A new kind of firefighting

I managed to miss a potentially interesting edition of Horizon on the BBC after making the mistake of flicking over to watch the second half of the Manchester Utd/Milan match.

Anyway, I caught the last ten minutes, and managed to glean the basic facts: that fewer people would have died when the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11 had the authorities been in possession of a global picture of the state of the building (in terms of both its structure and the movement of its occupants). But having the raw data is not enough: it needs to be provided as input to predictive models that are capable of allowing firefighters to play "what if" games. These models are necessarily computationally complex and resource intensive, which is where Jose Torero comes in. He's in charge of Firegrid, an interdisciplinary project dedicated to using Grid-based computing to model and predict, in real-time, the evolution of fire emergencies.

This work is related to my own on evacuation modelling, and we've recently been awarded a Ph.D. studentship in order to develop our ideas on how crush conditions emerge in situations where people fail to follow a set evacuation plan. This work will be done in collaboration with Dr Steve Gwynne, who has worked for the last ten years on modelling people movement, and who helped develop the influential Exodus system. The position will be advertised shortly, so watch this space.

Warwick victorious!

Congratulations to one of my old institutions, Warwick, on winning the 2007 University Challenge. In a tight match, they eventually fought off the reigning champions, Manchester, both securing Warwick's first ever series win and preventing their opponents from gaining the first ever "back to back" run of titles.

I'm afraid, however, that most neutrals watching will remember it more for Prakash Patel's post-presentation lunge for Ann Widdecombe than anything else.

Edinburgh Science Festival

Just a quick reminder that I'll be appearing at the Edinburgh Science Festival next Sunday (April 15th). Full details of my event (including how to reserve tickets) are here, and I'm told that there will be a book signing afterwards.

An apt observation

Jonathan Hodgkin, a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, has published a nice essay in the March 28 edition of the Times Literary Supplement. It's built around a review of both Genesis Machines and Robert Frenay's recent book, Pulse (which I haven't yet had the chance to read, but which has a very nice website). This is the second occasion on which the two have been jointly reviewed (the first being Matt Ridley's examination here).

Anyway, I'm happy with Hodgkin's overall assessment of my own book, and he makes some fair points concerning gaps in topical coverage. I specifically avoided dealing in detail with quantum computing (although, to be fair, I did mention it), as I didn't want the book to turn into a detailed "quantum vs DNA" debate (and I'm not sure I have the expertise to do justice to the quantum "camp" anyway). It's understandable, though, that as a chemist Hodgkin should highlight the omission of aptamer development.

Aptamers are synthetic molecules that can fold up into very detailed three-dimensional shapes, thus binding to other molecules with incredible specificity. They can therefore be used to target other molecules in the same way as antibodies, and offer a wide range of applications in biotechnology and medicine. Because the possible space of three-dimensional shapes a molecule can adopt is potentially vast, researchers must use a smart approach to finding aptamers, as opposed to a "hit-and-hope" policy. The technique that has been developed, the name of which is abbreviated to SELEX,
uses an evolutionary approach based on an initial molecular population. Interestingly, it may be thought of (rather loosely) as a "wet" version of the genetic algorithm.

One possible hook that I could perhaps have made more of is the fact that Andrew Ellington, one of the founders of aptamer development, was one of the main researchers involved in recently building a bacterial camera (which did merit a mention in the book!)

"From Rive Gauche to Rochdale..."

...was Justine's remark yesterday, as we drove home through that northern town after a wonderful week in Paris. We visited Dennis Shasha and his family, as he's there on sabbatical from New York University and kindly invited us over. Justine and Alice took in the sights while Dennis and I got down to some work.

We stayed in a marvellous little hotel, just around the corner from the Eglise Saint-Sulpice (which featured as a central location in The Da Vinci Code).

Wednesday was spent walking and talking with Dennis, bouncing around ideas about biocomputing. His wife, Karen, kindly took time out to show Justine and Alice around the Jardin du Luxembourg. Thursday was spend working while Justine wandered up to the Louvre, before we had dinner with the Shashas. We wrapped up on Friday morning, then Justine and I took some time out to revisit Monmartre, where we honeymooned three years ago.

It was a pleasure to spend time with Dennis and his family; both he and his wife are prodigiously talented, Dennis as a scientist, writer and (as Alice was delighted to discover) juggler, and Karen as an artist (and cook!), and we much appreciated their hospitality. Dennis and I are currently working on the draft paper that emerged from our discussions, which will hopefully appear as a preprint in the next few weeks - watch this space.

