Since time immemorial, mankind has wanted to share and use information for laters use. First, it was thought the caveman paintings and symbols. Then we inventd the alphabets, ideograms, numbers and other symbols. Using these, books were written and stored for future generation, in palm leaves, papyrus sheets or paper. The invention of printing brought the Gutenberg revolution, making multiple copies easily and spreading education to millions of people.
Printed books occupy space. Libraries and archives are bustng at the seams, Enter the compute age and digitization using the binary code of combining zeros and ones for alphabets and other sush symbols and reading them using the on-off electrical signals, which has made electonic storage possible, cutting down the size and space for 'hard copes'. Integrated circuits, processors and related electronic wizardry have shrunk the size of computes and storage devices from room-size to finger nail size.
How much information can be stored in DNA? Goldman and co have been able to store 2.2 petabytes(a peta s a million billion or 10 raised to power 15) in one gram of DNA. What about the speed? And how does one read the files?
Today, the speed is slow and the reading using DNA sequences is expensive, but in time both the speed iwll improve and the cost come down consideably. Rcall that it took $3 billion to read out the entire human genome a decade ago, and months to do so. Today, the speed has improved, and it is predicted that is a couple of years, the human genome can be rad fo $1000. But even tody, DNA-based information storeage is a realistic option to archive long-term, infequently accessed material.
What did Goldman and group store in DNA? For starters, they stored all 154 sonnets of shakespeare, a clour photgraph of Hinxton and a clip from the "i have a Dream" speech of Martin Luther Kng.
Natural selection and evolution have used DNA to store and read out to make out bodies. And we are now using DNA to store and achive the products of our brains. What a twist!
Printed books occupy space. Libraries and archives are bustng at the seams, Enter the compute age and digitization using the binary code of combining zeros and ones for alphabets and other sush symbols and reading them using the on-off electrical signals, which has made electonic storage possible, cutting down the size and space for 'hard copes'. Integrated circuits, processors and related electronic wizardry have shrunk the size of computes and storage devices from room-size to finger nail size.
How much information can be stored in DNA? Goldman and co have been able to store 2.2 petabytes(a peta s a million billion or 10 raised to power 15) in one gram of DNA. What about the speed? And how does one read the files?
Today, the speed is slow and the reading using DNA sequences is expensive, but in time both the speed iwll improve and the cost come down consideably. Rcall that it took $3 billion to read out the entire human genome a decade ago, and months to do so. Today, the speed has improved, and it is predicted that is a couple of years, the human genome can be rad fo $1000. But even tody, DNA-based information storeage is a realistic option to archive long-term, infequently accessed material.
What did Goldman and group store in DNA? For starters, they stored all 154 sonnets of shakespeare, a clour photgraph of Hinxton and a clip from the "i have a Dream" speech of Martin Luther Kng.
Natural selection and evolution have used DNA to store and read out to make out bodies. And we are now using DNA to store and achive the products of our brains. What a twist!
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