Question: I heard a while ago that a group of scientists were working on a organic computer, do you think that that would ever be able to work?

Jane Charlesworth answered on 18 Mar 2014:

There have been lots of people trying to make organic computers. One idea is that we can use DNA sequences to encode information–last year a scientist encoded the text of one of his books in a long string of DNA. I think at present it would not be easy to read back that text, because DNA sequencing machines can only sequence short strings, but hopefully soon technology will allow us to do so. So one idea is to make bacteria that can somehow do calculations and store and retrieve the information from those in their DNA. It sounds a bit like science fiction to me, though!

Another idea is that we can make a computer that works by causing certain proteins to interact (electronic computers work by storing data in ones and zeroes–I think a protein computer would work similarly, eg two proteins could stick together, meaning a “1” or be separate, meaning a “0”). So when people talk about organic computers they mean different things.

And of course people already write software that “evolves” towards the right answer to problems, which is another thing that I think sounds fascinating, but which I know very little about.