[peter-fogg]

This is certainly an interesting thing to think about, but the article is not well written. The author makes a vast leap of logic from "We are researching organ printing, and we have 3D printers" to "We will soon be able to code DNA and print cells".

There's a few problems here. One is that "organ printing" in its current state is not at all the same as printing a cell. What would printing a cell even mean? We know how do things like create a cell's membrane and inject DNA into it, but as far as I'm aware nobody can print a ribosome (one of the pieces that converts DNA's "code" into proteins).

Secondly, it's important to know that DNA isn't even the assembly language of the cell, it's the ones and zeros. The idea of hand-coding DNA is simply absurd -- not because we can't synthesize the molecule, but because chromosomes are huge and we don't even fully understand what everything does yet. Imagine trying to read a program's binary, except some sections of the code are repeated, some are complete garbage, and some look a lot like garbage but are actually totally necessary. Now imagine writing that.

There's been some work done on genetic computation, using the the expression of fluorescent proteins as "output", but it's a long way from general computation. The idea of a "DNA compiler" isn't even possible yet -- noone has figured out how to represent XOR, which makes performing arbitrary computations tricky at best. And, as you might imagine, using cells as computers is slooooooow.

[jamesjporter]

Spot on. We are laughably far away from being able to do the kinds of things with living systems that the author suggests. An analogous claim would be that because the Wright Brothers just invented the airplane, we will soon have cheap faster than light interstellar travel. I don't mean to be overly negative, this stuff is exciting! But it is important to have perspective and keep in mind how far we have to go.