Harvard stores 70 billion books using DNA

For those who know me they know I am a bit Data/Information crazy. As I write on my personal blog I am amazed that most of the worlds endeavors, problems and solutions really come down to 1′s and 0′s. In a basic sense I believe we can solve a great majority of problems and challenges with better and more effective data and information and at its core those 1′s and 0′s. Here is an amazing story that came out recently.

Harvard researchers have been able to use sequencing technology to

store 70 billion copies of a yet-unpublished book in DNA binary code.

The results

of the project by researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University were published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

“The total world’s information, which is 1.8 zettabytes, [could be stored] in about four grams of DNA,” said Sriram Kosuri, a senior scientist at the Wyss Institute and senior author of the paper, in a video presentation.

The researchers created the binary code through DNA markers to preserve the text of the book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves in DNA. …..

You can read the entire article here. What’s amazing to think about is that might not be blatantly obvious to everyone is the impact this could have on not only our current use of data appliances like data networks, storage, but also entire operations. Think about the fact that Google has an entire data center in The Dalles and states on their site: “The computers inside run some of Google’s services like the Google search engine, Gmail, and Google Maps. Even your own Google searches may be processed there”.  Another thing is the fact that data centers require an enormous amount of power to keep running (coolers, electricity, etc) and the potential cost savings in the future could drop like a rock.

I know now they are saying that the process to encode data in DNA is still costly but that the costs are dropping extremely fast due to innovation and technology.

What do you think? Cool eh?