There is a fundamentally new intersection of computer scientists, mathematicians and molecular biologists working in an area loosely known as DNA computation, in which the basic set of questions are in the process of being defined. The field was born in 1994 when Len Adleman (USC) showed how to solve a version of the traveling salesman problem using DNA (Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems. Science, 266, 1021-1024, 1994). Adleman's paper had a catalytic effect on the scientific imagination even though it admittedly solved only a "toy" problem that could easily be solved using pencil and paper, let alone a teraflop supercomputer. By clearly articulating the principles of his computation, the massive parallelism inherent in DNA reactions, the energy efficiency of these reactions, and the enormous storage capacity of DNA, he challenged the community to discover the limitations of this approach. Furthermore, it is widely believed that, if these principles are scalable, the potential of DNA computation would be truly spectacular. Richard Lipton (Princeton) published a paper a few months later in Science (DNA Solution of Hard Computational Problems. Science 268, 542-545, 1995) generalizing Adleman's result to a fundamental problem in the class of problems known as NP complete. The objectives of the Third DIMACS Workshop on DNA Based Computers will be to present new work in the field and to disseminate in printed and electronic form, information in all areas that relate directly to computing with DNA including: algorithms, applications, techniques, architectures, practical obstacles to DNA based computers, proposed solutions to such obstacles, computational processes in vivo, and relevant ideas regarding biological evolution. We will encourage papers reporting experimental results. The Organizing Committee is composed of a diverse group of individuals from around the United States. The Committee has made a commitment to make sure that st udents and investigators with various and diverse backgrounds will attend the meeting. We expect approximately 200 individuals will attend. DNA Computation, is a relatively new field, without an established Journal. The June International Meetings are the focus for the field. The Conference will be held at The University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on June 23-25, 1997. The meeting will be announced in several scientific journals as well on as on a dedicated web site. There will be three days of talks with time for informal sessions and impromptu presentations. The Proceedings of the Conference will be disseminated, as before, by AMS- DIMACS.
