Biological Engineering: New Undergraduate Programme at MIT

Guardian Unlimited | Life | From the cells up

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"The point of using biological [engineering] to do information processing isn't in order to replace your laptop computer," says Endy. "Instead, we can use biology-based computing to implement modest amounts of memory and logic in places where we don't have any - like the cells in your liver."

Imagine building a biological counter into a liver cell that was triggered every time the cell divided. Another biological device monitors the counter so that, if the cell has divided more than 200 times (in other words, it has lost control of cell division and might become a tumour), it is killed. This could be a very effective way to beat cancer - with none of the suffering of chemotherapy or inconvenience of surgery.