Alec Visslailli Research Paper June 23rd 2016 DNA: A Place For Genes or A Place For Information About Jeans? Imagine if one day people could leave behind memories or moments of their life to share with their kids or someone else, leaving behind a world of experiences and knowledge which would have taken the next person years upon years to master. Imagine a billionaire stashing all of his money away in a secret account that was unknown to everyone except himself but he wanted to pass it down to his son when he passed away so he put the account information in his DNA. Storing data in DNA opens up a whole new world. As of now, implanting data onto biological DNA has not been tested or successfully accomplished, but scientists have been successful with implanting data onto synthetic DNA. The cost effective transference and storage of data onto biological DNA as a means of documentation and information retrieval, will be the future of personalized data storage, permitting us to hard wire humankind. According to livescience, Deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA is a molecule that contains the instructions an organism needs to develop, live and reproduce. These instructions are found inside every cell, and are passed down from parents to their children. In other words, DNA is a very small but vital part of every living being that contains information, or data. It has the ability to hold information and transfer it from one place to another. Last time I checked, a hard drive could do the same exact thing. Now let s look at the definition of data. According to dictionary.com, data is individual
facts, statistics, or items of information. It is as simple as it seems: data, which is plural for datum, is information. Just by looking up and learning the definitions of DNA and Data, it seems as though integrating data into DNA is a legitimate possibility because DNA holds information, and data is information. Therefore it is theoretically possible, but now we must look to companies, universities, and scholarly sources who did the research or actually did the experiments and trials of trying to store data in DNA in order to figure out if it is physically possible. In Newsweek's Tech & Science article by Anthony Cuthbertson, DNA Storage Could Make Data Centers Obsolete, the article discusses an operation performed by scientists and engineers at the University of Washington and at Microsoft Research where four images were successfully encoded into synthetic DNA. When just considering that single statement, they made the claim of successfully transferring data from a computer or storage device onto synthetic DNA, which is DNA created in a lab. That means that this technological advancement isn t theoretical anymore. This is real. This sounded great but I stopped myself to ask if they were able to get the images back from the DNA? Only one sentence later, the article said, more significantly, the researchers were able to reverse the process and perfectly retrieve the images without losing a single byte of information. Information was transferred onto DNA and it was retrieved without a single lost byte. But how did it work? It worked by combining a mechanical, technological substance with synthetic DNA, which is almost identical to biological DNA but without the lifeform. DNA contains four bases called nucleotides. These nucleotides are
cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. For our purposes, we can consider them as C, G, A, and T. In terms of data, a lot of data is stored in computers, and other information holding mechanical devices such as a hard drive, in binary form. This form is a sequence of 0s and 1s that create numbers, words, and information. Cuthbertson tells us that the images were encoded as 0s and 1s but were changed to a string of Cs, Gs, As, and Ts, which are the bases that form DNA. For example, the binary code for the images could be 00110010101 but was then converted to AGTGACCTGAT. A DNA molecule that had that specific sequence was then synthesized so the image could be transferred. They claimed that this could work with any digital information, but they used images because images and video tend to take up a lot of space. Another point Cuthbertson makes is that DNA never goes out of style; it will never become obsolete. He compares it to a floppy disk. That technology went out of style when the next kind of disk drive replaced it. On the other hand, DNA can t be replaced in humans; it will always exist and be needed as long as humans exist. So now we know it is possible, but can it be taken further? Can it become useful to a point where large companies would switch over to DNA data storage instead of the typical hard drives and cloud services? Microsoft must have heard this question and decided to take on this challenge. The article by Eliza Strickland, Microsoft Buys Into DNA Data Storage, is about Microsoft taking on the challenge of mass producing in efforts to make sequencing, creating synthetic DNA, cheaper. This article starts off supporting the last point of the previous article. There is proof that DNA never goes out of style. The article states,
thanks to 7000 year old DNA from a tooth found in a Spanish cave, for example, we know that the caveman who died there had blue eyes and was probably lactose intolerant. If that isn t proof that DNA data storage is great for long lasting information than I don t know what is. Similar to the case stated by Cuthbertson, Microsoft has invested their time and money into this project and has taken a big group of data that would normally be stored in a hard drive and translated it into a sequence of the four DNA bases. They would then have a biology lab create the specific sequence and send over ten million copies of it, allowing Microsoft to experiment with the transferring as many times as needed. The goal was to test for long term data storage. According to this article, there are many ways to simulate the passing of a millennia, therefore allowing the company to do extensive testing. Microsoft is testing to see how long the data will last and how much they can store. The downside to this form of data storage for now is that it can t be frequently accessed. It can only be rarely accessed because it wears down the DNA with each usage. That is why it is perfect for long term storage. DNA sequencing has become quicker and cheaper over the years so DNA storage is becoming more and more of a viable option, especially for companies such as Microsoft who have money for research. Over the past two decades, the price for sequencing an entire human genome has dropped dramatically from around one million to one thousand dollars today. O Driscoll states in Synthetic DNA that storage devices have drastically dropped prices in the last number of years. O Driscoll sites that a group of researchers ( Goldman N, Bertone P, Chen S, Dessimoz C, LeProust EM, Sipos B) claim that DNA synthesis and
