In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
By being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware.
I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.
Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era.
I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology.
Sometime in the future, I am a hundred percent certain scientists will sit down at a computer terminal, design what they want the organism to do, and build it.
We're at the beginning of the digitization and automation of biotech.
Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.
Biomimicry is basically taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that's already solved that challenge, and literally trying to emulate what you learn.
If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.
Since my own genome was sequenced, my software has been broadcast into space in the form of electromagnetic waves, carrying my genetic information far beyond Earth. Whether there is any creature out there capable of making sense of the instructions in my genome, well, that's another question.
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