Future Computing: DNA Hard Drives | Nick Goldman World Economic Forum

Molecular Biologist Nick Goldman and his team at the European Bioinformatics Institute, have created a way to use DNA to store data. “All the information in the world could be encoded and stored in DNA, and it would fit in the back of a SUV,” says Nick Goldman in this video for the World Economic Forum. He explains why DNA is a stable, long term way to store digital information that might otherwise be lost.

Watch the video for the full talk or read key quotes below

On DNA as nature’s hard drive
“DNA is the hard drive, the memory in every cell in every living organism that has the instructions for how to make that cell. It’s a chemical molecule, and is four different kinds of molecules that can be stuck together in a chain, and you can put those four in any order and if you read that back you have a sequence of characters. If you want to think of it like a digital code.”