The objective is a biological design process that enables point-of-use, on-demand, mass-customization biological manufacturing.

FORBES: DARPA Builds First Bio-Engineering Factory

Key to success will be the democratization of the biological design and manufacturing process, breaking open the field to those outside the biological sciences.

FORBES: DARPA Builds First Bio-Engineering Factory

Transforming biology into an engineering practice, decoupling design from fabrication and speeding the biological design, build, test cycle is how DARPA proposes to tackle this problem.

FORBES: DARPA Builds First Bio-Engineering Factory

Merck is taking a different approach, betting that an especially deep understanding of a biological pathway will allow it to design better clinical trials.

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Such thinking permits the design of drug molecules to treat complex human diseases or to modify other difficult biological disorders.

ECONOMIST: Cut out the middle men

This uses a process of randomisation and trial-and-error (akin to mutation and selection in biological evolution) to search the vast number of possible microstructures to find the most suitable design for each subsection.

ECONOMIST: MONITOR

In fact, there are those that argue artificial intelligence is simply unattainable except through the biological pathways of the human brain and the restrictions of the human brain are a byproduct of the design of intelligence itself.

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