We hear a lot about Big Data. What people don’t talk about much is that storage of all that data is going to be extremely costly, both financially and ecologically.
But nature, from the beginning, developed the most efficient memory storage medium in existence. The DNA of one human, as Riccardo Sabatini dramatically presented in a 2016 TED talk, fits into 175 printed volumes that are each 1,600 pages long, with a font size of 6 (1/2 of what you’re reading). He also pointed out that the information representing every molecular aspect of a newborn baby would fit on 2000 Titanics packed with thumb drives.
In 2012 two Harvard scientists, George Church and Sri Kosuri, figured out how to translate data into DNA. Since then, DARPA has granted a lot of money to companies and university researchers to figure out how to make DNA data storage a reality.
Why? DNA is shelf-stable. It can last, as we know from Woolly Mammoth samples, 60,000 years. DNA is not electrically or magnetically activated. DNA is also ridiculously dense. To illustrate: every film ever made could be saved on a pile of DNA the size of a sugar cube.
To take it even further, every piece of data currently in existence, stored on DNA, would fit in a single, average sized closet, requiring no fans, cooling systems, electricity or hardware. It would never degrade.
Right now, a company called Catalog is building a concept machine that is the Guttenberg printing press of DNA memory storage. The size of a school-bus, the encoder/decoder processes base pairs like movable type. Instead of the insanely costly early methods, Catalog uses shorthand to encode binary sequences.
If you hired Catalog to put every photo, movie, piece of writing, homework, report card, textbook, tv show, novel, social media post and medical record you’d ever generated or consumed in your life–basically everything that can be recorded–into a bunch of strands of DNA, it would fit in a drop of water. And it would last basically forever.
Google and Microsoft are both researching DNA storage. We need it now.