Two Harvard scientists have produced 70 billion copies of a book in DNA code --and it's smaller than the size of your thumbnail.

Lisa Poole / AP FILE

In his lab at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, George Church, Harvard Medical School Genetics professor, shows DNA sequence data for Dr. John Halamka, chief information officer, following a news conference on Monday, Oct. 20, 2008 where a group of mostly scientists and researchers said they will post their medical records and DNA sequence of some of their own genes online for the sake of research. Both George Church and Dr. Halamka are part of the group that plan to post their medical and DNA sequence of some of their own genes online.

Despite the fact there are 70 billion copies of it in existence, very few people have actually read the book Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves in DNA, by George Church and Ed Regis. The reason? It is written in the basic building blocks of life: Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.

Church, along with his colleague Sriram Kosuri, both molecular geneticists from the Wyss Institute for Biomedical Engineering at Harvard, used the book to demonstrate a breakthrough in DNA data storage. By copying the 53,000 word book (alongside 11 jpeg images and a computer program) theyve managed to squeeze a thousand times more data than ever previously encoded into strands of DNA, as reported in the August 17 issue of the journal Science. (To give you some idea of how much information were talking about, 70 billion copies is morethan three times the total number of copies for the next 200 most popular books in the world combined.)

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Part of DNAs genius is just how conspicuously small it is: so dense and energy efficient that one gram of the stuff can hold 455 billion gigabytes. Four grams could in theory hold ever scrap of data the entire world produces in a year. Couple this with a theoretical lifespan of 3.5 billion years and you have a revolution in data storage, with wide ranging implications for the amount of information we could record and store.

Dont expect your library to transform from paperbacks to vials of DNA anytime soon though. It took a decade to work out the next generation of reading and writing of DNA Ive been working on reading for 38 years, and writing since the 90s, Church tells TIME.

The actual work of encoding the book into DNA and then decoding it and copying it only took a couple weeks. I did it with my own two hands! says Dr. Church, which is very rare to have that kind of time to spend doing something like this. Church and Kosuri took a computer file of Regenesisand converted it into binary code strings of ones and zeroes. They then translated that code into the basic building blocks of DNA. The 1s stand for adenine (A) or cytosine (C) and the zero for guanine (G) and thymine (T), says Kosuri. Using a computer program, this translation was simple.

While the future implications and applications are not yet clear, the DNA storage industry is moving at an incredible speed. Classical electronic technology is moving forward something like 1.5 fold per year, says Dr. Church, whereas reading and writing DNA is improving roughly ten fold per year. Weve already had a million-fold improvement in the past few years, which is shocking.

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