ATG Quirky: An entire book encoded into genetic material.

 Harvard University researchers encode book into DNA

Here is one bit of news that may be tough to get your head around!  It’s being reported by a number of sources ranging from this article in the New York Daily News, famous for its headline approach to news, to the respected journal Science that researchers at Harvard University have encoded an entire book into genetic material.  It appears that scientists  George Church and Sri Kosuri along with their team have figured out a way to encode “an entire book into the genetic molecules of DNA, the basic building block of life, and then accurately read back the text.”  You can read the more technical articles to try and figure out how they did it but the New York Daily News may have the possible future consequences right  when it notes:

“The implications of the experiment are that … “billions” of copies of the book could be stored in a container that beats out larger information storage systems. However, as awesome as this all sounds, it will most likely be quite some time before billions of copies of “How I Met Your Mother” or the Harry Potter series can be housed in a test tube, since the process is expensive, though the experiment does point the way to a promising future in natural information storage systems.”

Other Sources:

• Harvard Researchers Turn Book Into DNA Code – WSJ.com
• Scientists write first book in DNA – latimes.com
• Harvard cracks DNA st orage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram- extremetech.com
• Writing the Book in DNA – Harvard Medical School
• Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA – Science (subscriber only)