It&#x27;s painful to read the NYT write about something you know about:<p><i>It would also address a glaring Achilles’ heel at the heart of microelectronic data storage systems: Magnetic disks, tape and even optical storage systems safely store information at most for only a handful of decades.</i><p>It&#x27;s really not a glaring Achilles heel.  This is a solved (for the most part) problem - see <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mdisc.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mdisc.com&#x2F;</a> for a product which can archive your data a reasonable cost for centuries, and <i>much</i> more conveniently than trying to store&#x2F;recall from DNA.<p>Here are some of the endurance tests they put the mdic through -  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.esystor.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;China_Lake_Full_Report.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.esystor.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;China_Lake_Full_Report.pdf</a>.  I would be interested in seeing how DNA storage stood up to that sort of testing.<p>The ability to store data in DNA is cool, and it&#x27;s neat that the teams are making progress - but it&#x27;s important to put the progress into context right now.