Molecular Programming Society

We are the Molecular Programming Society, an international grassroots team of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, who are programming the behavior of physical matter. We build liquid computers that run on chemistry, instead of electricity. Using these chemical computers, we program non-biological matter to grow, heal, adapt, communicate with the surrounding environment, replicate, and disassemble. Broad libraries of interfaces exist that allow chemical computers to control the growth and reconfiguration of nanostructures, actuate soft robotics up to the centimeter scale, regulate drug release, grow metal wires, and direct tissue growth. Similar interfaces allow chemical computers to sense environmental stimuli as inputs, including chemical concentrations, pressure, light, heat, and electrical signals. In the near future, chemical computers will enable humans to control matter through programming languages, instead of top-down brute force. Intelligent medicines will monitor the human body for disease markers and deliver custom therapeutics on demand. DNA-based computers will archive the internet for ultra-long term storage. In the more distant future, we can imagine programming airplane wings to detect and heal damage, cellphones to rearrange and update their hardware at the push of a button, and skyscrapers that grow up from seeds planted in the earth. Currently our society is drafting a textbook called The Art of Molecular Programming, which will elucidate the principles of molecular programming and hopefully inspire more people to help us spark this second computer revolution. Our grassroots team includes members who work at institutions across the globe, including Brown, Cambridge, Caltech, Columbia, Harvard, Nanovery, NIST, National Taiwan University, TUM, UCLA, University of Vienna, and many others. Collectively, our society members have published over 900 peer-reviewed papers on topics related to molecular programming.