Make no mistake, this book falls into the popular science category: It is accessible to the general reader without a scientific background, but it also makes a scientifically interesting argument. At one level, Wetware by Dennis Bray is an easy introduction to systems biology—the relatively new science born from the union of molecular biology with information science. At another, it proposes a model of the cell as a computer, not of the von Neumann kind, but a rather elaborate neural network type of computation system. This idea is expanded to include a few aspects of multicellular information processing, especially with living neurons, but perhaps these are just to support the main argument, as they receive scant attention. The main focus for Bray is the molecular signaling network, especially illustrated by the generation and control of directed movement in bacterial cells.
Using no more than first-year university-level science, we are introduced...