at the bottom of this vial barely
visible to the naked eye is a speck of
DNA but it's not the recipe for life
written into its code it's digital
computer files I have a green an mp3 of
Martin Luther King's famous speech a
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digital photo a PDF document and the
text of every one of Shakespeare's
sonnets written into a synthetic strand
of DNA we're using DNA instead of a DVD
disc and we're using different machines
to write it and to read it but the ideas
are the same you take information you
put it in a coded form you put it in a
physical medium that's a good storage
medium of one sort or another I never
really believed it would work until the
day I decoded them on my laptop and and
it all worked out when a music track is
stored on an mp3 player the software
turns it into a string of ones and
zeroes
the scientists stored information using
the chemical letters that make up DNA
one megabyte of computer data was stored
in a strand of DNA three million letters
long a strand so short it's almost
invisible
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so much information can be stored that
every film and TV program ever made can
be packed onto a strand of DNA that
fills just one cup at the moment
information is archived on magnetic tape
it's cheap but it takes a lot of space
and the tape degrades so every few years
people need to copy the contents onto a
fresh tape but the entire vault here of
skinny's material could be stored on a
tiny ball of DNA and as long as that's
kept cold and dry the information could
be preserved for tens of thousands of
years within just a few years reading
and writing DNA should be fast enough
and cheap enough to be commercially
viable massive libraries of information
could be held in the palm of your hand
Thomas More Sky News