Hi Guys

I flicked through "Transcendent" to get an idea of the story. The built-in teleport ability the girl has is interesting.

Problem with DNA encoding any of those things is that it is rather labile to mutation/replication errors and the current coding system is rather imprecise. I would think that technological adaptations would take more precise specification than normal morphogenesis uses. A lot of cellular material ends up being apoptosised and reabsorbed, with which cell getting the axe depending on some fuzzy specifications - thus multitude of minor anatomical variations in the normal population and the dizzying array of terata that can happen when morphogenesis is interferred with in minor ways. Of all our 3 gigabase genome only about 1.5% is used for genes, and a similar amount for the 'construction program' - that's not a lot of information specifying a multi-trillion cell somatic architecture.

A similar objection applies to most proposed cell-scale nano-memory systems - they'll be either too labile or too brittle to perturbation. I think the current DNA-RNA is as good as it gets for cell-scale memory for nanomachines.

However I maybe wrong. Durable molecular memories may allow precision morphogenesis, perhaps as a parallel genetic system that guides normal ontogeny into the desired forms. In which case my answer is two-fold: No, DNA-RNA genetics can't do what Baxter describes, but a technologically created genetic system might.

Adam