Last century was the century of Physics, we have done everything using laws of physics. Last century saw the birth of steam locomotive, it gave way to diesel trains which gave way to electric trains. All of these have been possible due to the fact that mankind has thoroughly understood the laws of physics.

This century, not being content with what we know about the atom, we are smashing it in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to probe deep into it. I feel in this very century, we will find ourself that its a century of nanotechnology and biology. Humans have already scraped the surface of nanotech, there is plenty of room at the bottom waiting for us to explore. As we understand nano world we are starting to understand life. We now know better than any time how our cells work. We are beginning to understand that our cell is like a computer and DNA is its code that tells it what to do. Scientists around this planet are sequencing DNA and are finding out how it works. We are already starting to mix and modify DNA to come up with new species and plant varieties.

I think its time to mix old computer technology with biology. DNA is a assembly language which many humans will fail to understand. Many programmers do not know what happens beneath the hood of computer, yet this hasn’t made them to refrain from programming. In the future I think we will be having a human friendly language to program a cell. All a human needs to do is to write a program on his computer, the compiler compiles it into DNA sequence which can be used by a nanotech machine to synthesize DNA. This DNA can be injected into a empty cell and when jolted with electric charge  it will start to grow.

I don’t know weather DNA compilers exist in some secret biotech or pharmacy lab where scientist write code in high level language which gets compiled to DNA, if it does not exist we must hurry up to build one. Programming a cell in a high level language will revolutionize life and could enable humans to achieve far greater results in biology. Like Information Technology, biotech could be greatly revolutionize if some one or some group builds a DNA compiler.