The Times Higher recently commissioned an article from me, the subject being the recently announced cuts in UK research funding. They were particularly interested in the views of a "young academic", so I was delighted to see that the resulting piece was made the lead opinion article in today's edition. It's available on the THES website, but I'm reproducing it here with their kind permission. The headline (and accompanying cartoon) appear to have been derived from a rather throwaway remark I made in the final sentence.

Labour's infidelity will not be forgiven easily
Martyn Amos, Times Higher Education Supplement, March 22 2007, p. 12.

Ripples from the collapse of Rover two years ago are apparently lapping at the doors of UK university departments. The decision to dip into research funds was, according to the Department of Trade and Industry, to cover "exceptional" costs. The demise of the car firm was a one-off budgetary burden that should be borne by all.

The image of an administration battling to save jobs in a region blighted by industrial decline is one the DTI is in no hurry to dispel. A closer inspection of the department's figures suggests the exercise was more about fiscal firefighting than industrial or social intervention. But behind the smokescreen of short-term financial juggling lie deeper concerns about fundamental breaches of trust.

Senior academics and industry leaders reacted with dismay to the announcement that about £68 million of funding destined for science would instead be diverted back to the DTI to address these "historic and new" financial pressures. Although the Rover debacle was pushed to the front of the crowd of good causes, other recipients of recalled funds lurked in the background. Jokes about David Cameron's alleged drug use at school have recently filled the corridors of Whitehall, but, to the Government, Weeed is no joke. That's the Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment Directive to the uninitiated, a European Union edict that requires companies to dispose of obsolete white goods on behalf of consumers. UK implementation of this directive has been put on hold twice, the delay necessitating an additional funding shot to the tune of £27 million - only a couple of million short of the £29 million taken back from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Michael Kenward, a former editor of New Scientist magazine, has highlighted the irony of funding the cost of delays in implementing electrical recycling by taking money away from the very agency that has green technologies at the top of its research agenda.

Whatever lies behind the decision to cut research funding, as a relatively junior member of staff I am acutely aware of the impact that these changes may have on the rank and file. The short-term implications are that roughly 100 research council grants will no longer be funded. Many of these would have been supported in "responsive mode", a mechanism designed to offer maximum flexibility in terms of project size and scope. Younger scientists are particularly encouraged to apply within this framework, as are those proposing adventurous or multidisciplinary research - all of which are vital to the long-term development of healthy science and innovation. Since most grants run for between two and five years, the research councils are obliged to cover these future costs from a much diminished purse and must cut back on flexible, short-term activities. These include studentships and fellowships - precisely the mechanisms by which new researchers establish their groups and develop their careers. Long-term, risky research will be sacrificed for the purposes of short-term expediency.

Perhaps more significant, this decision represents a sea change in the relationship between Labour and the scientific community. For the first time since taking power, the Government has reneged on its promises about the funding of science. This had previously enjoyed protected status within the Office of Science and Engineering to encourage medium to long-term research that might extend beyond the lifetime of governments. The dismantling of this ring fence has sent out a signal to some that the DTI can choose to ignore Treasury rules on science funding whenever it sees fit.

Early portents of the cuts came soon after the resignation of Lord Sainsbury from his post of Science Minister, a long tenure that had been greeted with almost universal approval from the research community. According to one insider quoted in The Times Higher in the wake of the announcement of the cuts: "The fact that he has left has made this possible." The formal announcement came while his successor, Malcolm Wicks, was on a trip to an operation funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.

The Government will argue that the cuts amount to less than 1 per cent of the total science budget, and that funding levels will be restored or even improved in future. But, like a cheating partner, the administration must understand that the long-term damage wrought by their breach of trust cannot simply be undone by promises to behave better in future.

Passport hell

Dennis Shasha, academic, author and the series editor for my first book, has very kindly invited me over to Paris for a week to do some work. Of course, my wife and daughter were also invited, and we thought it would be a chance to introduce Alice to the city where her parents enjoyed their honeymoon (during the heatwave of 2003 - even less romantically, we thought it might also be a chance to get some rather messy but necessary work done on the house in our absence).

