Talk Topic: An Engineering Technology Based on Biology
Tom Knight, MIT CSAIL
Novemeber 14, 2007

Abstract
Technology of the 20th century was dominated by developments in the science of physics. The core science was well understood in the late 1800's, yet it took another century to fully capitalize on that understanding from an engineering perspective. Electrical engineering, as a discipline, built a modular, easy to manipulate infrastructure based on the far more complex physics. Shannon and Turing taught us the technology and importance of manipulating information with those tools. This technological era based on physics is coming to a close -- mechanical and lithographic techniques for positioning atoms are too crude for the scale of structures we must produce for this century. The core manufacturing will transition from a physics-based technology to a chemical and biochemical technology, placing atoms precisely where we want them, and counting how many are present.

Biology provides proof-of-principle and core technology for this effort. For the first time we can manipulate self-reproducing structures, structuring information at the atomic scale. This ability provides almost unimaginable technological opportunities for solving challenging problems in energy, environmental problems, and even, perhaps, in building faster computers, all at economic costs so low as to challenge our existing social structures.

I'll try to give an overview of how this technology may play out over the next few decades, and what we're doing to push it along.