Scientists have encoded short messages in DNA for years using simple ciphers. “I could copy a petabyte like this,” says Birney, who mimes depressing his thumb. To transfer the contents of a tube of DNA, you dissolve it in water, suck up some of the liquid into a pipette, and squeeze it into another tube. To transfer the contents of one hard disk into another, you need to hook both of them up to a computer and wait for minutes or hours. All of the world’s data would fit in the back of a minivan.Īnd once encoded into DNA, information is a doddle to copy. A single gram can contain as much data as 3 million CDs. In terms of information density, DNA outclasses anything we’ve been able to invent. Sequencing machines will continue to improve and will need to be replaced, but once information is stored in DNA, that’s that. If you can create your own strands of DNA, with the ones and zeroes of binary data converted into these As, Gs, Cs, and Ts, you have a storage medium that will never go obsolete. The molecule itself looks like a twisting ladder, whose rungs are made of four molecules called bases that pair up in specific ways-adenine (A) with thymine (T), and cytosine (C) with guanine (G). Living things have been storing information in DNA since the dawn of life, including the instructions for building every human, animal, bacterium and plant. Both of them start laughing-the answer was so obvious. “We thought: Isn’t there some other nano-machine that would allow us to store digital data?” says Birney.
Old machines are junked in favour of new hardware (remember VCRs?) and any data stored on out-of-date media must be re-read and re-written onto the medium du jour, all at great expense. They realised that the big problem was the cycle of obsolescence that all data-storing technologies go through.
INTREPID NATION DECIPHER CHAT ARCHIVE
At an internal conference in Hamburg, in April 2010, “you couldn’t move for someone saying the EBI will have to close down the DNA archive because it’s unsustainable”, says Birney.Īfter the conference, Goldman and Birney retreated to a local pub and started batting around possible solutions, beers in hand. Located in an isolated campus on the outskirts of Cambridge, UK, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) stores genomic data from labs all over the world. That would be a setback for a normal lab and an outright catastrophe for the place where Birney and Goldman work. “And at some point, not too far in the future, you would run out of either disk space or money,” says Goldman. However, it takes 18 months to get twice as much hard disk for your buck, so it is starting to cost more to store the results of experiments than to actually run them in the first place. This technology doubles in efficiency every six months, allowing you to sequence twice as much DNA for the same amount of money. Since then, the relentless improvement in sequencing machines has turned that trickle of genomic data into a full-on flood. Back then, it took a decade to sequence the human genome and geneticists could store their data on an Excel spreadsheet. In the 1990s, this problem would have seemed laughable. Their chat was fuelled by a simple realisation: scientists would soon start amassing more genetic information than they could afford to store. “It would’ve involved a lot of hands from me,” says Birney. “It must have involved a pen or pencil because I can’t think without holding one,” says Goldman. They may or may not have scrawled their ideas on a napkin. They know it happened in the bar of the Gastwerk Hotel in Hamburg, and that many beers were involved. Neither Ewan Birney nor Nick Goldman can remember exactly how they came up with the idea of storing all the world’s knowledge in DNA.
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