As is common in our household, various arrangements had been left until the last minute, the most significant one being passports for my wife and daughter. Luckily, one of the regional centres that deals with fast-track (ie. within two weeks) applications is just down the road in Liverpool, so I made an appointment to go over there today. Which is where the fun started.

The regulations concerning the acceptability of photographs for use on passports are fairly relaxed for children under five, but they still specify things like "no other person visible in the background". If you've ever tried to get a 12-month old to sit still, in a photo booth, looking in the vague direction of the camera, whilst remaining invisible yourself, then you'll know what we're up against. A couple of days ago, my wife had the following taken:


Which we thought would be fine. How little we knew. We dropped into our local Post Office on the way to Liverpool, just to double-check that the photo would be acceptable. "No", was the quick response, since Justine's arm is clearly visible in the background. Cue quick dash to Morrisons and frantic changing of notes into pound coins.


Our first effort wasn't too bad, in a moody, My Bloody Valentine album cover sort of way. But nowhere near good enough to satisfy the sticklers at the passport agency. So we tried again.












Away with the fairies. So we tried again.


















Too blurred, face in the wrong part of the shot, looking down. By this point, we'd burned through 12 quid, I'd lost all feeling in my legs from kneeling on the floor of the photo booth, and we were in severe danger of missing our pre-booked appointment. So we decided to just get there and then worry about it.

Sure enough, the lovely (and I don't mean that sarcastically, they really were lovely, accomodating and helpful) people in Liverpool told us that none of the photos would be acceptable, but they had their own photo booth for just such an eventuality. They also passed on some wisdom on how to control toddlers whilst remaining invisible, thus sticking to the rules. Which is how we came to get this (acceptable!) shot:


If you look closely, you can see that Alice is actually sitting on my lap. That's me, in the background. Wearing a white T-shirt over my head.

Festival time

I feel honoured and delighted to have been asked to contribute to two of the Edinburgh Festivals this year. The programme for the International Science Festival was published today, and features (amongst many others) Marcus du Sautoy, Marcus Chown, Kirsty Wark, Colin Blakemore, Steve Jones and Heinz Wolff. Richard Jones (who blogs here) and I have been scheduled in the Cutting Edge subgroup of the Big Ideas event. The Festival runs from April 2-15, and it promises to be a lot of fun (as well as informative, of course!)

I'll also be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival which takes place between August 11-27. Last year's event (featuring three Nobel Laureates) attracted over 220,000 visitors, and it's now the "world's largest celebration of the written word". The programme for this event will be published on June 14.

Protect and survive

Those of us old enough to remember Protect and Survive (or its US equivalent, Duck and Cover) will appreciate the humour of Safe Now, which provides alternative interpretations of public information graphics.



The middle of a terrorist attack is not an appropriate time to catch up on your reading or paperwork.

"Dr" Gillian McKeith

Today's Guardian contains a wonderfully detailed demolition of "Dr" Gillian McKeith, Channel 4's very own "clinical nutritionist". Many people have accused her of quackery and charlatanism in the past, often resulting in threats of legal action (as opposed to a reasoned scientific response).

Her claims to hold a Ph.D. certainly seem quite laughable.

Paperback edition

Just a short note that the paperback edition of Genesis Machines is now available for pre-ordering on Amazon. It's out on June 14.

I spent the end of last week at a BBSRC workshop on synthetic biology, and will post a report later this week.

Another radio interview

Just a quick note that I'm this week's guest on This Week In Science, a radio show run out of the University of California Davis, and which boasts listeners in over 60 countries. You can either listen online tomorrow at 17:30 (UK) via the website, or download the show later as a podcast.

New stuff

Two new publications to report, both very different.

The first is a paper that's just been accepted by BioSystems, and is now available online. Two hybrid compaction algorithms for the layout optimisation problem was written with two colleagues in China, and deals with the problem of packing circular objects inside an "outer" containing circle. Many people will be familiar with this problem, which tries to minimise the size of the container, but our version is complicated by the fact that each object also has mass, and we must seek to minimise not only the radius of the container, but the net mass imbalance. This problem has real-world significance in areas such as aerospace and satellite design, where the circles represent pieces of equipment, and the body as a whole is rotating or moving. We have developed two algorithms, both inspired by nature, which produce the best known results for this problem.

The other piece of writing this month is my first (and quite possibly last) appearance in a men's style magazine (Esquire). As part of their "Hot List 2007", I was asked to write a short piece on "The New Software is...", and chose "Wetware". I'm on page 92 of the February issue, sharing space with George Monbiot.

