Bacterial Backup
The New Scientist brings us the sci-fi story of the day, about long-term information storage using bacterial DNA. Apparently, they encoded the lyrics to “It’s a Small World” as a DNA sequence and stuck it into a particularly hardy strain of bacteria. 100 generations later, the message was still there. I would hope that my own cells would reject such tripe out of hand…
January 11th, 2003 at 10:34 pm
Wait a sec. (reading the article) Protecting information in case of catastrophe? You mean, the kind of catastrophe that will wipe out all their laptops and desktops but leave intact the kind of equipment needed to read a floppy disk the size of a single cell?