
My biology paper in Science (really) - another
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2862
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dekhn
I remember when Len Adelman came to my undergrad institution in '94 or '95 and
gave a seminar on his DNA computer. We (biologists) thought it was a neat
trick, but not particularly interesting- it was always obvious to molecular
biologists that a sufficiently complex set of protein operations could be used
to store information and compute over it.

What Adelman didn't understand was how poorly his system scaled. To solve
problems in his system, every molecule encoding data had to encounter and
properly select its mate- that's fine when you have a small number of items in
a test-tube volume. But combinatorial growth meant, that to encode problems
that are interesting, you would have to use bathtub-sized reactors, and the
solution would take a long time, and errors would be hard to manage.

People got slightly better but these systems still aren't really used for
anything. I'm always hopeful somebody will use a system like this to discover
something new and interesting, but most biologists just aren't open to using
them (it's a risk, if you tried to publish a major finding using this
technique, your reviewers would probably reject the paper).

Like material science, material biology has a ton of potential but the
followup after discovery tends to be really limited.

