I'm just going to quote the entire item:
A team of Stanford engineers have created a small computer that can function inside a living cell.That's awesome. I look forward to applications.
According to a report in today's issue of the journal Science, the biological computer can detect disease, send warning of toxic dangers to the cell, and even self-destruct an infected cell if needed.
The computer culminates 10 years of efforts by researchers to create a biological computer, and is the latest step in the field of synthetic biology.
Other things the internal computer can do is engineer small changes like a cell's smell or color, and count cell divisions.
It basically starts to fulfill hopes and dreams in my imagination regarding nanotechnology and supporting biological functions. When I have time, I hope to read more on this, to see whether it can be used for cancer treatment. I wonder whether it's the type of work that they could insert into cells of a living adult.
At first I thought "That's awesome". But looking into it more, I feel there's some spin involved to make this seem more revolutionary than it is. It's not clear to me that they've done much more than manipulate or hijack mechanisms that already exist in cells, which is something scientists have been doing in a variety of ingenious ways for years. I feel this is less building an intracellular computer, and more just describing ordinary intracellular mechanisms but using the language and concepts of computers.
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