Mark Sims is an unusual CEO. Instead of focusing on selling one of his key products, the founder of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan-based Nanorex spends much of his time giving it away. NanoEngineer-1, as it's called, is a computer program that allows scientists to model DNA nanostructures. The software, Sims reckons, could hasten progress in DNA computing, a once obscure field that is of growing intrigue to the entrepreneur as well as to other scientists and venture capitalists. Once focused on attempts to outdo silicon-based computers at mathematical problems, DNA computing is now looking to use DNA self-assembly to create new biological and nano-electronic products.

First developed in the mid-1990s, DNA computing is increasingly concentrating on a central tenet of the biotech industry: mimicking the complex activities of nature to create new processes and products. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, the field brings together computer scientists, physicists, chemists, and biologists in cutting-edge research. Sims has high hopes for the work. One day, he envisions, even high school students could build novel structures out of DNA. Dr. Yaakov Benenson, a researcher at the Harvard Center for Molecular Automata, shares his enthusiasm. "Each genetic cell already has all of the tools to build biocomputers on its own," says Benenson. "All that must be provided is a genetic blueprint of the machine and our own biology will do the rest."

As is the case with many advances in computing, the development of DNA computing began when researchers were looking for ways to create computers that run faster and have greater memory. Adding urgency to the exploration is the eventual obsolescence of silicon chips. The number of components that can be etched on a silicon chip has been doubling about every 18 months, but that will max out in the next decade. At that point, the chips won't be able to shrink further without electron leakage or other problems.

The space between each base pair in a genetic sequence is 1 billionth of a meter, allowing for a denser packing of information than in silicon. But beyond the expansion in capacity it can provide, DNA computing offers a unique advantage in biological environments. In cells or in the bloodstream, DNA computers can take advantage of their ability to interact directly with a biological environment. Computers were once room-sized calculating machines, but DNA computers may be able to function as "smart drugs" that can detect abnormalities in the environment to indicate a particular disease, and then, ultimately, adjust that environment to offset the disease process. DNA can also be used to create machines and structures other than computers, such as tiny motors or miniaturized circuitry.

In 1936 Alan M. Turing, the renowned British mathematician, invented a "toy" computer which is now called the Turing Machine. The machine stored information as sequences of letters on tape and used a finite control to manipulate that information. What began as a conceptual device to explore mathematical computations ended up being a universal tool to store and manipulate data.

A half-century later, University of Southern California computer scientist Leonard Adleman, realizing that DNA and enzymes also store information and manipulate it, set out to create the first DNA computer. His work at the intersection of computer science and molecular biology inspired research to find an approach for DNA to replace silicon chips. Along the way, companies such as Olympus, Gentel Biosciences, Nanorex, and CDF have funded and fabricated components to harness DNA, not just to replace certain computer functions but to venture where traditional computers do not tread.

Richard Feynman once said, "The inside of a computer is dumb as hell, but it goes like mad." The speed of silicon-based computers comes from their ability to quickly solve problems one step at a time. DNA is potentially much faster. This biological raw material replicates exponentially and each of the strands can be working on a different aspect of the problem at the same time. And rather than needing a multimillion-dollar dust-free factory to make thousands of silicon chips, the creator of a DNA computer could use a single bacteria cell in a flask in a lab to produce billions of cells with the same DNA.

Silicon-based computers store information using the binary code and manipulate that information with a microchip. Adleman realized that he could store information in DNA and manipulate that information utilizing the process by which a sequence of nucleotides binds to a complementary strand.

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