{"id":36065,"date":"2017-04-12T13:22:27","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T20:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/scientists-hacked-a-cells-dna-and-made-a-biocomputer-out-of-it"},"modified":"2017-06-04T07:05:11","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T14:05:11","slug":"scientists-hacked-a-cells-dna-and-made-a-biocomputer-out-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/scientists-hacked-a-cells-dna-and-made-a-biocomputer-out-of-it","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Hacked a Cell\u2019s DNA and Made a Biocomputer Out of It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-hacked-a-cells-dna-and-made-a-biocomputer-out-of-it.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThese re-engineered organisms will change our lives over the coming years, leading to cheaper drugs, \u2018green\u2019 means to fuel our cars and targeted therapies for attacking \u2018superbugs\u2019 and diseases, such as cancer,\u201d wrote Drs. Ahmad Khalil and James Collins at Boston University, who were not involved in the study.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Our brains are often compared to computers, but in truth, the billions of cells in our bodies may be a better analogy. The squishy sacks of goop may seem a far cry from rigid chips and bundled wires, but cells are experts at taking inputs, running them through a complicated series of logic gates and producing the desired programmed output.<\/p>\n<p>Take beta cells in the pancreas, which manufacture and store insulin. If they detect a large spike in blood sugar, then they release insulin; else they don\u2019t. Each cell adheres to commands like these, allowing us\u2014the organism\u2014to operate normally.<\/p>\n<p>This circuit-like nature of cellular operations is not just a handy metaphor. About 50 years ago, scientists began wondering: what if we could hijack the machinery behind these algorithms and reprogram the cells to do whatever we want?<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2017\/04\/12\/scientists-hacked-a-cells-dna-and-made-a-biocomputer-out-of-it\/\">https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2017\/04\/12\/scientists-hacked-a-ce...out-of-it\/<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThese re-engineered organisms will change our lives over the coming years, leading to cheaper drugs, \u2018green\u2019 means to fuel our cars and targeted therapies for attacking \u2018superbugs\u2019 and diseases, such as cancer,\u201d wrote Drs. Ahmad Khalil and James Collins at Boston University, who were not involved in the study. Our brains are often compared to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":388,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,1523,41,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-computing","category-information-science","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/388"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36065"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58096,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36065\/revisions\/58096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}