DNA

One area biochemists and genetists have not understood is how the same DNA sequence can produce so many different types of cells in our bodies. They know there are inhibitors that stops some genes in certain cells. By removing the inhibitors, the hope is that one can grow any other types of cells from any one cell in the body. The only way do that today is the embryonic cells or other cells get returned to the embryonic state. But how did the inhibitors get created in the first place? Especially think about the inhibitors has to be enabled in such an orderly fashion, that all fertilized eggs grows arms and legs in the exact same places.

So I think the DNA is actually a much complicated program, much harder to understand. It is great that we can decode all the DNAs in a human, but a single gene does not necessarily mean the same thing in different cells. At least the way I viewed about the genes is that they are like blue prints, that once a cell use a gene to create a protien, it always creates the same protiens. That may be true for a lot of genes, but the real key part of the genetic information is actually in the genes that can mean different things. Rather than viewing DNA as a blue print of an organism, I would view DNA as a program. Much like the separation between instructions and data in an computer architecture, DNAs are instructions. The cell is the machine, food and external inputs to the cell are data. What the organism behaves is the output. The key difference here is that computer does not grow. Maybe if we can understand more about how DNA works with raw material to grow an organism, we will also be
able to aplly it to a self constructing machine or computer.

What is missing is an environment that a computer can grow in. Maybe the environment has to start with a factory.