How Shakespeare and MLK Got Encoded in DNA

Here's how the process, outlined yesterday on the website of leading scientific journal Nature,works: The scientists took these writers' famous words, encrypted them using a cipher that corresponds with DNA's four nucleic acids (A, C, G, or T),synthesizedstrands of DNA according to that code, and chilled the resulting samples in dark, dry conditions, where they should last for millennia. Goldman tells NPR's Adam Cole that one of our generation's biggest problemsorganizing and storing the deluge of data we face every daycould be solved using DNA:

The data we're being asked to be guardians of is growing exponentially. But our budgets are not growing exponentially ... We realized that DNA itself is a really efficient way of storing information.

This process shrinks information much more than existing formats like hard drives or magnetic tape. Or paper-bound books. Let's consider that a physical copy of Shakespeare's Sonnetsfromthe Folger Shakespeare Library weighs7 ounces. Project Gutenberg's digital version ofthe poemstakes up 95 KB on your Kindle. That might seem pretty compact, but physical books and e-books are majorly inefficient storage methods when contrasted with genetic encoding.Shall we compare these to a strand of DNA? Goldman's teamshowed that they can fit the entire database of pioneering particle physics lab CERN (which holds approximately 90 petabytes of information) onto just 41 grams of DNA. In comparison, every sonnet Shakespeare ever wrote could fit on a mere speck of genetic material.

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These findings aren't necessarily newHarvard geneticist George Church was able to encode a book in DNA last summer. And some adventurous poets are even using DNA to encode new original works. In Canadian poet ChristianBk'sfour-line Xenotext, the stanza "Any style of life / is prim"is encodedin DNA thatalwaysspits out proteins reading "The faery is rosy / of glow." But even Church acknowledges the strides made by Goldman and his colleagues. "I think its a really important milestone," he toldNature's Ed Yong. Currently, storing information in DNA is expensive. It costs about$12,400 to store every megabyte, and $220 to extract the information in readable form. But the expense is going down every year. "In 10 years, it's probably going to be about 100 times cheaper," Goldman told The Wall Street Journal's Gautam Naik. "At that time, it probably becomes economically viable."

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How Shakespeare and MLK Got Encoded in DNA