A use of DNA to store large amounts of data was recently announced and has caught the attention of the media. For example, the Wall Street Journal has a story Storing Digital Data in DNA. The event that was attention-grabbing was the storage and then retrieval of a very large amount of data from a speck of biological material. All of the following were stored
- An audio clip of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech
- A photograph
- A copy of Francis Crick and James Watson’s famous “double helix” scientific paper on DNA from 1953
- Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets
The notion of using DNA in computing is not new, having been proposed by Leonard Adleman of the University of Southern California, in 1994. I have been posting about using DNA in computers off and on for several years (for example, here and here.) The latter post was actually about IBM working on DNA as a circuit element but it is related to the storage function.
The implications of being able to use small amounts of biological material as computer components almost seems like science fiction. It isn’t just the miniaturization that is important. Other single-molecule materials have been demonstrated. It is the possibility of minute power requirements that excite me. A tiny computer with almost no power needed would be a second computer revolution.