Will biologists become computer scientists? A truly interdisciplinary effort by computer scientists and biologists to understand how cells process information may yield new insights for both fields.

Abstract

EMBO Reports (2018) e46628 The idea that living systems could be understood and described as information‐processing systems has been around even before the first computers were built. From Alan Turing's considerable paper in 1936 to Erwin Schrodinger's work in 1944 and John von Neumann's work in 1948 [1], many scientists pondered about information storage and the possible existence of a logical processor within living cells. The discovery of the double‐helical structure of DNA in 1953 provided the material basis for these intuitions as it finally revealed how cells store inheritable information in a “digital” format. The recent success of genome transplantation experiments into recipient host cells [2]—akin to transferring software to another computer—further strengthened the hypothesis that living cells can be regarded as Turing Machines, as was suggested by Sydney Brenner [3] (see Sidebar 1 for a glossary and Sidebar 2 for further readings). > … many scientists pondered about information storage and the possible existence of a logical processor within living cells. > Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod were among the first biologists to understand gene expression as an algorithm . In light of these and other experimental results that would support the hypothesis that some parts of living systems could be understood as information‐processing machines, the Fourmentin‐Guilbert Scientific Foundation invited international scholars from the life sciences, computer sciences and physical sciences (see Sidebar 3) to the I2CELL (from Information to Cells) seminar in February 2018 near Oxford, UK, to discuss and identify new research areas. Over 3 days, they debated on a broad range of subjects from computation, information handling, algorithms, robotics and viruses (of the digital and biological varieties) to explore analogies between cells and computers that could inspire new research, while keeping a critical approach to the benefits of similarities. This article …