There is another newsworthy development that has been going on for some time. Its not much at the moment but it does sound awfully promising. And that is organic computers. At the moment its not even in its infancy, I suppose on a similar timescale we can call it somewhere just after conception. We have just begun to realize that its possibility exists. Generically we could call it organic storage. It doesn’t actually apply to faster processing; just to bigger and more reliable storage. Much bigger and more reliable than anything else we have today.
Scientists have been able to write a man made code on a strand of DNA and have it manifested in subsequent generations of that DNA. Right now the experiment was with Einstein’s famous equation of energy and mass relationship, E=mc^2. It’s a humble enough beginning but it is a consistent and reproducible beginning. The scientists estimate that the information thus stored is good for a hundred million years. That is several orders more than the best storage devices in use today. And since DNA is so small, a lot of information can be stored in relatively small spaces in things like bacteria which are known to be tough.
And since I am notorious for philosophizing, I can interpolate this to mean that one day perhaps we ourselves may become the biggest storage devices. Already we store more information in our bodies than all the hard drives in the world put together. Of course, we don’t know what that information is or what our bodies use it for but the information is there. And the body uses it as efficiently as it can. We are who we are because of it. Maybe we are carrying our ancestral data from the first primordial soup to what we are today. Sort of like our complete history. Its nice to think that it is so because it implies that we know exactly where we are coming from. And that in turn implies that some part of us knows exactly where we are going as well.
But the catch here is that the information retrieval or processing is not fast. Since it is organic like ourselves, it is much slower than electronics. Again, just like us as compared to modern computers. I should clarify here that the information stored using DNA would not be a part of the host’s life but something very similar to the way information is stored using binary code. It would be information useful only to those who put it there and not necessarily to the host whose DNA is modified for storage.
The scientists are hoping that this technique can be used for bacteria, plant and insect DNA. I don’t see any reason for it to be inapplicable to mammals in general and humans in particular. Maybe that which understands and controls this information is given the generic divine class. There is another aspect also and its implications and possibilities are endless. Our own DNA can be programmed to fight cancer cells or viruses. With the new information, our cells would know what to look for more intelligently and how to fight off possible invaders. Eradication of some of our deadliest diseases would be so much simpler if our cells were made better prepared to face the challengers.
Here’s a link: Organic Computers.
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