sequencing costs are becoming cheaper by 5 to 12 times compared to the other electronic storages. With the cost dropping, there is only one more thing that needs to change. We can try storing more data than just a few pictures. The boundaries of how much data could be stored in DNA was pushed by Microsoft. In the article by Peter Bright, Microsoft Experiments with DNA Storage: 1,000,000,000 TB in a gram, we see exactly that. It states that the data density of DNA is orders of magnitude higher than conventional storage systems, with 1 gram of DNA able to represent close to one billion terabytes (one zettabyte) of data. A way to understand how big one zettabyte actually is, is by converting the name to the number. One zettabyte is roughly 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. When comparing that to the article by Anthony Cuthbertson, we can see how far Microsoft has pushed the limits. The average image from a mobile phone is 1.7 megabytes, which is roughly 200,000 bytes. They transferred over three photos, averaging about 600,000 bytes of data. After doing some mathematical calculations, Microsoft has advanced what they did in the first article by around 1,600,000,000,000,000%! That is a ton of data. But it doesn t stop there. In O Driscoll s article, he states that DNA has the storage capacity of up to 445 exabytes per gram. Now that cost is getting cheaper and ways have been found to store tons upon tons of data, it means that the commercial viability of synthetic DNA storage is getting closer and closer to becoming reality, just like this article suggests. But as of right now, it is all dealing with synthetic DNA. What about natural DNA, like the DNA in a person s body rather than created in a lab? Will it work? If it
does, we would be walking computers and storage devices, half human half machine, like a cyborg. Having human beings walk around as big data banks is a big technological step, and evolutionary. Will having data stored inside of us change the way we act, feel, and or interact? This could relate to two TED talks, Sherry Turkle s Connected, but alone? and Amber Case s We are all cyborgs now. Turkle talks about being connected to all of this social media and information but being separate from other people in person and spirit. If we were to become walking databases, would this become even more of a reality? Would we become cyborgs who just exchange information and communicate through our DNA rather than word of mouth or phone calls. As of right now it is unlikely but it is always a possibility. We would be proving Case s point as well. Through everything we do that extends our biology through technology, we are all cyborgs. Even being connected through time and space with our phones and the internet makes us cyborgs to some degree. The information we share is practically our second selves. Being full of data would only push her theory further. We will not only have and use technology, but we will be physically intertwined with information technology. Information stored within our DNA could eventually be retrieved through apps or scanners just like a debit card. We could be able to dispense information like medical records to emergency care workers or resume credentials to employers with accuracy and ease. These are just some points to think about when it comes to using our DNA as data banks.
Before I started this research paper, I didn t know that DNA data storage was even a possibility, let alone an idea that could be realized through lab work. Throughout this paper I have researched and discovered that not only was it possible, but it has been successful. Many companies have learned how to successfully transfer data to and from DNA. Other companies have aided in decreasing the cost of this technology. Others have pushed the limits and capabilities of how much data can be stored. All of these advances together continue to push the standards of our society and technology to new heights. Maybe one day, human beings will become walking Yellow Pages, storing addresses, numbers, accounts, pictures, and so much more in a very tiny biological component that we are filled with. Let s just hope that fears of being consumed by technology won t come true.
Works Cited DNA Digital Data Storage. Wikipedia, 5 June 2016. Web. 26 June 2016. Bright, Peter. "Microsoft Experiments With DNA Storage: 1,000,000,000 TB In a Gram." Arstechnia. N.p., 27 Apr. 2016. Web. 26 June 2016. Rettner, Rachael. DNA: Definition, Structure & Discovery livescience. N.p., 6 June 2013. Web. 7 July 2016. Strickland, Eliza. "Microsoft Buys Into DNA Storage." IEEE Spectrum. N.p., 27 Apr. 2016. Web. 26 June 2016. Cuthbertson, Anthony. "DNA Storage Could Make Data Centers Obsolete." Newsweek Tech and Science. Newsweek, 15 Apr. 2016. Web. 26 June 2016. O'Driscoll, Aisling. Synthetic DNA, The Next Generation of Big Data Storage. N.p., 20 Mar. 2013. Web. 26 June 2016. "DNA." Dictionary.com. 2005. Web. 26 June 2016. Data. Dictionary.com. 2005. Web. 26 June 2016 Turkle, Sherry. "Connected, but alone?." TED Talks. Feb. 2012. Web. 26 June 2016. Case, Amber. "We are all cyborgs now." TED Talks. Dec. 2010. Web. 26 June 2016.