![]() Many DNA storage researchers believe they have hit on the perfect storage medium for both widespread and incredibly long-term storage. "That way, if life were to either be recreated here or otherwise transferred or imported from other planets and so forth, there would be records of what we did, and what we had," he says. The global threats facing humanity compel us to preserve both human-made information, such as art and science, and the DNA of all living things on the planet, says Bathe. Mark Bathe, a professor of biological engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-founded the start-up Cache DNA to make biomolecules widely accessible and useful. The LHC alone produces 90 petabytes (90 million gigabytes) per year. Radio telescopes and particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as Cern) on the border of France and Switzerland, for example, generate reams of data, and scientists want to keep all of it, says Latchesar Ionkov, a computer scientist working on DNA storage at Los Alamos National Laboratory. One is science – researchers are generating unprecedented amounts of data, and the more they have, the better. ![]() People want to store data for the long term for a huge variety of reasons. I think that industry can't really keep up with generating enough hard disks and servers to store all this data on," says Zielinski.īut do we really need to keep all this data, and preserve it for so long? The problem is seen as significant – the US government's molecular information storage (Mist) programme, launched in 2019, aims to find an alternative to today's huge data storage facilities, for example. Storing data also requires huge data centres which use large amounts of energy to keep things cool – not ideal in a world prone to energy crises. "It lasts on average maybe 10 to 20 years, maybe 50 if you're lucky and the conditions are perfect," says Zielinski. For one thing, demagnetisation is a huge issue – permanent magnets gradually lose their magnetic field over time, so to keep data reliably it's important to rewrite hard drives every few years. Most of the reams of data we have produced is stored as 1s and 0s on magnetic tapes such as hard drives, but this is far from an ideal solution. Films, photographs, webpages, business documents, critical security records – everything we use is digitalised, and we are using increasingly more of it. Meanwhile, some researchers are exploring other ways we could store data effectively forever, such as etching information onto incredibly durable glass beads, a modern take on cave drawings.īut how long could this data really last, and can we really rely on it to store the reams of data now being produced by humanity for posterity?Īs we move towards a more and more digitised world, our reliance on data is skyrocketing. But many experts argue it offers an incredibly compact, durable and long-lasting form of storage that could replace the many forms of unreliable digital media available, which regularly become defunct and require huge amounts of energy to store. The information stored in DNA defines what it is to be human (or any other species for that matter). Netflix has even used it to store an episode of its 2020 thriller series Biohackers. Scientists have already encoded films, books and computer operating systems into DNA. ![]() Research into how we could store digital data inside strands of DNA has exploded over the past decade, in the wake of efforts to sequence the human genome, synthesise DNA and develop gene therapies. "That will last easily tens of years, maybe hundreds," says Zielinski. Instead, it stores a digital representation of a museum. It does not store the code from a human genome, nor does it come from any animal or virus. It's hard to make out, but she tells me that I should be able to see a mostly clear, light film on the bottom of the vial – this is the DNA.īut this DNA is special. "You know you're a nerd when you store DNA in your fridge."Īt her home in Paris, Dina Zielinski, a senior scientist in human genomics at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, holds up a tiny vial to her laptop camera for me to see on our video call.
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