This has long been in the cards and
now it is easily done. This suggests
that a living dynamic storage protocol could well make good sense and yes, it
can be stuffed into a living organism for safe keeping perhaps.
It also begs another
question. Just when are we going to
reverse transcribe the human genome to see if it contains plausible readable
content. With so much clearly
unidentified it may have already been used to store data.
It would be an interesting
project for cryptologists. Because of
our prior human emergence and the enhancement of our own humanity, it is safe
to say that if the conjecture of plausible encoding is correct then it was in
fact done. Thus this suggestion is not
unreasonable at all.
Researchers use DNA to store huge amounts of data
JANUARY 24, 2013
Malcolm Ritter
It can store the information from a million CDs in a space no bigger
than your little finger and could keep it safe for centuries.
Is this some new electronic gadget? Nope. It’s DNA.
The genetic material has long held all the information needed to make
plants and animals, and now some scientists are saying it could help handle the
growing storage needs of today’s information society.
Researchers reported Wednesday that they had stored all 154 Shakespeare
sonnets, a photo, a scientific paper, and a 26-second sound clip from U.S.
civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That all
fit in a barely visible bit of DNA in a test tube.
The process involved converting the ones and zeros of digital
information into the four-letter alphabet of DNA code. That code was used to
create stands of synthetic DNA. Then machines “read” the DNA molecules and
recovered the encoded information.
That reading process took two weeks, but technological advances are
driving that time down, said Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics
Institute in Hinxton , England
DNA could be useful for keeping huge amounts of information that must
be kept for a long time but not retrieved very often, the researchers said.
Storing the DNA would be relatively simple, they said: Just put it in a cold,
dry and dark place and leave it alone.
The technology might work in the near term for large archives that have
to be kept safe for centuries, like national historical records or huge library
holdings, said study co-author Nick Goldman of the institute.
Maybe in a decade it could become feasible for consumers to store
information they want to have around in 50 years, like wedding photos or videos
for future grandchildren, Goldman said in an email.
The researchers said they have no plans to put storage DNA into a
living thing, and it couldn’t accidentally become part of a living thing.
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