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Here’s something to think about:

The human (Homo Sapien) is constructed of 2,900,000,000 units of DNA, or base-pairs. This immense network of variant combinations of ATCG can be thought of as Code, much like binary code. Between you and me and the next person there is less than a 3% variance in that code, and that is what makes you, you, and not me. If you look at the sequencing of the ATCG’s, you can understand the code for how everything about you operates, from behavior, to skin pigmentation to cancer; and one step further trace the exact evolution of your code back to what specific type of primordial ooze you evolved from.

Now imagine yourself as a computer program, based on a specific period in time, your body looks and feels different, your tastes change, your thoughts, even your skin change too. All this is is your genetic code executing it’s “program” of life. To put this into relative terms; scientists have already discovered that aging has nothing to do with whether a person uses expensive “age-defying” creams or spends 3 hours a day having their face massaged with rare pearls. In fact, all that needs to be done is to “re-program” that one sequence, and you can quite literally eliminate the aging look, Not your age, but the code that says your face and skin should look like “this” at this point in time, talk about Forever 21.

But what has research and exploration into genomics to date really given us? Well for one, scientists last year took a dead donor heart, stripped it down to only it’s cartilage, sprayed it with stem cells from a mouse, those cells in turn self-organized, and the heart started beating. Public-life genomics has allowed a woman in Spain to re-grow her Trachea in in 72 hours went from dire to being able to run around with her kids.

How about in computing? We would like to consider ourselves vastly complex, comprised of 2.9Bn DNA bits, until you sequence Amoeba Dubia which has 670,000,000,000 DNA bits, more than 200 times larger than the human genome. Now imagine that as a digital storage unit, this may well be the future of computing.

What is hopeful for The United States is that we are by and large the most literate nation in genetics, and come time when people will opt for re-growing healthy organs, and programming cells to not be cancerous as opposed to the current chemical bombardment approach, we can be the primary manufacturer. And when Moore’s law can no longer sustain itself using silica and other such synthetics, we can be the manufacturer for a new generation of computing in ACTG rather than 1010.

This is the new manufacturing economy, and we have a 10 year window to become the preeminent leader, that is to say we would like to remain a leading nation.

Image Sources: GenomeNews, IMPAwards