“Scientists have stored audio and text on fragments of DNA and then retrieved them with near-perfect fidelity — a technique that eventually may provide a way to handle the overwhelming data of the digital age,” Gautam Naik reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“The scientists encoded in DNA—the recipe of life—an audio clip of Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, a photograph, a copy of Francis Crick and James Watson’s famous ‘double helix’ scientific paper on DNA from 1953 and Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets,” Naik reports. “They later were able to retrieve them with 99.99% accuracy.”
“The experiment was reported Wednesday in the journal Nature,” Naik reports. “‘All we’re doing is adapting what nature has hit upon—a very good way of storing information,’ said Nick Goldman, a computational biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England, and lead author of the Nature paper… DNA — the molecule that contains the genetic instructions for all living things — is stable, durable and dense. Because DNA isn’t alive, it could sit passively in a storage device for thousands of years… DNA could hold vastly more information than the same surface volume of a disk drive—a cup of DNA theoretically could store about 100 million hours of high-definition video.”
Naik reports, “Plenty of challenges remain before DNA storage could become a cheap and reliable commercial process. ‘In 10 years, it’s probably going to be about 100 times cheaper,’ said Dr. Goldman. ‘At that time, it probably becomes economically viable.'”
Read more in the full article here.
Support me on Kickstarter where I’m going to start producing little, itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny, reel to reel DNA players.
Talk about storage potential. But really, DNA? This kind of technology could also be used for the bad. But hey, there is good and bad in all tech. Only time will tell.
It’s worked in nature as a means of storing information in an incredibly dense structure for billions of years, so why not?
excellent point
There’s nothing to worry about here: the scientists are using the DNA by itself, without the machinery that cells use to replicate and read it. Not only that, but they’re encoding their data in such a way that it’s incompatible with the DNA code anyway, so it’s completely useless in living systems In fact, if you put this work into a living cell, the information would probably decay quite rapidly.
So they encode some Monty Python films in DNA. That DNA gets into cells, and the next thing you know, you’ll have clones of Steve Ballmer, Eric Scmidt, Larry Page, and Jeff Bezos.
thats scary-cool man,
but don’t you see, it will be – Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity.
by encoding our own DNA we could then (with the right micro-hardware decoder implanted in us) we become super geniuses – know everything that ever was to know
this way we can finally compete against the robots that will try to take over – right John Connor?
— always looking on both sides of life
i can’t wait, but will patiently do so, for apple to get it right
I think its awesome sounding.
Cant wait for my MacBook pro with a 100 terabyte Apple DNA Drive(tm)
hell yeah!
Don’t forget that the .01% that ain’t correct is responsible for all the mutant analysts out there.
Even 0.0001% or whatever would still make this method barely useful. You have no way to know at which place of DNA that tiny error occurs. Of course, you could implement CRC/ECC methods, but that level of accuracy would still make it impractical.
So if you stored the plans and programming for the terminator on some DNA, could it start reproducing?
Maybe finally humanity can stop repeating mistakes made previously by storing the lesson and the successful answer in our DNA.
Here comes the real Johnny Mnemonic.