Itamar Willner has built a computer that may one day live inside you. Willner, who constructed the molecular calculator with colleagues at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, believes enzyme-powered computers could eventually be implanted into the human body and used to, for example, modify the release of drugs to match a specific person’s metabolism.

Enzymes are already widely used to assist calculations using specially encoded DNA. These DNA computers have the potential to surpass the speed and power of existing silicon computers because they can perform many calculations in parallel and pack a vast number of components into a tiny space.

But for Willner, speed is not a priority. His enzyme computer can take several minutes to perform a calculation. Instead, he pictures it eventually being incorporated into bio-sensing equipment and used, for example, to monitor and react to a patient’s response to particular dosages of a drug.

Read more about the enzyme computer at: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/info-tech/dn8767.html

Filed under: Special Features

Tags: Amazing Engineering, DNA