DNA instead of a hard drive

Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich demonstrated yesterday that information encoded by humans in DNA can be stored for about 2,000 years without any loss. With the advent of the digital age, the problem of preserving information for future generations has taken on new significance. Currently an external hard drive can retain up to five terabytes of data for around 50 years (under ideal storage conditions). Scientists have decided to push those boundaries by adopting DNA as a storage device until a couple of years ago. In theory, even a small fraction of it could hold up to 300,000 terabytes of information, and yesterday at the 250th American Chemical Society conference, scientists demonstrated how long this information can be stored. They encoded 83 kilobytes of text from the Swiss Federal Charter of 1291 and Archimedes' 10th-century Palimpsest into DNA, then sealed the DNA in silicon spheres and kept them at about 71 degrees Celsius for a week - the equivalent of keeping the same material at 10 degrees Celsius for about 2000 years. When the information was deciphered after all the procedures, however, no errors were found in it. Now that the researchers have demonstrated a method of how to synthetically store DNA for a long time, they face a new challenge. According to the head of the research team, Dr Robert Grass, "The DNA storage medium is a drop of liquid with floating molecules in which the information is encoded. We can now read everything in this drop. But I can't point to any individual location and read an individual file." So now scientists are developing a system of labels for different pieces of information so that they can be searched by them. There is, however, some bad news. As with many technologies in their early stages of development, storing information in DNA costs a lot of money. Encoding and storing a couple of megabytes of data now costs thousands of dollars, meaning that DNA-based hard drives will not be available to users any time soon.