On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 3:32 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 > > 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 (295 exabytes) > > 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 > That would be an awesome way to transmit messages as well. Pop a message into a bacterial ring DNA, insert it into a pathogen free Ecoli, and infect your agent with it. They travel to whereever, take a blood sample, culture the bug, and extract. A few days processing time, but still, undetectable. Hmm.... Actually... That gives me a novel idea (by which i mean, an idea for a novel.
