The current complement of proteins in the cell and their physical deployment depends on the cell s history and thus is a memory. Long-term memory mechanisms are implemented by more or less permanent changes in the state of the cell or in the DNA sequence. In higher organisms, successive cellular state changes during organ differentiation are largely irreversible. The tight integration of the various forms of memory in biology is far beyond what today s electronic memory hierarchies offer. The design of memory systems is one of the areas where we hope to learn from biology how to avoid memory bottlenecks with suitable parallelism, pipelining, and integrated hierarchies.
Genetic networks have many attributes commonly associated with computing.
Table 1 shows points of similarity between genetic logic and the electronic digital logic in chips in today s desktop computers. The simplest of genetic circuits is a regulatory cascade capable of initiating events in sequence, but cells also use create complex biochemically-based control logic structures. A complex version of this mechanism was proposed in topological quantum computing research. Strictly speaking, electronics uses this principle as well in bus interfaces. In summary, the detailed implementation and the manner of processing of information in cells is radically different from today s digital information processing paradigms in today s computers.