I have this idea of a wonderful machine.

Stuck in my head like a fork.

As input the machine takes an organism. It analyses DNA and epigenomics and makes a map of protein pathways. It figures out exactly how the organism works, then stores the data.

I can query the data. Ask questions like; What does this organism look like? What does it need to sustain itself?

I can scan another organism with the same machine and ask: If this organism interacts with the first, what happens?

The second organism could be food. It could be a virus.

It doesn't sound like an impossible machine.

Weird.

-Splicer

A bit beyond our current capabilities, though, if we want a map of ALL the protein pathways. Still, it would be awesome. I can just see the looks on my friends' faces as, after 5 years of analysing what a particular pathway does in a particular bacterium, they see a machine do the same thing in a few minutes.

Poetry in here?
Amazing the Internet!
Written as haiku...

petaflop computers are already around, in five years i think well have the power to map organisms, in ten we will probably be doing it and working out the kinks.

Ive been thinking of a catalog of things like that that would be used as input to evolutionary algorithms that look for certain characteristics of a novel organism designed in a computer. Then after simulation after simulation you would have a creature with desireable traits.

This would be comparing genes and their functions in one organism opposed to multiple organism interaction.

For now you are that machine. Maybe some day there will be an artificial machine like that, but probably very far away in the future.