As I was reading an article, yes, from the New York Times, Using DNA To Store Digital Information: Double Helix Serves Double Duty, it clearly lays out a success in the lab of storing information in DNA, which in itself is not new, but the researchers have added a new technique, which includes error-correction software. According to the article, a step toward a digital archival storage medium of immense scale.
The experiment we did converted about three-quarters of a megabyte of information off a hard disk drive into DNA. We showed it worked on a large scale…We were quite conservative in the approach we took. We really wanted to make sure that it worked, and so we used quite a lot of error-correction code…
The sequencing, or reading it back, that we did is exactly the same [as writing]. We designed it that way. We designed it so that it would work in the standard protocols that we and our laboratory collaborators are familiar with, day in day out. It is really exactly the same process. We use an Illumina sequencing machine.
So, the barriers for the Public Sector are apparently cost for these machines, and the quantity of data stored. However, this article proves that any government agency is able to store information in someone’s body today, on the DNA level, have someone walk into a country and extract the data. Those James Bond movies are not factious any more. In the article, it implied extraction of the DNA, and not necessarily reintegration. Also, there are other factors to contend with, such as replication of duplicate cellular information, immune systems, and so on.
There are Public Sector uses within arms reach, keeping in mind the limited supply of today’s machines, despite reintegration challenges, even if the cells were used outside the body, as mentioned in the article, imagine, Cloud Computing. We, as people outside the Amazon Data Centers, do not own the costly hardware to do the storage and calculations, we lease based on usage. The article also points out although it is possible to scale the amount of data I/O for storage, their test was using a relatively minute set of data, and did imply a significant time to perform the writes [and reads] from the DNA storage. So, for WORM [Write Once, Read Many] applications, this technology in a cloud environment may well be applicable, such as in compliance and legal matters, where WORM is required, That could be a potential immediate use for the process and technology.