The next generation

I spent the end of last week and the start of the weekend drifting in and out of the Systems Biology, Bioinformatics and Synthetic Biology conference BioSysBio, which was hosted by the University of Manchester. The event is aimed at post-graduates, post-docs and "young faculty" (I wasn't sure if I qualified for this last descriptor, but they took my money!), and there was certainly a youthful exuberance about the the proceedings. Teaching and family commitments meant that I wasn't able to attend as many sessions as I would have liked, although I was able to make both sessions dedicated to synthetic biology.

The first of these was opened by Randy Rettberg, director of the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGem) programme. Rettberg had a long and distinguished career as a computer engineer (including serving as the chief technical officer of Sun Microsystems) before turning his attention to biology and dividing his time between iGEM and looking after MIT's Registry of Standard Biological Parts, the community's attempt to do for synthetic biology what the Maplin Catalogue did for electronics.

There then followed three talks by UK-based teams who took part in the most recent iGEM. The Imperial College team described their novel approach to building a cell-based oscillator (a device that gives a signal that goes "up" and "down" on a regular basis). Rather than building their oscillator inside a single cell, as others have done, the Imperial team decided to try to model classical "predator-prey" dynamics, where the population of prey (eg. rabbits) rises and falls slightly out of step with the rise and fall in the number of predators (eg. foxes). The students decided to engineer two populations of bacteria, each generating molecules that would cause the net signal between the two to rise and fall periodically. Although they've yet to get it all working together, it's a novel approach to the problem, and their simulations and early experimental characterisations seem to suggest that they're well on the road to success.

Another talk was given by a team from Cambridge, who were investigating a subject close to my own heart; self-organisation and pattern formation in bacteria. They've harnessed the ability of bacteria to "swim" combined with an engineered position-dependent genetic "switch" to generate spatial patterns from the "bottom up". The ability to be able to control this process may have significant implications on tissue engineering and bio-medicine, as we'll see shortly.

For me, the most inspiring student presentation was given by the group from Edinburgh, about whom I've written briefly in my book. Arsenic contamination in drinking water is a problem that affects tens of millions worldwide, and is particularly acute in Bangladesh. Existing methods for testing samples are expensive and require technical training, so the Edinburgh team have developed a cell-based detection kit that can detect concentrations below the WHO safety threshold, and which produces a simple "yes-no" response that a non-specialist can understand. Their eventual objective is to be in a position to package and sell the kits for around $1 a pop, which will make sustained testing possible for villagers. A fantastic technical achievement as well as an extremely worthy cause.

I felt slightly humbled by the experience of watching these students in action; remember, most of them were undergraduates (albeit the best of the best) when this work was carried out, and yet they were doing work that, only a few years ago, would be considered the absolute state of the art, and attracting Science and Nature papers (although I can't see any reason why the current work should not do the same). If any of them choose to pursue a career in this field (and I sincerely hope that they do) then they have an excellent future ahead of them.

The final plenary was given by my colleague Ron Weiss of Princeton, who is one of the leading figures in synthetic biology (and, again, who features prominently in the final chapter of my book). Ron has been at the forefront of cellular re-engineering for some years now, and has consistently produced first-rate work. Ron is also interested in pattern formation in nature, and his recent work focuses on programming the way that stem cells talk to other cells, in the hope of one day being able to control the way that they "specialise" and form tissue structures. Although it's still very early days, I think this work has the potential to be massively significant.

A good way to start the year

A (belated) Happy New Year to you!

I haven't, up until now, flagged reviews of Genesis Machines on the blog (partly because I assume that most people who come to it have arrived via the link in the book). However, I was delighted by this review in last Saturday's Guardian; apart from saying nice things about the book, its author, Steven Poole (who wrote Unspeak) appears to share my views on Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail.

A minor point: Poole ends his review by saying that "It is even possible that, when the footnote numbering goes crazy on pages 199-201, it is some sort of joke about genetic mutation. Sadly, I was not able to find meaning in the resulting number series." He assumes that footnote numbers refer only to the first citation of a source; in the example he gives, I cited a report at the start of the chapter, and then again near the end. In both instances I supplied the reference number ("3"), which is why it might have appeared to be out of sequence later on.

