A Protein Printer - by Niko McCarty and Julian Englert

How to make a machine that turns bits into molecules.

I. Dreams This essay is a thought experiment about a protein printer, a new technology to convert digital bits into physical molecules. It is speculative writing, because this printer doesn’t yet exist. But there are no physical reasons that it couldn’t, and we think it could change biology as much as printers changed the news. We are living through an inflection point in biology’s history, in which a simple laptop can design proteins with wondrous new functions. Scientists at the Institute for Protein Design have crafted proteins that self-assemble into nanomaterials or that can be used…

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