Hashim Al-Hashimi, professor of biochemistry and molecular physics at Columbia University, talks about his March 2023 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) entitled, “Turing, von Neumann, and the computational architecture of biological machines,” in which he writes about an opportunity for better understanding biological problems: seeing biological molecules as computing machines.
In Part 1 of our conversation, we discuss:
*Hashim’s background as a scientist [1:05];
*Prelude to the problem: the late Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner’s idea that we are drowning in data [3:55];
*How Hashim got involved in this research [5:25];
*John von Neumann reveals his ideas at the Hixon Symposium at Caltech in 1948 [7:30];
*Von Neumann’s question: how can you build a machine that can build a machine more complex than itself, similar to how living organisms evolve into more complex organisms? [9:20];
*Von Neumann’s solution [10:50]; with copying error providing the basis for the evolution of complexity [12:20];
*Five years before the discovery that DNA had the double helix structure, von Neumann used principles of math, theorizing and thinking, to work out how complexity can and must evolve [15:00];
*All living organisms carry a copy of the instructions to build the organism [17:00];
*Turing and the general purpose programmable computer [18:00];
*The idea of states as fundamental components of computation in Turing’s machine [20:30];
*What it means that there is no solution to the decision problem [25:50];
*Hashim’s quest to understand Turing’s 1936 paper and the connection to biomolecules [27:30]
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