Molpigs Podcast

The Molpigs Podcast (styled molpigs, and listed as The molpigs Podcast) is the podcast of the Molecular Programming Interest Group, a community of researchers and students in molecular programming, the field that designs DNA and other molecules to compute and to assemble themselves into structures.^[1] Its index lists 31 episodes, from November 12, 2020 to January 18, 2026.^[2] The tenth, counting from the first, is dated May 16, 2021 and has Kent Kemmish as its guest.^[3]

The group describes itself as "a group of over 200 people interested in molecular programming from within and without the field". It runs a newsletter, a Slack workspace, reading groups and the podcast. One reading group, "Revisiting the Classics", read seven papers by Ned Seeman over seven weeks. A page on isnsce.org dates the group's introductory post to November 7, 2023.^[1]

The field traces its start to a paper of 1994 in which a small route problem, a path that visits each of seven points once, was solved with DNA in a test tube.^[4]

Most episodes are interviews with researchers in the field, and each has a line of topic tags on the index page. Several are titled "Meet the Molecular Programmer". Others take up a subject: a tutorial on "Storage and Computing with Small Molecules", the first episode, from November 2020, or "Molecular Programming and the Physics of Computation", dated January 9, 2021.^[2] The physics of computation is where Landauer's principle sits, the cost of erasing a bit of memory, on which the usual resolution of the paradox of Maxwell's demon rests. Kemmish's company was first named after the demon.

The index tags the episode "Demonpore 64", "Molecular Gaming", "Molecular Mind" and "Player Science". The episodes on either side of it are tagged "DNA Robots", "Maze Solving", "Art of Molecular Programming" and "Grad School" for March 27, 2021, and "Data Storage" and "Security & Privacy" for May 27.^[2]

The show notes introduce Kemmish as "the founder and chief exorcist ... officer of Molecular Reality" and the creator of the "world's first 'molecular' games console", the demonpore 64. They add: "This is our first podcast with a member of the molecular programming community who works in industry, and in the startup sector."^[3] Kemmish's CV repeats the sentence with its commas removed.^[5]

The notes describe the console as a device that uses solid-state nanopores to sense its surroundings at the molecular level, made cheap enough that players could take part in data collection and so make possible experiments "which would otherwise be impossible". They list four games planned for it: Poop of the Gods, 2021: A SARS Odyssey, Genomic Ranger and Molecules of Mars, which they pair with poop, viral detection, chromosome structure and martian soil.^[3] All four are among the eight titles of a company memo of about 2022, and none of the eight had been released by October 2026.^[6][7]

The second half of the episode covers Kemmish's own path "from student, to academic, to entrepreneur": his early work on fruit-fly genetics, and his years at Halcyon Molecular, the DNA sequencing company built on electron microscopy. The notes say that these experiences shaped his view that more impact comes from working on scientific tools than from the science itself. The guest biography adds that as a child he spent his time programming video games for the Commodore 64.^[3]

• Citizen science
• Experigaming
• List of works that inspired Molecular Reality Corporation
• Player Scientist