Biological computers

In three senses:

Living things --- or parts thereof --- which in some sense do computations already. Presumably most of this happens in nervous systems. I've just read a very convincing illustration of this,
Bill Baird, "Nonlinear Dynamics of Pattern Formation and Pattern Recognition in the Rabbit Olfactory Bulb," Physica 22D (1986) 150-175
and feel keenly my wasted youth, since Dr. Baird is in the Berkeley Biophysics dept...
Computers could be made from organic materials --- cultured nerve or immune cells, for instance. High Technology ran some articles on this oh, nearly ten years ago, but since then I've heard nothing about it, until Adleman started using DNA on the travelling salesman problem.
Computers could have designs inspired by biology, like neural networks or evolution. (Recommended: Sejnowski and Churchland, "Computation in the Era of Neuroscience," in Metropolis and Rota (eds.), A New Era in Computation (MIT, 1992).)

Martyn Amos, DNA Computation [Ph.D. Thesis, University of Warwick, 1997]
Yaakov Benenson, Binyamin Gil, Uri Ben-Dor, Rivka Adar and Ehud Shapiro, "An autonomous molecular computer for logical control of gene expression", Nature 429 , (2004)
Dennis Bray, Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell [blurb]
Michael Conrad, "Molecular Computing," Advances in Computers 31 (1990): 235--324
Tsugucjika Kaminuma and Gen Matsumoto, eds., Biocomputers: the Next Generation from Japan (trans. Norman Cook)
Richard Lipton and Eric Baum (eds.), DNA Based Computers
Michael S. Livstone, Danny van Noort and Laura F. Landweber, "Molecular computing revisited: a Moore's Law?" Trends in Biotechnology 21 (2003): 98--101
Gasper Tkacik, Curtis G. Callan Jr. and William Bialek, "Information capacity of genetic regulatory elements", arxiv:0709.4209

Notebooks