Nnews
Science | DOI: 10.1145/2492007.2492013
Samuel Greengard
a new approach
to information storage
Disk drives and solid-state drives have long served as the foundation
for computer storage, but breakthroughs in molecular and DNA
science could revolutionize the field.

harvard geneticist George church shows the amount of space needed to store 20 million
copies of his book within Dna.

When george ChurCh, a geneticist at Har- vard Medical School, decidedto produce70 billion copies of his book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, he skipped printing presses, Kindles, and hard drives. The professor of genetics instead turned to a most unlikely medium: DNA, the same long molecule that serves as the building block for life on Earth. “It has worked remarkably well as a storage medium for 3. 5 billion years,” he says.

PhotograPh by marIe Wu, courteSy of george church

In Church’s case, a team of re-
searchers used sequencing technol-
ogy to format his 54,000-word book
(with words, images, and a JavaScript
program, it came down to 5. 27 mega-
bits, or 658.75 bytes) at a density of
5. 5 petabytes per cubic millimeter.
While the physical volume of 70 bil-
lion physical copies of his book would
fill nearly 3,500 New York City Public
Libraries (including all branches),
and a digital version would require
somewhere in the neighborhood of
46 storage devices with 1TB drives, all
those copies of Church’s book fit on a
piece of DNA no larger than a speck of
dust. What’s more, the copies will last
hundreds of thousands of years—per-
haps even a million years—and do not
require any special handling or tem-
perature conditions.