Sunday, October 03, 2004

Biotechnology and Information Technology

It is interesting to note that, on Friday, 1 October 2004, Bill Gates prophesised that biology and information technology would slowly coalesce into one: "If I were a student I would highlight those two areas as the most interesting". You can read more about the story at
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/9818224.htm
The reason, by the way, that this is the case is that the essence of study of life, namely biology, is built on a key primitive, the DNA. It is really amazing that the analog world is so beautifully built by a digital primitive, a sequence, several billions long, of nucleotides drawn from a set of four chemical compounds, Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine, commonly abbreviated by the initial letters A, C, G and T.