The ‘Computer in a Bottle’ Experiment

Leonard Adleman and the birth of DNA computing

Diagram of Leonard Adleman’s ‘Computer in a Bottle’ experiment, showing how DNA molecules explore all possible paths at once to solve a mathematical puzzle. Generated by ChatGPT and released under public domain

In November 1994, computer scientist Leonard Adleman caused a sensation by publishing an article in Science titled Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems. Adleman showed for the first time how DNA molecules could be used to solve computational problems. Using DNA strands, enzymes, and chemical reactions, he solved a classic mathematical puzzle called the Hamiltonian Path Problem: given a set of cities and one-way roads, is there a route that visits each city only once?

Leonard Adleman was born in 1945 in California to Jewish parents and grew up in San Francisco. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from UC Berkeley in 1968 and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences in 1976. From 1976 to 1980, he taught mathematics at MIT, and from 1980 on, he taught computer science at the University of Southern California.

Although Adleman focused on mathematics and computer science, he was always interested in biology and treated it like a foreign language he needed to learn. To bridge the gap between computation and life sciences, he decided in the early 1990s to study biology, working in a molecular biology laboratory and learning experimental techniques from biologists at the University of Southern California. In an…