I'm on board with this, just so long as end users get proper training before giving them the keys to an API into their own bodies. I expect lots of StackExchange questions along the lines of, "I sent a POST request to my cerebellum and now I can't walk."
The real challenge there would be interfacing - some jackass didn't include any neural documentation. Although it would set off a whole wave of griping among older generations about how back in the day they didn't have wetware digital memory.
Side note - Erik Winfree is the son of Art Winfree, a super fascinating character whose work is detailed beautifully in the book Sync by Steven Strogatz. Highly recommend for anyone interested in how spontaneous order emerges from chaos. Looks like the son is kicking ass too.
What is the difference between "DNA-Programmable Chemical Machines" and Proteins? Aren't basically all Proteins DNA-Programmable Machines? I don't think you can encode non-organic or organic chemistry without long-chained amino-acids, so why bother to use new nomenclature...?
Intention mostly - machines imply design. Putting aside the philosophical questions if designed proteins unlike known ones still count as proteins doing data processing instead of structural and signaling (antigens) might count as something different from what has been found in nature. Not to mention proteins can be synthesized from ammino acids without DNA or RNA.
One thing is certain all DNA programmable machines may count as proteins but not all proteins count as DNA programmable machines.
I'd argue that DNA is not the important thing here (and this work has nothing to do with biology): it is just a very convenient model for what chemistry can do with large varieties of interactions, as it is easy and inexpensive to synthesize and can be comparatively easily designed to have large sets of orthogonal interactions. Tile systems like this one could be built with other molecules, but it would be much harder to design.
The question in tile assembly systems is how computation can be done by the crystallization process: you could compare them, not to protein function, but to protein folding. The DNA is not being used just as instructions to a machine: there is nothing in this paper but DNA, and the computational work is done entirely through strands of DNA binding to combinations of complementary sequences on the growing crystals: the "instructions" to the computer here are actually the computer itself.
You're right but that's an additional layer of abstraction - check out the article / paper, they built a 6-bit "computer" using DNA and DNA superstructures only.
