UK scientists make living computer gates

We have all seen the science fiction movies showing computers being implanted in living beings like dogs and even humans.  We have also seen artificial limbs and hands that are controlled by implanted electrodes connected to microcontrollers.

Now scientists have done the opposite: creating a computer gate from something living.  It is not a computer, but computers are made out of gates and this is the start.  After all, present day computers started out as the first transistor that was mounted on a piece of wood – the simple single-transistor inverter gate.

This living gate made was much more complex than the first transistor.  It was an “AND Gate.”

The living material used was bacteria.  Researchers from the Imperial College London created the first living computer gates from bacteria and DNA.

The harmless bacteria are found in the human stomach.  One of the scientists and a co-author of the scientific paper, Professor Richard Kitney commented “Logic gates are the fundamental building blocks in silicon circuitry that our entire digital age is based on. Without them, we could not process digital information. Now that we have demonstrated that we can replicate these parts using bacteria and DNA, we hope that our work could lead to a new generation of biological processors, whose applications in information processing could be as important as their electronic equivalents.”

The scientists can envision using these gates to create computer-controlled things that can travel throughout the body and kill cancer cells or remove poisons from the body.  I see a cell phone that can be “grown” inside your ear.  You would never need to worry about charging batteries and you could truly have a hands-free cell phone when you are driving.