I like that idea as long as it is not me that is being infected! Now, the hard part. Why would this new bacteria not be wiped out by the competition within the guys system? And of course you then must find your exact ones within a large group of others. Also, how many different times can a guy be infected in this manner?
A very tiny silicon chip insert at an exact location only known to the carrier would work very well and be difficult to locate or even suspect by others. Dave -----Original Message----- From: leaking pen <itsat...@gmail.com> To: vortex-l <vortex-l@eskimo.com> Sent: Thu, Dec 27, 2012 1:19 pm Subject: Re: [Vo]:Digital information storage in DNA 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.
