My body, the hard drive

When you’re part of the DNA-of-things

Medical records, CCTV footage of your home, the video of your child’s home birth, bank accounts and more. In 2051 we will no longer trust computers, services or clouds to store our most private information. We'll store that data in our own bodies, at an atomic level. That way, we know that everything we hold dear is carried with us and nobody can access it – unless we are physically present. No more threats from hackers, no more stressing about the cloud going down. We predict that this technology will become mandatory – including storing our ID cards and visas.

By removing the personal information of nearly 10 billion people from the cloud – finally completed in 2045 – the world will be saved from a certain data apocalypse. The first warning came in the early 2030s, when the unfortunate timing of a tsunami hitting the United Kingdom at the exact moment fires were raging in California brought down the cloud for eight days. In future, industries will rely on a combination of storage methods, from quantum computing to synthesised DNA storage. Genetically encoded digital data mixed into common manufacturing materials will become commonplace, so humans will be yet another vessel in the DNA-of-things (DoT).

From DNA storage to DNA computing

“Software is eating the world”, Marc Andreessen famously said. But very soon, data will eat the world. It’s no longer a question of “will we run out of cloud space”, but when. At this point in time, our digital universe is already made up of more than 44 zettabytes of data (1 zettabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes) – 90% of which was generated over the last few years alone. It is forecasted that we’ll have around 572 zettabytes of data by 2030 (10 times more than today). If you use a model of exponential continuation, the world will have 50,000 to 500,000 zettabytes of data to deal with in 2050. To picture one zettabyte, think of as much information as there are grains of sand on all the world’s beaches.

We are heading for a certain data apocalypse. We are generating data at breakneck speed, and making no effort to dispose of anything. Just imagine the catastrophe if all the data in our connected world is wiped out. Therefore, scientists are already experimenting with alternative means of storing data such as liquid-state, helium, glass and holographic storage. IBM is working flat out to make its atomic-scale storage economically manufacturable. But let’s not forget about nature’s ultracompact and stable storage medium that’s been perfected over 3 billion years of evolution. DNA storage is nothing new. All the living things on planet Earth have been using it for millions of years. Every human, reptile and fish is born with a blueprint running through their veins that tells it how to grow, survive and fight disease. We’re not only storing lots of data in our DNA, our cells are constantly accessing and computing it. What if we can harness that computing power?

DNA-based data storage systems will be able to hold and process massive amounts of data. With an information density that’s millions of times better than conventional hard drives, a single gram of DNA is able to store up to 215 gigabytes. Scientists have stored many things in DNA already, from the book War and Peace and the entire 16GB of Wikipedia, to the Netflix series Biohackers. So far so good – they seem to have the encoding and decoding of binary data to and from synthesised strands of DNA down. The next stop? Creating a living library. In 2017, Harvard researchers used the Crispr system to insert DNA encoded with photos and a GIF of a galloping horse into live E.coli bacteria. Crispr is of course the revolutionary molecular tool that combines special proteins and RNA molecules to precisely cut and edit DNA. Even after multiple generations of bacterial growth, they were able to recover the GIF by sequencing bacterial genomes.

DNA storing was always perceived as slow and expensive, but experts are already predicting that, with the right investment, costs could drop to $100 per terabyte by 2025. Everyone, from Microsoft to a whole host of start-ups (Catalog Technologies, Iridia, Helixworks Technologies and Cache DNA) is taking part in the race to build commercially viable, DNA data storage technology.

Cache DNA’s aim is to provide a low-cost platform to store nucleic acids that are mission-critical to a number of areas, such as viral detection, ecological conservation and forensic analysis. In other words, should we land up with an atom bomb or meteorite scenario, these kinds of back-ups will save us from going back into the technology middle-ages. Meanwhile, Catalog is likening its system to a printing press that will synthesise batches of many different kinds of short DNA sequences. As you would scramble letters to form words, the original binary data is encoded by stitching together ‘DNA letters’ into billions of possible words. These sequences are then stored in teeny tiny powder pellets – ready for when you want it ‘read back’, even 100 years from now. Once we have these nanoparticles, just imagine where they’ll be inserted. This DoT storage process could hide useful data in everyday objects (steganography) or manufacture objects containing their own blueprint.

Thus far, DNA-based data encoding is likely to be a long-term storage option for ‘cold data’ – archiving vast amounts of information that don’t have to be regularly accessed. The prediction is that so-called ‘hot data’ – the very personal information we mentioned before – will be captured in other formats.

But who knows? Perhaps technology will advance faster than we think. And maybe, just maybe, instead of storing our most private data on data stickies or tiny glass coins, we’ll store it directly in our own bodies. Then again, maybe all Cassandra needed to do to protect her IP was to swallow biocompatible silica beads containing her files and make a quick trip to the ladies room before her meeting...