The intelligence community is funding research into storing our ever-expanding troves of data in DNA. Their efforts could change how everything from our photos to Google searches get saved.
of Bluffdale, Utah, is “Life Connected.” That’s both innocuous and general—innocuous and general that the two words are also, for instance, the slogan of a Colorado therapist and the title of a BBC tech column. However, in Bluffdale, under the shadow of the Wasatch mountain range, the words take on a slightly different tinge. Because this place is home to a facility code-named “Bumblehive.”
The intelligence community would like to figure out how to make that almost laughable vision a reality. And they’d like to share their solutions with the private sector’s data hogs. To make that happen, for spies and corporations, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is currently in the midst of a four-year project called Molecular Information Storage, or MIST. Contracts awarded to two teams in 2019 total around $48 million.
Nevertheless, you don’t breeze past tabletops of double-helixes containing the whole of Wikipedia . That’s because it’s still not practicalIf MIST succeeds, some of today’s big-data warehouses could one day be just a bunch of double helixes. The program will ideally produce a prototype system that can encode 1 terabyte of data into DNA and extract 10 terabytes back from DNA in 24 hours, for less than $1,000, using less than 1 kilowatt of power.
The idea of using DNA to hang on to it dates back decades as a what-if. In 1988, for one, an artist named Joe Davis created a piece called “Microvenus.” He embedded a 35-bit image into the nucleotides ofDavis is now an affiliate at the Harvard lab of scientist George Church . In 2011, Church enmeshed 700 kilobytes’ worth of a book into DNA, and he worked on a similar project the next year, adding images and JavaScript code.
Voilà! In the future, this could be how archival farmers’ almanacs get shelved and then picked up again.
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