Encoding Messages in Living Matter
Japanese Universities Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus have announced that they’ve created a technlogy that allows us to encode up to 100-bit messages in the DNA of living matter.
The message is passed on generation from generation, and they claim that it can possibly survive up to thousands of years without corruption. From the news:
While the technology would most likely first be used to track medication, it could also be used to store text and images for many millennia, thwarting the longevity issues associated with today’s disk and tape storage systems — which only store data for up to 100 years in most cases.
They’ve successfully managed to encode the message “e=mc2 1905!” on the DNA on the common soil bacteria, Bacillius subtilis.
For me, this begs the question of whether massive paralell computation can be accomplished by engineering bacteria, i.e. using living tissue for smart dust computation.
Fascinating.
[DNA Encoding found via Spivack's great blogMinding The Planet]
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