news.vanderbilt.edu/2011/10/robot-biologist/

The paragraph on 'why biology needs automation' is most fascinating to me. A single cell needs 10-15,000 protein molecule equations.

http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2011/10/robot-biologist/

Matt (xeno) has drawn our attention to

http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2011/10/robot-biologist/

The robot biologist certainly raises some interesting questions, not the least of which is its relevance to life and the human brain:

According to Wikswo, the crowning source of complication is that processes at all these different levels interact with one another. “These multi-scale interactions produce emergent phenomena, including life and consciousness.”

Would it be a stupid question to ask whether all these biological processes are able to interact with one another BEFORE there is life? Perhaps we need a definition of life first.

Similarly, in relation to the problem of consciousness, I seem to remember Tony (balance_maintained) asking a question along the lines of: if the brain is a computer, who or what switches it on? Romansh put it differently: “Which came first the thought or the brain chemistry?”

My favourite passage here, though, is the quote from Emerson Pugh: “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”