Biological Computer on Chip?

Victor Chemtob, The Consulate General of Israel in New York, "High Hopes for Israeli Biological Computer on Chip" (8 March 2005, Israel Line by The Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

Excerpt: "A pioneering biological computer - composed entirely of DNA molecules and enzymes built on a gold-coated chip - has been developed by scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, The Jerusalem Post reported. The model represents a significant improvement over its previous version reported three years ago in a joint paper in the journal Nature by the Technion's Prof. Ehud Keinan and a group from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot that included Yaakov Benenson, Prof. Ehud Shapiro and Prof. Zvi Livneh.

While the original computer could accept up to 765 different programs, the new computer accommodates up to a billion; this increase represents a dramatic advance in terms of the potential mathematical operations and complexity of problems that may be solved using a biological computer. The results, which open a wide variety of applications in data encryption and cancer diagnosis, are published this week in the Journal of the American Chemical Society." [FullText]