http://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinese-scientists-just-admitted-tweaking-205300657.html
"So the locus of code's dance is not only logic gates or the gleaming fields of random access memory; code also moves within the millions of humans who encounter its effects, not just programmers. Code already shapes the world of non-programmers and embeds itself into their bodies, into their experience of themselves, into lived sensation and therefore the realm of experience and aesthetics. Soon in the near future we will live inside an experience mediated by computers; all those science-fiction fantasies of eye-glasses that can layer data over what you see, of new means of sensing the world through android extensions of our bodies, all of these are already possible, they already exist.
And this is not all. We will program ourselves and the world we live in. Consider this: the four letters of the genetic alphabet that makes up DNA - A(adenine), C(cytosine), G(guanine), and T(thymine)-are really, quite literally, a programming language. And this language can be represented in binary code, which means that it can be manipulated by a computer. A recent article in the Atlantic lays out the process and the possibilities:
The latest technology - known as synthetic biology, or "synbio"- moves the work of biotechnology from the molecular to the digital. Genetic code is manipulated using teh equivalent of a word processor. With the press of a button, code representing DNA can be cut and pasted, effortlessly imported from one species into another. It can be reused and repurposed. DNA bases can be swapped in and out with precision. And once the code looks right? Simply hit Send. A dozen different DNA print shops can now turn these bits into biology."
The DNA print shop will send back several vials of "frozen plasmid DNA," which you will then inject into a host bacteria cell, causing this cell to "boot up" using the DNA code you've created. The cell will metabolize, gow and reproduce. Congratulations-you have just created a new form of life."
Geek Sublime, The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty
Vikram Chandra
