Comment by j7ake
3 years ago
Have one actually tried programming in “biology”? It is mostly grunt work of moving liquid solutions from one tube to another at different temperature and waiting times…
3 years ago
Have one actually tried programming in “biology”? It is mostly grunt work of moving liquid solutions from one tube to another at different temperature and waiting times…
Nicolas Schabanel and his labs do DNA tile programming, see "molecular programming" https://www.dailymotion.com/NicolasSchabanel/videos
It's a bit mind blowing in the most extreme sense. DNA tiles as combinatorial building blocks to realize game of life like structures that serves as foundations for computation. IIRC they had a turing-capable compiler, but only small programs would complete due to chemical degradation. It's also extremely sensitive to temperature conditions.
Sounds super cool. The downside of this wet lab computing is the feedback is so much longer and debugging is much more difficult.
Part of the joy of programming for many people is the instant feedback you get and the ability to go through the logic of the code line by line to debug and reason.
I feel a lot of that is lost once you start pipetting instead of typing.