Going back to my roots

I'll be returning to my home city of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne next Wednesday (December 6th) to take part in an event organised by The Great Debate. I'll be discussing the topic of Reprogramming Life with Prof. John Burn of the Institute of Human Genetics and Caspar Hewett, the organiser of TGD. Audience participation is welcomed (and, indeed, necessary) at such events, so please come down and take part (if you need an extra incentive, Toby Mundy, my publisher at Atlantic, has very kindly stumped up some cash for a drinks reception afterwards!)

The event starts at 7pm, and further details are available here.

I am a commodity

I only just found out that, as of February last year, this blog's been listed on BlogShares, the "fantasy blog stock market". You can keep track of performance here; I'm not sure what I've been doing to raise the valuation (I think it's mainly to do with incoming links), and it only seems to take notice of blogspot pages, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless. I guess it's a natural extension of the Google pagerank algorithm, where pages with a relatively high number of incoming links are considered to be more authoritative.

On the shelf

I finally feel like a proper author after seeing my book nestling on the shelf of the Manchester Deansgate branch of Waterstone's, near to Isaac Asimov's classic New Guide to Science.

I did look a bit mental taking pictures of the shelf with my camera phone, but there you go...

The New Scientist looks forward

The magazine New Scientist recently celebrated its 50th Anniversary. While some might question its scientific rigour, there's no doubt that it generally does a decent job of bringing science to the public in an accessible fashion, whilst also flagging up to professional scientists the occasional article that might otherwise have gone unseen.

In the most recent issue, the editors asked a collection of the "smartest brains on the planet" to predict the most significant scientific advance of the next 50 years. While some are understandably reluctant
to set themselves up for a fall, most play along with the game.

It's interesting to note how many of the predictions seem to come at the intersection of information/computer science and biology. Lewis Wolpert talks of "computable embryos", Erik Horvitz gives a wide-ranging description of computation as the "fire in our modern-day caves", Paul Nurse anticipates an understanding of the cell as a "chemical and computational machine", Jaron Lanier argues for a restructuring of computer architecture(s) along "bio-mimetic" principles, while Peter Atkins believes that computer technology will allow us to observe and eventually control natural processes to construct "synthetic life".

THES article from last week

The Times Higher Education Supplement published a feature article of mine last week. As we're on a new edition as of today, I can reproduce it below.

If you wish to cite it, please do so as follows (my suggested title was "Synthetic Biology: Where Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up"...):

Martyn Amos, A chip off Mother Nature's own hard-drive, Times Higher Education Supplement, November 9, 2006, pp. 16-17.

---

Possibly the most unusual reviewing assignment I have ever accepted came in 2002, when Guinness World Records asked me to help validate a claim made by a group of Israeli scientists to have built the "world's smallest computer". What made this machine radically different was not just its incredibly miniaturised state but its basic construction material. Rather than piecing together transistors on a silicon surface, Ehud Shapiro and his team at the Weizmann Institute had fabricated their device out of the very stuff of life itself - DNA.

Three trillion copies of their machine could fit into a single tear drop. This miracle of miniaturisation was achieved not through traditional technology but through a breakthrough in the emerging field of molecular computing. The team used strands of DNA to fuel these nanomachines, their latent energy freed by enzymatic "spark plugs". These were not computers in any traditional sense. Their computational capabilities were rudimentary and, rather than using the familiar zeroes and ones of binary code, their "software" was written in the vocabulary of the genes - strings of As, Gs, Cs and Ts.

One of the main motivations for shrinking traditional computer chips is to extract the maximum amount of computational power from a limited space. By placing ever smaller features on the silicon real estate of modern processors, chip-makers such as Intel continually try to keep in step with Moore's Law - the famous observation that computer power roughly doubles every 18 months.

Shapiro's computer was never going to win any prizes for mathematical muscle. All it could do was analyse a sequence of letters and determine whether or not it contained an even number of a specific character. Nevertheless, it represented the state of the art in a scientific field that had been in practical existence for less than a decade. In 1994, Len Adleman (previously better known as one of the co-inventors of the main Internet encryption scheme, and the man who gave a name to what we now know as computer viruses) stunned the computing world by demonstrating the feasibility of performing computations using molecules of DNA.

