The European Commission has supported the Integrated Project PACE in its Future Emerging Technologies program from 2004-2008. This is the final public report of results and experience in PACE.
PACE has created the foundation for a new generation of embedded IT using programmable chemical systems that approach artificial cells in their properties of self-repair, self-assembly, self-reproduction and evolvability.
Future projects will build on the technology and experience developed in PACE to build the first artificial chemical cells and apply them to revolutionize complex construction in and outside IT. PACE has established a new hybrid IT technology for programming complex chemical systems. PACE has explored the IT potential of future synthetic chemical cells: addressing both the novel embedded IT required to produce and program them and their technical opportunities, both within IT and to other fields. In contrast with biological approaches to minimize existing cells, applications of these artificial chemical cells will exploit their chemical distinctiveness from biological cells, in particular their ability to function without proteins and below the complexity barrier posed by biological translation machinery.
A consortium of some 13 partners and 2 cooperating groups from 8 European countries, including Switzerland and Lithuania, and several leading USA organizations are pioneering this new approach under the IST-FET section of the EU 6th Framework Program (FP6).
The coordinator is John McCaskill at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. Managers of the PACE Consortium are Norman Packard and John McCaskill. The project liased closely with the Los Alamos PA Project led by Steen Rasmussen. The PACE project initiated and founded a new European Centre for Living Techology in Venice that has now achieved independent funding.