Prometheus 6

One day I'm going to assemble all the bizarre organism enhancing tech that I know is under development and write up a story about what it might be like to have all of them.

cientists have developed what they say could become the world's smallest medical kit: a computer, made of DNA, that can diagnose disease and automatically dispense medicine to treat it.

The computer, so small that one trillion would fit into a drop of water, now works only in a test tube, and it could be decades before something like it is ready for practical use. But it offers an intriguing glimpse of a future in which molecular machines operate inside people, spotting diseases and treating them before noticeable symptoms even appear.

"Eventually we have this vision of a doctor in a cell," said Dr. Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, Israel, who led the work, published online yesterday by the journal Nature.

DNA's role is to store and process information, the genetic code. So it is not surprising that it can be used for other computing tasks as well, and scientists have in fact used it to solve various mathematical problems. But the Israeli scientists said theirs was the first DNA computer that could have a medical use.

The computer, a liquid solution of DNA and enzymes, was programmed to detect the kind of RNA (a DNA cousin) that would be present if particular genes associated with a disease were active.

In one example, the computer determined that two particular genes were active and two others inactive, and therefore made the diagnosis of prostate cancer. A piece of DNA, designed to act as a drug by interfering with the action of a different gene, was then automatically released from the end of the computer.