"Chemists like me have been working on trying to turn molecules into machines for about 25 years now," says Leigh, an organic chemist from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. You're building on all those that went before you." In 1936, English mathematician Alan Turing imagined an autonomous machine capable of carrying out any precisely coded algorithm. The hypothetical machine would read a strip of tape dotted with symbols that, when interpreted sequentially, would instruct the machine to act. It might transcribe, translate, or compute--turning code into a message, or a math problem into an answer.

Microsoft is working towards fighting cancer using computer science such as machine learning and algorithms. By treating cancer like an information processing system, Microsoft researchers are able to adapt tools typically used to model computational processes to model biological ones. Ultimately, the company hopes to create molecular computers to program the body to fight cancer cells immediately after detection. "We are trying to change the way research is done on a daily basis in biology," said Jasmin Fisher, a senior researcher who works in the programming principles and tools group in the Microsoft's research lab in Cambridge. This is combined with a data-driven approach; putting machine learning at the core of Microsoft's attempts to try to tackle the disease.