Tiny robots already exist - they're called proteins (of which Cas9 is one). We're just now starting to be able to program these proteins de novo. Reading DNA

Tiny robots already exist - they're called proteins (of which Cas9 is one). We're just now starting to be able to program these proteins de novo. Reading DNA - well, DNA is inside a nucleus inside a cell. That's tricky to get that information out. But if you're just trying to trigger a signal iff a case exists (i.e. viral infection), well, that too already exists - it's you're immune system. Problem with wireless beaming is power. The amount of power required to transmit a (radio) signal through centimeters of human tissue is just not a biologically reasonable amount. If you want to use light, well, that's getting interesting - there are a lot of ways that biology can create and read light (see bioluminescence and plants, respectively). There is currently a lot of research and a number of companies that are building biological sensors that you can 'wear' that can peer into your bloodstream that get access to some information. But the bandwidth is not such that you could transmit much more than a single gradient of signal, much less a few gigabytes of genetic information. But the research presented here is how to do high-throughput analysis in an academic manner very much outside of a live organism, and in a consumable laboratory setting. This is a useful technique using relatively accessible materials to analytically check that a study's gene therapies are not too far off their targets.