Valley out of its three-year slump. A report last month from the nonprofit organization Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network points up this fact, showing that venture funding in biotech startups rose from 7 percent in 2000 to 24 percent last year while investment in information technology startups fell from 10 percent to 4 percent over the same period. The immediate question is whether this is a temporary anomaly or the emergence of a major trend.
Certainly computers, biochips, robotics and data sharing over the Internet have been important tools in accelerating biological and medical research, and it should be no surprise that new application areas and markets would grow around them. The view from inside the engineering cubicle might be something like, "Yes, we have created a revolutionary technology that creates new markets-biomedicine is simply one area that benefits from advances in VLSI."
But a long-term perspective suggests a tighter linkage between electronics technology and molecular biology. Indeed, it could be argued that the second half of the 20th century forged not one but two digital revolutions, fueled by two fundamental breakthroughs: transistorized digital computers and the cracking of the genetic code. The latter advance showed that the genome was transmitted through the generations by means of digital storage in the DNA molecule.
In the following decades, both developments matured at an increasingly rapid pace. Digital circuits were inspired by crude models of the nervous system (see story, below). Although the models turned out to be wrong in many respects, technologists discovered that digital representation brings the advantages of simplicity, stability and an ability to control errors. Those same properties have made DNA the viable and stable core of living systems for billions of years.
But the nervous system is only one component of the body that is encoded in DNA, which somehow not only represents the information for building the basic components of cells, but also encodes the entire process of assembling highly complex multicellular machines. The growth process is an amazing feat of bootstrapping from the genetic code to functioning organisms. Essentially, an organism is a molecular digital computer that constructs itself as part of the execution of its code.
Leroy Hood, director of the Institute for Systems Biology (Seattle), believes that science aided by computers and VLSI technology will achieve major breakthroughs in reverse-engineering the cell's assembly processes. The fallout will be new circuit and computational paradigms along with nanoscale mechanisms for building highly compact molecular computing machines.
"There will be a convergence between information technology and biotechnology that will go both ways," said Hood. "We can use new computational tools to understand the biological computational complexities of cells, and when we understand the enormous integrative powers of gene regulatory networks we will have insights into fundamentally new approaches to digital computing and IT."
But cell machinery can also be enlisted in the kind of nanostructure work that is currently done manually with tools such as the atomic-force microscope. "The convergence of materials science and biotech is going to be great, and we will be able to learn from living organisms how they construct proteins that do marvelous things and self-assemble," Hood said. "There will be lessons about how to design living computer chips that can self-assemble and have enormous capacity."
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