Biology is the next technology platform as entrepreneurs look to push the limits – The Australian Financial Review

Machines that learn mimic the brain's neural networks but are restricted by the limitations of electronics and silicon.

Millions of years in the making, life on Earth is a thing of beauty. We look to it to inspire our designs, forms and functions from architecture to economics. More to mimic than in belief we ourselves could produce equal sophisticated elegance.

At the frontier of today's technology we mimic the brain's neural networks to develop machines that learn, also known as artificial intelligence. Yet efforts here remain forever restricted by the limitations of the electronics and silicon that enables them.

To circumvent such limitations a growing number of biologists-come-computer scientists are programming life's organic materials in a quest to deliver a leap forward in technology and its elegant design.

Advances have given rise to the feasibility of biology being the next generation technology platform upon which to build our solutions.

We are in the midst of a data explosion. 90 per cent of the worlds data was created in the last two years. To store and retrieve all that data we have state of the art server farms, often built underground to keep temperatures down and prevent damage. Even our best will become overwhelmed, obsolete and needing to be replaced within 10 years. And its not just cat videos that are at risk of being lost or corrupted think data underpinning financial markets, health records and national security.

Enter DNA. It lasts for centuries:look at how we recover woolly mammoth's DNA successfully. And while a conventional magnetic strip has storage capacity to fit 10 GB into the volume of say a sugar crystal, DNA can pack billions of GB.

While we're only at the start of being able to achieve such numbers the entrepreneurs are coming. Only last week I witnessed SF startup Catalog's round become oversubscribed after pitching its capabilities of DNA cold data storage.

Microsoft is immensely keen. Seeking to have its cloud business catch up to Amazon, it commissioned startup Twist Bioscience to deliver 10 million DNA strands for its engineers to store data on. The space looks to be a matter of when rather than if.

We're still a big way off but scientists have been able to successfully design leech neurons to calculate maths questions posed to it. As you can imagine it is not because leeches are nature's Archimedes, rather they have less complicated brains to experiment on.

It is part of a quest to develop computers with no silicon or electronics components, or at least a hybrid with biological elements. Circuits in cell biology and circuits in electronics may be viewed as being highly similar with biology using molecules, ions, proteins, and DNA rather than electrons and transistors.

Labelled Wetware Computers or Organic Computers it offers a glimpse into future efforts to enhance traditional computing architecture via biology.

MIT's biological engineering department has even been able to design a programming language for living cells. Aptly named "Cello".

"It is literally a programming language for bacteria," says Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering. "You use a text-based language, just like you're programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell."

Unnerving? I can see why. Yet don't worry this is just academic theoretical research at this stage. No basement developer will be getting access to life's code anytime soon.

And therein lies the underlying concern over the mounting trend of biology intersecting so closely with technology. Oversight and regulation remain critical. And yet even now the international community has little ability to enforce which country adopts which ethical standards in an environment of competitive innovation.

This, like the advances it seeks to govern, requires equal innovation.

Daniel Darling is an Australian investor based in Silicon Valley, where he is the managing director of Darling Ventures

Follow this link:
Biology is the next technology platform as entrepreneurs look to push the limits - The Australian Financial Review