A multidisciplinary group of researchers is trying to change the way people think about computers. Why rely solely on silicon-based hardware, they say, when there is so much promise in what Grzegorz Rozenberg of the University of Leiden, Netherlands, calls "bioware"--nucleic acids and enzymes? It's not as far-fetched as it sounds: A computer is nothing more than a device that computes--that is, it performs a defined series of operations on a set of input data to produce an answer. Using this definition, one can imagine, as Douglas Hofstadter did,1 that the central dogma of molecular biology is a computation in which an input DNA is transformed via a series of operations-- transcription and translation--into a protein output.
The computer scientists, engineers, molecular and evolutionary biologists, and chemists involved in the relatively new field of DNA computing are taking this concept one step further. Ordinary biological processes, they say, are simply ...
