FUJISAWA, Japan — These days, data get stored on disks, computer
chips, hard drives and good old-fashioned paper. Scientists in
Japan see something far smaller and more durable — bacteria. The
four characters that represent the genetic coding in DNA work
much like digital data. Character combinations can stand for
specific letters and symbols — so codes in genomes can be
translated, or read, to produce music, text, video and other
content. While ink may fade and computers may crash, bacterial
information lasts as long as a species stays alive — possibly a
mind-boggling million years — according to Professor Masaru
Tomita, who heads the team of researchers at Keio University.
Tomita's team successfully inserted into a common bacterium
Albert Einstein's famous "E=MC2" equation and "1905," the year
the Nobel Prize-winning physicist published the special theory
of relativity. Genetic coding is so massive that information —
say, a Shakespeare play — can be stashed away somewhere in the
gene without affecting an or