Are organisms Turing Machines? Similarities and differences between genetic and computer code.

The idea of DNA as a computer program was invented by Jacob and Monod in the 1960s when valve computers were fed by code on paper tape. Applied to living organisms, the paper tape became DNA, the machine obeying the instructions became the rest of the organism. The idea was that a 'genetic program' was to be found on the DNA 'tape'. An organism could therefore be regarded as a Turing machine. Our knowledge today of the complexity of molecular genetic mechanisms, and of the extensive control that the organism and environment exert via epigenetic and other processes, leads to a very different analogy. Organisms are 'interaction machines' not 'Turing machines'. This opens the way to a radical re-assessment of the central dogmas of biology (Noble, 2006, 2008).

Noble, D (2006) The Music of Life, OUP.
Noble, D (2008) Genes and Causation. Phil Trans Roy Soc A, 366, 3001-3015.

Professor Denis Noble from the Dept of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at the University of Oxford published the first computer modelling of the heart (/Nature/, 1960). From 1984-2004, he was Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford, and is now co-Director of Computational Physiology. He is author of The Music of Life, the first popular book on systems and computational biology. As Secretary-General of the International Union of Physiological Sciences, he helped launch the Physiome Project, an international project to use computer simulations to create the quantitative physiological models necessary to interpret the genome – which has now been joined by the Virtual Physiological Human Network of Excellence. Professor Noble also leads preDiCT, an EC FP7-funded project to model and predict the effect of pharmaceutical compounds on the heart.

For further information, please see
http://www.dpag.ox.ac.uk/research/cardiac_science/denis_noble/noble_research