The eNotes Blog Shakespeare Its in theDNA

Shakespeare Its in theDNA Are you old enough to remember when floppy disks were  actually  floppy? Or maybe when disks were 3 wide? (Yes, kids, thats what that little icon to save your work to your hard drives and flash drives represents, a hard little disk that held approximately two Word files or a half a dozen pictures (but not at the same time). Maybe you think data storage has reached its pinnacle. It is rather startling to realize you carry more technology in your pocket on your smart phone than was available for the moon landing (but with considerably less LOL cats).   But when you understand that there is now over one trillion gigabytes of information in the world, not even the iPhone 204 can keep up with that pace. (Heres what 10 trillion gigabytes looks like in numbers: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. ten plus twenty one  zeroes). Every method of storage we have thus far employed has had long-term storage problems. CDs and DVDs scratch and wear out, as do magnetic tapes. But what about DNA, natures storage system? DNA is compact and durable. We can extract DNA information from bones that are millions of years old. It sounds like science fiction, but its actually science-in-action. Nick Goldman heads up a research team at  European Bioinformatics Institute in the U.K. Goldman and his fellow scientists are studying  DNA data storage and Goldman has written a paper on the process which appeared  Ã‚  in the journal  Nature  last week. In an interview with Ira Flatow on NPRs Science Friday, Goldman explains that DNA utilizes a storage system much like computers use ones and zeroes so [w]e wrote a computer program that embodied a code that would convert the zeros and ones from a hard disk drive into the letters that we use to represent DNA, and then we our collaborators in California    were able to actually synthesize physical DNA. Once the scientists realized this was possible, they decided what they would first try to encode and store: [W]e chose a photograph of our own institute because were sort of self-publicists at heart, I guess, and an excerpt from Martin Luther Kings speech I Have a Dream, all of Shakespeares sonnets and a PDF that contained in fact the paper, the scientific paper by Watson and Crick that first described the structure of DNA itself. All of this information, Golman says, is saved   on the equivalent of a speck of dust. How large of an area would contain all 10 trillion gigabytes of the worlds information? It would fit in the back of a station wagon.