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Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

There needs to be further collaboration between computer scientists and these emerging biological platforms. Between the ability to synthesize code (RNA) and data (protein), I don't think it's been fully realized by most that they've truly entered the world of computing.

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You may be interested in this:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30237357/

Programmable protein circuits in living cells

Yes and no. Biological systems are similar to mechanical computers in that they are information processing systems.

However, they are also self-assembling, self-repairing, wet, massively parallel, etc. Artificial biological systems are in a sense programmable, but with the difficulties of a physical system that can be error-prone and extremely complex.

Don't worry, we are. But it does seem slow compared to other tech industries

Isn't this what the entire field of bioinformatics supposed to be about? I know a few people who left it because it doesn't pay as well (in the US) as your average software engineering job.

I have seen a distinction made between "bioinformatics" - analysing biological data with software - and "computational biology" - using biological systems to do computing.

What OP seems to be talking about is systems modelling, where you model the network of genes and proteins (genomics and proteomics) using tools partly derived from modelling of computer networks.

That's not how I would explain bioinformatics and computational biology... What people often mean when they say bioinformatics is actually computational biology: using computer software, algorithms and other such tools to analyze biological data. Bioinformatics is the development of new tools, new algorithms and new methods to do computational biology.

In other words, a bioinformatician is to a computer scientist what a computational biologist is to a data scientist.

Using biological systems to do computing is more in the realm of "biological computers".

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