At 07:59 PM 12/26/2012, Jojo Jaro wrote:
Yes, digital information is indeed present in DNA.
Agreement!
One has to wonder how it got there.
Oh, we know pretty well. Details, not necessarily, but Reality (God,
Allah) knows how to create DNA. Scientists follow the footprints,
test to see if hypotheses work, and keep looking and testing. It's
the Scientific Method, progressing through direct knowledge of
Nature, cutting through interpretive dogma and assumptions. Thank God for it.
Natural Selection can not explain how random process can originate
information; let alone exabytes of information present in DNA in its
natural state.
Natural Selection is not Random Process. Nor are there exabytes of
information encoded in our DNA, at least not in a single copy of our
set. It's far, far less than that.
But, of course, Darwinian Evolutionist are right because there's
2000 of them and nobody has heard on one of them being threatened or bribed.
Gee, bringing in two separate contentious issues at once, like AGW
and Evolution.
"Darwinian Evolution" uses the name of a person. Why? Do we care
about persons, or do we care about principles?
Jojo
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:jedrothw...@gmail.com>Jed Rothwell
To: <mailto:vortex-l@eskimo.com>vortex-l@eskimo.com
Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 6:32 AM
Subject: [Vo]:Digital information storage in DNA
Not quite as off topic as you might think. I am looking into this as
part of an essay about the history of cold fusion I am writing. Anyway, see:
<http://arep.med.harvard.edu/pdf/Church_Science_12.pdf>http://arep.med.harvard.edu/pdf/Church_Science_12.pdf
This prof. at Harvard, George Church, has been experimenting with
recording data in DNA. He recorded his own book and then read it
back, with only a few errors. He reproduced it 30 million times,
making it "the biggest best seller in history" in a sense.
Quote: "DNA storage is very dense. At theoretical maximum, DNA can
encode two bits per nucleotide (nt) or 455 exabytes per gram of ssDNA . . ."
I'd like to confirm I have the units right here --
Present world data storage is variously estimated between 295
exabytes in 2011 to 2,700 exabytes today (2.7 zettabytes). See:
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12419672>http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12419672
(295 exabytes)
<http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23177411#.UNt2eSZGJ5Q>http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23177411#.UNt2eSZGJ5Q
(2.7 ZB)
I don't know what source to believe.
This takes a colossal number of hard disks and a great deal of
electricity. On NHK they estimated the number of bytes of data now
exceeds the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of the
world. Assume it is 2.7 ZB. That seems like a large number until you
realize that you could record all of this data in 6 grams of DNA.
That demonstrates how much our technology may improve in the future.
We have a lot of leeway. There is still "plenty of room at the
bottom" as Feynman put it.
DNA preserves data far better than any human technology. It can also
copy it faster and more accurately by far. I mean by many orders of magnitude.
It might be difficult to make a rapid, on-line electronic interface
to DNA recorded data, similar to today's hard disk. But as a back up
medium, or long-term storage, it seems promising. As Prof. Church
demonstrates, this technology may come about as a spin off from
genome-reading technology. Perhaps there are other 3-dimensional
molecular methods of data storage. Maybe, but I would say why bother
looking for them when nature has already found such a robust system?
- Jed
