DNA Strands Modified Into Tiny Fiber-Optic Cables

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on the latest idea from researchers trying to make microcomputers use photons in place of electrons — to make optical interconnects from strands of DNA. Mixing DNA strands with the right dye molecule upgrades them into wires for light, like microscopic optical fibers, able to absorb photons at one end and transmit them to the other. One of the neat things about using DNA is it is the right scale to play nicely with existing and future chip lithography. Quoting: 'The result is similar to natural photonic wires found inside organisms like algae, where they are used to transport photons to parts of a cell where their energy can be tapped. In these wires, chromophores are lined up in chains to channel photons.'"

Right scale...

[morgan_greywolf]

Hmmm...I'm no biologist, but I'll bet it's the right scale for human-implanted computing. Wow. Be afraid...very afraid...

The organisation of life

[Kupfernigk]

This is yet more evidence, if it was needed, that there is something about carbon chemistry that facilitates the emergence of life. Once you have a DNA or RNA molecule, organisation and replication of small molecules seems to emerge almost from nowhere. This evidence that even a concept as significant as photon collecting and channelling could emerge out of a largely self-organising process is quite extraordinary, because it starts to answer the objections of Creationists to, for instance, the evolution of light sensitivity. Given the sheer vastness of geological time, the range of environments on even a minor planet going around a mid-rank star, the opportunities for something to get started are enormous. It's a kind of corollary to Murphy's law: in a sufficiently large system, given long enough, practically anything possible is going to happen at some point.

This of course is not evidence for or against any kind of theology in general, because theology is a much more diverse (and interesting) subject than the Creationists and IDers would have you believe. But it does look as though the question "how did life get started", which is vague and ill defined, is gradually resolving down to the question "under what circumstances can ribose nucleic acids form spontaneously, and how many other small molecules can we find which can spontaneously arrange themselves in the presence of ribose nucleic acids?" which is testable.

Signal loss?

[GogglesPisano]

As I understand it, fiber optic works because there is minimal signal (light) loss due to total internal reflection, which is a consequence of differences in the refractive indices of the glass and the cladding used in the fiber. Does the structure of DNA somehow support reflecting light in the same way? Pretty cool stuff.

Light beings

[Anonymous Coward]

So, eventually this DNA fiber optics will evolve into beings that have nervous systems that operate at the speed of light and therefore can think at the speed of light? Which leads to them being vastly superior to us and them pushing us to extinction?

Photonic "wires"

[Mindcontrolled]

Admittedly I can't be arsed to RTFA, but, hey, let's blabber on.

I don't think the comparison with optic fibres is valid. This is no reflection phenomenon. The so-called natural optic wires are not reflection based, but rather a series of chromophores chained together. Photon transport is a series of absorption-emission-events channeling the energy down the chain.

The same is most likely the case with this stuff. The light transport is no intrinsic property of the DNA, but rather of chromophores coupled to it. DNA just serves as a scaffold to arrange the absorption-emission centres.

Ofc, build this into a computer and I will show you the true meaning of "virus".... Biochemical hacking, oh yes, I am looking forward to that...

Re:The organisation of life

[OolimPhon]

The explanation that has been given in the Bible is the only one whose source is decidedly not human.

Proof that the source is not human, please?

Think Photosynthesis, not Fiber Optics

[cynicsreport]

These modified DNA strands seem to act more like the photosynthetic electron-transport system than they do optical fibers. In fact, one of the applications listed is "light harvesting in artificial photosynthetic systems." It is curious that TFA describes this as a fiber optics corollary.
Fiber optics works based on the principles that photons will reflect off of a surface given a sufficient difference in refractive index and approach angle, allowing high-bandwidth communication. This new DNA photon transport system seems to have very little resemblance. I would guess that using DNA for communication would be very slow and very low bandwidth, to the point of being practically infeasible.

Which Bible is that? Not the original.

[Kupfernigk]

Funnily enough, I actually learned at little Hebrew at University. Enough to be able to read parts of Bereshit, anyway. (Why call an English translation Genesis, which is not an English word? Either call it by its translated name "In the Beginning", or its actual name which is Bereshit.) Enough to know that there is no such word as "Jehovah" in the Bible (it's an interesting story how the error arose, but rest assured it is an error.) Bereshit actually begins, in a fairly accurate translation, "In the beginning the Gods created the Heavens and the Earth" - the word "Elohim" is in the form of a Hebrew plural. YHWH turns up later in the book. If you actually read it in anything like a literal translation, you will find that there are at least 3 different gods wandering around the first book of the Bible, along with some angels who intermarry with human beings.

So either we have to believe that the Jehovah's Witnesses and other "fundamentalists" have been supplied with a heavily corrected version of the Hebrew Bible by a God who keeps supplying different versions in different versions of English (King James, Revised etc.) or that they have been misled by a series of incompetent scholars who never bothered to learn Hebrew.

It's strange, is it not, that Roman Catholic and Episcopalian priests (most of whom do know Hebrew) are quite comfortable with the age of the Universe and the Theory of Evolution, and it is the unlettered fundamentalists, who don't know their k'thibh from their qu're, who aren't?

They strain at a gnat

[Kupfernigk]

And swallow a camel. You are not, of course, answering my main point (that the first Book of the Bible is a collection of heterogeneous legends with more than one theology) while trying to absorb the oddity that Elohim _is_ a plural, and the claim that it isn't in this context is based on bar'a and bar'u. To give a simple analogy from German, if I wrote "Der Goetter" rather than "Die Goetter", it's more likely that I didn't know the correct form of the article than that I really mean "Der Gott". In the Biblical case, if I was a scribe coming along later who wanted to clean things up a bit as regards monotheism, faced with the difference between changing a single letter and replacing a whole word, I might well decide to slide in one of the few vowels that actually appears in unpointed text. Especially as vowels are less sacred than consonants. (Wikipedia writer, btw, hedges bets by writing "is traditionally understood").

The second issue is quite basic. Fundamentalists, to preserve their interpretation against the evidence, have to pretend that the Bible is literally correct. If you preserve an actual mistake - because the word Jehovah is a mistake, not a mispronunciation - you are admitting to your Bible something that is not literally correct. And if you have done that, how many other scribes and copyists may have done the same?

It's OK. Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens, and I know the battle is unwinnable. I wouldn't have bothered, had not your original post been so ridiculous.