The opening of the new Economist article, “Computing with Soup,” which examines the medical benefits of using DNA-laced liquid instead of silicon chips:

“EVER since the advent of the integrated circuit in the 1960s, computing has been synonymous with chips of solid silicon. But some researchers have been taking an alternative approach: building liquid computers using DNA and its cousin RNA, the naturally occurring nucleic-acid molecules that encode genetic information inside cells. Rather than encoding ones and zeroes into high and low voltages that switch transistors on and off, the idea is to use high and low concentrations of these molecules to propagate signals through a kind of computational soup. 

Computing with nucleic acids is much slower than using transistors. Unlike silicon chips, however, DNA-based computers could be made small enough to operate inside cells and control their activity. ‘If you can programme events at a molecular level in cells, you can cure or kill cells which are sick or in trouble and leave the other ones intact. You cannot do this with electronics,’ says Luca Cardelli of Microsoft’s research centre in Cambridge, England, where the software giant is developing tools for designing molecular circuits.” (Thanks Browser.)