Huge financial and intellectual investments over a half-century have made electronic computers the marvels
of our age. Much of our scientific, technological, military and economic future depends on the availability of an ever-increasing supply of computational power. But the incessant demand for computational power has pushed electronic technology to the limit of physical feasibility and has raised the concern that this technology may not be able to sustain our growth in this new millennium. For this reason, it becomes important to consider the future of computation and alternative means of achieving computational power. In this regard, two technologies have surfaced: quantum computation and molecular computation. The Laboratory for Molecular Science explores the latter.

The field of molecular computation began in earnest with the 1994 publication of the paper `Molecular computation of solutions to combinatorial problems' by the labs leader Leonard Adleman(Science, 266:1021-1024 (Nov. 11)- see papers section). It immediately became clear that molecular computers had many attractive properties, including: extremely dense information storage, enormous parallelism and extraordinary energy efficiency. We wish to determine if this potential can be put to practical use and whether a large scale molecular computer can be built.