In 1994, his paper Molecular Computation of Solutions To Combinatorial Problems described the experimental use of DNA as a computational system. In it, he solved a seven-node instance of the Hamiltonian Graph problem, an NP-Complete problem similar to the traveling salesman problem. While the solution to a seven-node instance is trivial, this paper is the first known instance of the successful use of DNA to compute an algorithm. DNA computing has been shown to have potential as a means to solve several other large-scale combinatorial search problems.
For his contribution to the invention of the RSA cryptosystem, Adleman was a recipient along with Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir of the 2002 ACM Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of Computer Science.
Fred Cohen, in his 1984 paper, Experiments with Computer Viruses has credited Adleman with coining the term "virus".
Adleman was the mathematical consultant on the movie Sneakers.
Adleman tackled a version of the "traveling salesman" problem, in which a person is presented with a map of a certain number of cities, a number of specified roads connecting the various cities, and a starting and an ending point.
Adleman mixed in a test tube some 100 trillion DNA molecules containing all 7 cities and 14 roads, and let them join up as they saw fit.
But because Adleman used so many copies of each DNA city and street, at least one of the combinations that formed was bound to link the cities correctly.
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