The Mad Cow Mind

This thought was prompted by a thread on DiYBio and it seems to me that a prion has all the characteristics of a transistor system as it has memory and amplification of effect. By exposure to a conforming model the secondary model is transformed and remembers its shape at some level of kinetic noise . Exposure causes memory, secondary exposure leads to detection and it is self amplifying in the presence of its counterpart. If the signal is PrionA, the amplified product is PrionA when exposed to PrionB. I am not suggesting building computers from mad cow prions, but there are many different meta-stable configurations which are long term stable at various levels of E_k or °K is you wish. It would be a system that required less energy per computation and would be a good match for low temperature computation and information storage in space that is not exposed to radiation sources.

ADDED: Just to make it absolutely obvious. Chiral molecules have a different optical rotation and they can be identified in solution and thus provide an optical to electronic interface. In this way the system which could be operated at varying levels of temperature to absolute zero and would store about 10²⁶ of data per 100 kg. or about the weight of one actual moteyalpha. To translate, that is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of information in the space that would be occupied by a person. One would have to create a new general term for that and I am suggesting 10mI, which would be ten million times all the data stored on the whole Internet ( 5x10¹⁸ est.) at the present time. I think Alice Infinity and the moties would love that as a plaything.

ADDED MORE: So if 1 Gig of memory is $10 then this is about 10¹⁶Gig, $10¹⁷. That would be 10 billion billion dollars. I guess I have to make a new unit there and call it a GF or Gates Fortune. Thus this is about 160 megaGFs :)