Biomolecular information processing: Biotechnology paves the way for new approaches to computing

In the nineteenth century, the synthesis of the biological compound urea by organic chemists established that living organisms were not always necessary to produce organic materials. Today, the challenge is to use organic materials to form a molecular computer that can process information in a lifelike manner. The desire to do so stems in part from important and difficult problems that face today's computer scientist. Three of the most challenging areas are effective pattern recognition in ambiguous environments, efficient utilization of parallelism, and learning from experience.