The Indispensible Missing Link: Molecular Wiring

Brenda Rubenstein, Professor at Brown University, works with small molecules to store information as mixtures rather than polymers. Bits are encoded in the presence or absence of a solution, then interpreted by machine learning algorithm. Brenda is able to store data in molecules, but also wants to compute data using this system as well. In order to do computation, a type of molecular ‘wire’ must be developed. Not an actual physical wire but rather a wire in an abstract sense – the ability to direct information between specific molecules at a distance. Creating molecular wiring in this context would open up the field of chemical computation and possibly enable a much more dense form of computation than is currently possible.