Engineers like to make things that work. And if one wants to
make something work using nanoscale components—the size of proteins,
antibodies, and viruses—mimicking the behavior of cells is a good place to
start since cells carry an enormous amount of information in a very tiny
packet. As Erik Winfree, professor of computer science, computation and neutral
systems, and bioengineering, explains, "I tend to think of cells as really
small robots. Biology has programmed natural cells, but now engineers are
starting to think about how we can program artificial cells. We want to program
something about a micron in size, finer than the dimension of a human hair,
that can interact with its chemical environment and carry out the spectrum of
tasks that biological things do, but according to our instructions."