The discovery of DNA as a new information level was not instantaeous, rather it happened through steps, from Swiss chemist Friedrich Miescher identifying the chemical signature of nucleotides in the 1860s, and in the decades following Miescher's discovery, other scientists--notably, Phoebus Levene and Erwin Chargaff--carried out a series of research efforts that revealed additional details about the DNA molecule, including its primary chemical components and the ways in which they joined with one another. Watson and Crick's groundbreaking conclusion in 1953, that the DNA molecule exists in the form of a three-dimensional double helix, built on a century of work at the molecular scale, and before that Darwin, Lamarck, and others whose work predicted that there must be an information medium for their theory of evolution.

The past three decades has seen an increase in work around yet another information level in the cell^{[1, 2]}, which may very well be the biggest discovery since DNA, the idea that microtubules, initially understood as the "cytoskeleton", are computers, and provide cognition to the cell.

New ideas need new symbols, from the cytoskeleton to the spiraeum

The idea that microtubules are a cytoskeleton is a static, older idea from the last century, and like Christopher McCandles said, call things by their right name. The word spiraeum, from Greek for breath (inspire, respiration) and cerebrum, models microtubule networks as a single integrated system, an organelle that provides cognition to the cell, and a potential seat of the soul as well as an information level for god and George Lucas "the force".

The "spiraeum" as the technological singularity of the cell

"where are you going?" "everywhere"

The "spiraeum" as a single integrated system, made up of tubulin networks, can touch every corner of the cell, manipulate it, like human hands can manipulate the environment, a form of "singularity of the cell", that evolved from 5 tubulin filaments in bacteria^[3] to 13 in eukaryotes, and that like Will in Transcendence could be everywhere at once, and co-ordinate and regulate cell function. The discovery that microtubules are computers points to that our own computers are more primitive than often believed, and that the brain is much more complex than just the connectome.

CAMKII writes to microtubule lattices, storing memory

In 2012, Stuart Hameroff et al published Cytoskeletal Signaling: Is Memory Encoded in Microtubule Lattices by CaMKII Phosphorylation?, on the idea that CAMKII, activated via Ca2+ influx through NMDA receptors, writes to microtubules, similar to how a read-write head adds data to a hard drive, a needle writes to an LP record, or a Homo habilis etches symbols into a rock.

"Using molecular mechanics modeling and electrostatic profiling, we find that spatial dimensions and geometry of the extended CaMKII kinase domains precisely match those of MT hexagonal lattices. This suggests sets of six CaMKII kinase domains phosphorylate hexagonal MT lattice neighborhoods collectively, e.g. conveying synaptic information as ordered arrays of six “bits”, and thus “bytes”, with 64 to 5,281 possible bit states per CaMKII-MT byte. Signaling and encoding in MTs and other cytoskeletal structures offer rapid, robust solid-state information processing which may reflect a general code for MT-based memory and information processing within neurons and other eukaryotic cells. "

References

1. Microtubules: Possible Application to Computer Technologies (1989)

2. Cytoskeletal Signaling: Is Memory Encoded in Microtubule Lattices by CaMKII Phosphorylation? (2012)

3. Microtubules in Bacteria: Ancient Tubulins Build a Five-Protofilament Homolog of the Eukaryotic Cytoskeleton (2011)

4. A Mechanism for Memory Storage Insensitive to Molecular Turnover: A Bistable Autophosphorylating Kinase (1985)

5. Regulation of Brain Type II Ca2+/CalmodulinDependent Protein Kinase by Autophosphorylation: A Ca2+-Triggered Molecular Switch (1986)

6. The molecular basis of CaMKII function in synaptic and behavioural memory (2002)

7. A role for CaMKII in T cell memory (2000)