Another interesting TED talk. Paul Rothemund discusses how genetic engineers can fold proteins by writing the sequence of the DNA and compiling it with a DNA compiler. The result? Well, you can come up with whatever you want – from simple figures to actual living organisms.
This topic was introduced to me by Ramsesoriginal on a discussion within the House of Hackers network. When I saw the video I thought that it is all good but they still write the DNA sequences with very simple language, which can be compared to an extend to the machine language, although much primitive. So now I am thinking: can’t we just write a high-level compiler? Sure it is not very hard to write the language parser. That’s easy! So, I guess that we, as hackers should take on this challenge and write one just for fun. Also having a simple interpreter could be very beneficial so that we see the result before executing the program through the DNA compiler.
Do you think that’s a good idea and should we do it? More over, do you think it is feasible?
