Or imagine programmable immunity, designing and harnessing molecular devices that guide your immune system to detect, eradicate or even prevent disease.
He needed programmable computers to calculate the size and force of shock waves from explosions, and game theory to address the thorny question of nuclear deterrence.
Base editors use the programmable searching mechanism of CRISPR scissors, but instead of cutting the DNA, they directly convert one base to another base without disrupting the rest of the gene.
The thing that makes a CPU powerful is the fact that it is programmable – if you write a different sequence of instructions, then the CPU will perform a different task.
The first commercial deployment was a programmable industrial robot called the Unimate, sold to General Motors in 1960 to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them.
And doing so will enable us to harness the properties of biology to generate new kinds of therapies, to repair damaged tissue, to reprogram faulty cells or even build programmable operating systems out of biochemistry.
You could use this super cheap programmable computer and maybe you put a sensor in it, and maybe you make you know another actuator, and then you make something happen in the real world.