<story><title>Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/biology-will-be-the-next-great-computing-platform/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dnautics</author><text>As someone who has a PhD in biochemistry and has been coding since age 5, I find the headline rediculous.  You won&amp;#x27;t be computing in biology.  Consider, a transistor is about 50-100 &lt;i&gt;atoms&lt;/i&gt; wide.  A protein, which cannot itself even be a minimal unit of compute, (maybe a molecular transistor like NiFe hydrogenase has a shot) is already bigger than that.&lt;p&gt;The things described in the article are not biology used for computation, but principles from CS applied to biology which has some validity.  In one case I achieved strides in protein design by reducing the engineering cycle from months to days.  Imagine hitting &amp;quot;compile&amp;quot; and having to wait a 72 hours to know your result.  That&amp;#x27;s biology, even with a fast organism like yeast or e coli.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>&amp;quot;As someone who has a PhD in biochemistry and has been coding since age 5, I find the headline rediculous. You won&amp;#x27;t be computing in biology....  principles from CS applied to biology which has some validity.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I think it may be worth reminding people that modern-day computing is only a subset of computation, and not even necessarily a very large one. Computing with biology has &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; different characteristics from computing with modern computers, and the field of Software Engineering may not have much to say about it except in the vaguest of terms, but &lt;i&gt;Computer Science&lt;/i&gt; may still have quite a lot to say about the limits of computation on this new substrate, how to do error correction, and all sorts of other things.&lt;p&gt;A computational formalism can easily be applied to something like an anti-body, and of course, anything larger than that. The primary thing that stops us is the fact that we have such a poor picture of what is going on that we don&amp;#x27;t have the data to create the formalisms correctly, nor machines (biological or otherwise) to manipulate such formalisms. But that&amp;#x27;s a human limitation and in some sense an &lt;i&gt;engineering&lt;/i&gt; limitation, not a limitation of Computer Science.&lt;p&gt;Whatever we are coding in biology will be radically, radically different. Entire classes of squabbles in our industry become irrelevant; you won&amp;#x27;t get a concurrency choice (it&amp;#x27;s just &amp;quot;yes, all the time and everywhere&amp;quot;), there will be no meaningful debate over mutability (again, &amp;quot;yes all the time and everywhere&amp;quot;), &amp;quot;structured programming&amp;quot; is just meaningless since the entire concept of &amp;quot;scope&amp;quot; will be out the window. I don&amp;#x27;t know what it &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; look like. But I do know that whatever it is, quite a bit of Computer Science will still apply to it. Biological computing will not be immune to information theory. It won&amp;#x27;t be immune to complexity theory, although a whole new suite of classes will probably have to arise, and there will be a lot more probability in it (but recall that complexity theory already extensively uses that, so it&amp;#x27;s not like that&amp;#x27;s a new thing). And even software engineering won&amp;#x27;t be &lt;i&gt;entirely&lt;/i&gt; tossed out... for instance, &amp;quot;leaky abstractions&amp;quot; will be an even bigger problem than they are for us now.</text></comment>
<story><title>Biology Will Be the Next Great Computing Platform</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/biology-will-be-the-next-great-computing-platform/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dnautics</author><text>As someone who has a PhD in biochemistry and has been coding since age 5, I find the headline rediculous.  You won&amp;#x27;t be computing in biology.  Consider, a transistor is about 50-100 &lt;i&gt;atoms&lt;/i&gt; wide.  A protein, which cannot itself even be a minimal unit of compute, (maybe a molecular transistor like NiFe hydrogenase has a shot) is already bigger than that.&lt;p&gt;The things described in the article are not biology used for computation, but principles from CS applied to biology which has some validity.  In one case I achieved strides in protein design by reducing the engineering cycle from months to days.  Imagine hitting &amp;quot;compile&amp;quot; and having to wait a 72 hours to know your result.  That&amp;#x27;s biology, even with a fast organism like yeast or e coli.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmlp</author><text>&amp;gt;  Imagine hitting &amp;quot;compile&amp;quot; and having to wait a 72 hours to know your result.&lt;p&gt;You mean, something like giving a deck of cards to a computing center operator and eventually getting back a printout of the outcome a few days later?</text></comment>