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