In what sounds like a tale straight out of a science fiction story, researchers George Church and Sri Kosuri at Harvard University have developed a technique to encode information in the form of DNA. This concept is not new — the idea has been around for several years, and has been explored in science fiction- most, notably in Ubisoft’s bestselling Assassin’s Creed series.
However, the new technology outstrips all previous genetic memory techniques by a factor of 1000 — allowing people to store 700 terabytes of data in a single gram of DNA. That’s equivalent to about 1,50,000 DVDs worth of storage in one single gram of material. If commercialized it will blow current market tech out of the water.
While the new DNA memory technology is miles ahead of current technology when it comes to storage capacity, its reading and writing speeds are still much slower than those for modern flash and magnetic memory devices, which is likely to be the next challenge scientists will start working on. With current DNA sequencing technology, it can still take several hours to read a block of DNA — but the new technique is still viable for long term storage of massive amounts of data. Some speculate that this Data — DNA could also be implanted into human beings — opens up a whole new slew of fantastical possibilities.