Paleontologists routinely resurrect and sequence DNA from woolly
mammoths and other long extinct species. Future paleontologists,
or librarians, may do much the same to pull up Shakespeare's
sonnets, listen to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream"
speech, or view photos. Researchers in the United Kingdom report
today that they've encoded these works and others in DNA and
later sequenced the genetic material to reconstruct the written,
audio, and visual information. The new work isn't the first
example of large-scale storage of digital information in DNA.
Last year, researchers led by bioengineers Sriram Kosuri and
George Church of Harvard Medical School reported that they
stored a copy of one of Church's books in DNA, among other
things, at a density of about 700 terabits per gram, more than
six orders of magnitude more dense than conventional data
storage on a computer hard disk. Now, researchers led by
molecular biologists Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney of the
European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Hi