In the Star Trek universe, organic and artificial systems often overlap — often intimately. In the case of the android Data, an attempt was made to create a being that can emulate the performance of a human. In this case, it was not the structure of a living system that was replicated, but rather its programming — its "wetware" if you will. While Data is a marvel, the emulation was not complete. Nonetheless, Data was capable enough to seek a way to modify his own programming, including the integration of human emotions, along the way.

With the exception of brief experiments by the Borg with implants of living tissue, Data is wholly mechanical. In the case of the Borg, the fusion of the organic and mechanical is more intimate — albeit much more violent.

More subtle fusions of the mechanical and the biological include the bio-neural gel packs that are a feature of the U.S.S. Voyager's command and control systems. On first appearance, they look like bags of bluish gel. However, when integrated into the ship, these partially living gel packs allow the ship to behave in a much more efficient manner than mechanical systems alone would allow.

There are pitfalls, of course, to using partially living components. In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Learning Curve," one of the ship's gel packs becomes infected — and the Doctor needs to cure it. The cause of the infection? Neelix's cooking.

Biological systems on Earth have some amazing properties. Through the use of nucleic acids (DNA), which contain the data that code an organism's development and operations, lifeforms can repair themselves, react to the environment, and reproduce. Through flexibility in the way that species adapt to changing environmental condition over time, adaptation (evolution) occurs whereby a species can acquire (and discard) capabilities. At the heart of this flexibility is a biocomputation system.

The capabilities of biocomputation systems are already being applied to purposes other than keeping an organism alive. In recently announced results from NASA-sponsored research, a strand of DNA was used to represent a math or logic problem. The DNA was then used to generate trillions of other DNA strands. Each strand was unique, each representing one possible solution to the original problem.

DNA contains an inherent way of coding information in the way it is structured, and how it binds to itself. The coding is not unlike the letters that form words, the words that form sentences, and the sentences that go on to form stories. By exploiting the way DNA strands bind to each other, a computer can weed out invalid solutions in a sequential fashion until it is left with only the DNA strand that solves the problem exactly. (To get an idea how such a DNA-based computer works, see the related articles listed below.)

Being clever in the way that they can be used to reach solutions is only one interesting feature of such biocomputation systems. Biological systems are capable of performing many, many such computations simultaneously. Such systems are called "massively parallel." Original mechanical computers were blindingly fast, but they had to solve problems one at a time. New advances in computers use parallel architectures so as to achieve some of the speed that living systems, even the simplest, can perform. When you recognize someone's face or listen to speech, you accomplish a pattern recognition process that computers can only crudely match — no matter how fast they are.

One of the applications NASA envisions for new biologically inspired software is the ability for spacecraft to diagnose and repair themselves. Other applications include vehicles that fly through the air by reflexively changing the shape of their wings — just the way birds and insects do.

The next time you watch a fly buzz around your head, and wonder how it always seems to avoid being swatted, just remember that this organism has flight software (wetware) more sophisticated than any humans have yet to create. Moreover, it can reproduce itself perfectly with no outside assistance. Even Data, with his "fully functional" capabilities, has yet to reproduce (his short-lived daughter "Lal" notwithstanding).

What might DNA computers be capable of? Make your conjectures at the Science & Technology message board!