A fascinating future of DNA data storage
“And using DNA would finally divorce the thing that stores information from the things that read it. Time and again, our storage formats become obsolete because we stop making the machines that read them—think about video tapes, cassettes, or floppy disks. That’s a faff—it means that archivists have to constantly replace all their equipment, and laboriously rewrite their documents in the new format du jour, all at great expense. But we will always want to read DNA. It’s the molecule of life. Biologists will always study it. The sequencers may change, but as Goldman says, “You can stick it in a cave in Norway, leave it there in a thousand years, and we’ll still be able to read that.”
James Hancock
on 26 Jan 13That’s a false assertion. Yes, you eliminate the physical storage medium and thus the incompatibility caused by that, however you did not remove the encoding. An mo3 is still an mp3. You still need a file system to store those files. All of which must be know. Big or little edian? Etc.etc.etc. you may not need to reencode to read the data, but you still need to know the language of what’s stored.
David Andersen
on 27 Jan 13James – thus the line in the article:
“Of course you’d need to send some sort of Rosetta stone to tell people how to decode the message…”
Zingus
on 28 Jan 13DNA is an incredibly cumbersome, botched, redundant, undocumented format. The stench of legacy looms all over it.
If we get to that level of knowledge of that (cluster of ) molecule(s), we’ll really be able to pull something better out. It will actually be easier to start from scratch, and we’ll do.
I suppose reproduction should happen by fission: that would make data replication a breeze. Sexual reproduction of a couple of hard disks? an hard mess to defrag. But then, maybe, good for crypto, who knows.
This discussion is closed.