Rather than representing information as electronic bits inside a silicon chip, Adleman showed how to solve a problem using data encoded as sequences of bases on DNA molecules. One of his motivations lay in the storage capacity of DNA; nature has data compression down to a fine art. Every living cell in your body contains a copy of your unique 3Gb genome, the data equivalent of 200 copies of the Manhattan telephone directory. Adleman wanted to use the nature of chemical reactions to perform massively parallel computations on this molecular memory.

Each tube could contain trillions of individual DNA strands, and each molecule could encode a possible answer to a particular problem. The idea was to exploit the fact that enzymes and other biological tools act on every strand in a tube at the same time, quickly weeding out bad solutions and giving the potential for parallel processing on a previously unimagined scale.

Adleman's initial paper led to the emergence of a fully fledged field. A rash of papers appeared, describing proposals to use DNA to crack government encryption schemes or build real, "wet" memories more capacious than the human brain. After this flurry of untamed optimism - when some seriously thought that molecular machines could give traditional computers a run for their money - DNA computing matured into a more thoughtful discipline. Scientists no longer talk seriously about taking on silicon machines and are instead seeking out niche markets for their molecular machines, areas such as medical diagnostics and drug delivery, where traditional devices and methods are too large, invasive or prone to error.

Shapiro's simple computer was one example of such an application; a small step towards eventual "on-site" diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as cancer. A later version of his machine was capable (in a test tube, at least) of identifying the molecules that signal the presence of prostate cancer and then releasing a therapeutic molecule to kill the malevolent cells. Shapiro and his team have spoken about their aim of creating a "doctor in a cell", a reprogrammed human cell that could roam around the body, sniffing out and destroying disease. As physicist Richard Jones explains in his book Soft Machines, the Fantastic Voyage scenario of humans in a miniaturised submarine is "quite preposterous", but that doesn't rule out serious work into trying to engineer existing living systems to act as "medibots" able to detect and control disease at its source.

A growing band of experts is slowly coming together to form a whole new vanguard at the frontiers of science, where boundaries between biology, chemistry, engineering and computing become fluid and ever-changing. This is the new world of synthetic biology. "We want to do for biology what Intel does for electronics," states George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard University. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Tom Knight is even more blunt: "Biology is the nanotechnology that works."

DNA is so much more than an incredibly compact data storage medium. As physicist Richard Feynman explained: "Biology is not simply writing information; it is doing something about it." Floating inside its natural environment - the cell - DNA carries meaning, used to generate signals, make decisions, switch things on and off, like a program that controls its own execution. DNA, and the cellular machinery that operates on it, is the original reprogrammable computer, pre-dating our efforts by billions of years. By re-engineering the code of life, we may finally be able to take full advantage of the biological "wetware" that has evolved over millennia. We are dismantling living organisms and rebuilding them - this time according to a pre-planned design. It is the ultimate scrap-heap challenge.

As pioneers such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann discovered, there are direct parallels between the operation of computers and the gurglings of living "stuff" - molecules and cells. Of course, the operation of organic, bio-logic is more noisy, messy and complex than the relatively clear-cut execution of computer instructions. But rather than shying away from the complexity of living systems, a new generation of synthetic biologists is seeking to harness the diversity of behaviour that nature offers, rather than trying to control or eliminate it. By building devices that use this richness of behaviour at their very core, we are ushering in a new era in terms of practical devices and applications and of how we view the very notion of computation and of life itself.

The questions that drive this research include the following: Does nature "compute" and, if so, how? What does it mean to say that a bacterium is "computing"? Can we rewrite the genetic programs of living cells to make them do our bidding? How can mankind benefit from this potentially revolutionary new technology? What are the dangers? Could building computers with living components put us at risk from our own creations? What are the ethical implications of tinkering with nature's circuits? How do we (indeed, should we) reprogramme the logic of life?

The dominant science of the new millennium may well prove to be at the intersection of biology and computing. As biologist Roger Brent argues: "I think that synthetic biology will be as important to the 21st century as [the] ability to manipulate bits was to the 20th." This isn't tinkering around the edges, it's blue-skies research - the sort of high-risk work that could change the world or crash and burn. I took a huge risk in the 1990s when I gambled on DNA computing as the topic of my PhD research - a field with a literature base, at the time, of a single article.

It is exhilarating stuff, and it has the potential to change forever our definition of a "computer". But most researchers are wary of promising too much, preferring to combine quiet optimism with grounded realism. As researcher Drew Endy explains: "It'll be cool if we can pull it off. We might fail completely. But at least we're trying."