Who Needs Hard Drives? Scientists Store Film Clip in DNA
“Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small which does what we want!”
Dr. Feynman’s idea “was a seminal piece — it gave us a direction,” said Leonard Adleman, a mathematician at the University of Southern California
and co-inventor of one of the most used public cryptography systems, RSA (the A is for Adleman).
Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematics professor and expert on digital technology at the University
of Minnesota who was not involved in the new research, called it “fascinating.”
Imagine, he said, “the impossibility of controlling secrets, when those secrets
are encoded in the genomes of the bacteria in our guts or on our skins.”
The renowned physicist Richard Feynman proposed half a century ago that DNA could be used for storage in this way.
“Right now, we can measure one neuron at a time with electrodes, but 86 billion electrodes would not fit in your brain,” Dr. Church said.
Dr. Church and his colleagues have already shown in past research that bacteria can record DNA in cells, if the DNA is properly tagged
It would be, said Dr. Church, analogous to the black boxes carried by airplanes whose data is used in the event of a crash.
George Church, a geneticist at Harvard and one of the authors of the new study, recently
encoded his own book, “Regenesis,” into bacterial DNA and made 90 billion copies of it.
