From a certain point of view, it was inevitable. After conquering pregnancy tests, Lego bricks, Notepad, teletext systems, landline phones, and ultrasound equipment, the only thing Doom lacked was escaping the traditional technological realm to make the leap into biotechnology. A biological engineering student at MIT named Lauren Ramlan created a simulation of a screen based on Escherichia coli cells, and managed to reproduce a frame of Doom... every eight hours.
The first Doom movie (yes, there is a second one) set aside the concept of interdimensional demon invasion to focus on genetic experiments with an extraterrestrial artificial chromosome. The idea of "good and evil as genetic conditions" remains interesting for a science fiction project... but in the end, fans wanted something else.
Today, Doom once again exchanges fire with genetics, though in a completely different context. First, you have to travel to MIT, where a biological engineering student named Lauren Ramlan created a screen based on Escherichia coli cells to play Doom. And second... we must be patient, because its framerate is far from optimal.
Doom + E. coli = ?
Ramlan's experiment is based on a previous project, "Programming Escherichia coli to function as a digital display" from 2020. The screen she proposes is actually a configuration of 1,536 E. coli cells with a 32 x 48 "pixel" format. Using very relaxed terms, this 1-bit screen uses "repressor-operator pairs" to control the fluorescence of the cells, thus generating the necessary zeros and ones. After capturing the first frames of Doom, she used a thresholding technique (usually translated as the "Threshold value method") to determine which pixels should be on and off.
The rest is a matter of simulating the cells (and by extension, the screen) and processing the frame. Her results within the simulation confirm that the screen needs 70 minutes to reach its maximum illumination, and a total of 8.3 hours to return to its "off" state and begin loading the next frame. Ramlan even took the trouble to calculate the time it would take to play an entire game of Doom under these conditions (using as reference the original 35 FPS cap and an average duration of five hours), and the final number is 599 years. Rip and tear, very slowly.
Access the study: Click here
Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun
