Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

I'm an author of the paper. The title of this article is misleading; first, we encoded 650kB and made 70 billion copies... second, those 70 billion copies weigh 1 milligram... third, it's really only meant for archival purposes as it's immutable and not random access... fourth, it's expensive right now (at least this might be a solvable problem).

It's weird when you read about tech advances that are so profound, you have to stop and consider the philosophical implications. I have a dime on my desk that probably weighs 2 grams... something that small could contain more raw data than a person could possibly read in their entire life... that could contain 1.4 million hours of cd quality audio. Insane!

I have a feeling this will be like when we had 16 MB of ram and thought 64 MB was a lot, now it's not uncommon to have 16 GB. Or how we had 32 MB hard drives, thinking we'd never need more space, and now we can get a 3,145,728 MB hard drive for next to nothing. What if we go from thinking 10 TB is a nice handy amount of space, to having 10,000 TB and still running…

This is from 2012, so there is most likely newer research out there... Previous Discussion (with 130 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396931 Original Source (not extremetech.com blogspam): http://hms.harvard.edu/news/writing-book-dna-8-16-12 Paper Abstract: "Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA" http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6102/1628.abstract The actual paper: http://arep.med.harvard.edu/pdf/Church_Science_12.pdf