JOTB19 - Biological Logic by Sara-Jane Dunn

The 20th Century was transformed by the ability to program on silicon, an innovation that made possible technologies that fundamentally revolutionised how the world works. As we face global challenges in health, food production, and in powering an increasingly energy-greedy planet, it is becoming clear that the 21st Century could be equally transformed by programming an entirely different material: biological matter. The power to program biology could transform medicine, agriculture, and energy, but relies, fundamentally, on an understanding of biochemistry as molecular machinery in the service of biological information-processing. Unlike engineered systems, however, living cells self-generate, self-organise, and self-repair, they undertake massively parallel operations with slow and noisy components in a noisy environment, they sense and actuate at molecular scales, and most intriguingly, they blur the line between software and hardware. Understanding this biological computation presents a huge challenge to the scientific community. Yet the ultimate destination and prize at the culmination of this scientific journey is the promise of revolutionary and transformative technology: the rational design and implementation of biological function, or more succinctly, the ability to program life.