Future Computing: DNA Hard Drives

Molecular biologist Nick Goldman and his team at the European Institute of Bioinformatics have found a way to use DNA to store data. “All the information in the world could be encoded and stored in DNA, and it would fit in the back of an SUV,” says Nick Goldman in this video for the World Economic Forum. He explains why DNA is a stable, long-term way to store digital information that might otherwise be lost.

“DNA is the hard drive, the memory in every cell in every living organism, which contains the instructions on how to build the cell. It is a chemical molecule and is made up of four different types of molecules that can be strung together in a chain, and you can string these four molecules together in any order. You can think of it like a digital code.

We have a major data revolution in genomics. Ten years ago, the cost of sequencing the genome of a person or living organism was about as much as the most expensive house in London. And ten years later, the cost of sequencing a genome was equivalent to the price of a season ticket for Arsenal football club. The price has fallen and scientists are doing more and more genome sequencing.

After scientists sequence a genome, they want to keep their data safe - and that's where Nick Goldman comes in - so they send their data over the Internet and ask Goldman to store that information. We are buying more and more computer servers and more and more hard drives to store this information. Then Goldman realized that all the information we store is about DNA, but that DNA itself could be a digital storage medium. Goldman thought he might be able to manipulate the DNA to write a message of his own. Life on Earth has used DNA as a hard drive for hundreds of millions of years, so perhaps we could use it too.

Goldman devised an experiment to see if DNA was a good way to store information. Goldman had to decide what high-value information it wanted to store in a DNA format for a long time. Goldman thought of a .txt file with all of Shakespeare's sonnets and an .mp3 file with Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and, because he and his team are molecular biologists at heart, a .pdf file of Watson and Crick's 1953 paper describing the helical structure of DNA in living cells. Goldman coded these and had the Agilent company in California convert them into DNA. And Goldman got back a tiny piece of dust at the bottom of a test tube, and that was the DNA.

Can we get the information back? Yes, we can read and copy DNA easily and inexpensively. But it's very difficult to write them in the first place. It takes too long and is very expensive and that is the rate limiting step. So you could encode all the world's information into DNA, but there isn't enough money in the world to do that. But it is a good solution to the challenge of creating a long-term digital archive. Within a few years, all forms of digital media will become obsolete. No one in the world currently archives digital information, although most information is now created, stored and observed digitally. But how long will memory sticks last compared to DNA?

Team Goldman looked at mammoth DNA that is 20 years old and ancient horses with 000 year old DNA sequences that were successfully read. All it takes is a very cold and dry place to store them and as long as there are humans who are technologically advanced, we will be able to read DNA. So what will we save in the long run? Maybe the records of American presidents, or where nuclear waste was disposed of, or even our family photos.

Future Computing: DNA Hard Drives | Nick Goldman