Thank you for this link, @DMath. The final quote from the news article is instructive as to the extent of the analogy to human technology, and not least where it breaks down:
Professor Mark Evans, of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences, said: "We found that cell function is coordinated by a network of nanotubes, similar to the carbon nanotubes you find in a computer microprocessor.
“The most striking thing is that this circuit is highly flexible, as this cell-wide web can rapidly reconfigure to deliver different outputs in a manner determined by the information received by and relayed from the nucleus. This is something no man-made microprocessors or circuit boards are yet capable of achieving.”
Scientific progress hasn’t been kind to David Hume’s criticism of the analogy argument for design. At the anatomical level, which Hume observed, any analogy to technology can be hard to discern. But at the level of cells, the analogy returns with a vengeance. Where would our modern understanding of cell biology be without concepts like regulation, control, signals, receptors, messengers, codes, transcription, translation, editing, proofreading, etc.?
You might even say that science has been well-served by a healthy dose of methodological designism. 