Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.
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What a Technocracy needs: infinite data storage
“…DNA storage has been estimated to have a longevity of 2,000 years.” [2016 article about Microsoft and Twist Bioscience, linked below]
2017, Dina Zielinski TED talk : “All the World’s Data in DNA” https://www.ted.com/talks/dina_zielinski_how_we_can_store_digital_data_in_dna
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“As humanity creates more and more digital data, archiving the information on hard drives presents economic and ecological challenges. Today an ever-expanding network of large data-storage centers already accounts for more than 2 percent of all electricity consumption in the United States.
“In an effort to develop cheaper and more sustainable storage methods, some scientists have begun experimenting with putting data onto nature’s original hard drive: DNA. In the past five years, a number of research groups have shown that synthetic forms of DNA can be encoded with words, images, or music just as easily as with biological information.
“Now [2017] Yaniv Erlich, an assistant professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering, and Dina Zielinski, a bioinformatics researcher at the New York Genome Center, have achieved a major breakthrough in this area, developing a technique that has enabled them to fit 60 percent more digital data onto a given strand of DNA than was previously possible. In a recent issue of the journal Science, the researchers describe how they managed to squeeze a trove of digital content — including a copy of the 1895 Lumière brothers film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, a full computer operating system, a $50 Amazon gift card, a computer virus, and a 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon — onto a speck of DNA so small that if it existed in a living organism, it would likely carry the blueprints for just a handful of proteins [like a virus]. They say that their technique could theoretically enable scientists to cram millions of megabytes of information onto a single gram of DNA.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest-density storage device ever created,” says Erlich.
Erlich and Zielinski’s storage technique is also very reliable. The researchers say that even after they induced the DNA to make copies of itself, and then forced those copies to make copies, and so on, the resulting double helices were found to contain flawless replicas of the original data.
“ ‘We really tortured the content to see if there was anything we could do to make errors appear,’ Erlich says. ‘But each time we read the files back onto our computers, they worked perfectly.’
“Downloading data onto DNA is still too expensive for commercial use; it cost Erlich and Zielinski about $9,000 to store and retrieve theirs. But the researchers suspect that if they and other scientists can continue to improve the efficiency with which they translate computer code, with its long strings of 0s and 1s, into the chemical language of DNA, made up of various combinations of the four nucleotides adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T), the strategy could eventually provide a cost-efficient option for archiving everything from Facebook posts to historical documents.”
https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/future-data-storage-our-dna
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“How We’re Building the World’s Largest Family Tree” –Yaniv Erlich, 2018– https://www.ted.com/talks/yaniv_erlich_how_we_re_building_the_world_s_largest_family_tree/transcript
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“Team Erlich” report [2017] on their DNA storage retrieval:
…”Recent studies have made large strides in developing DNA storage schemes by exploiting the advent of massive parallel synthesis of DNA oligos and the high throughput of sequencing platforms. However, most of these experiments reported small gaps and errors in the retrieved information. Here, we report a strategy to store and retrieve DNA information that is robust and approaches the theoretical maximum of information that can be stored per nucleotide. The success of our strategy lies in careful adaption of recent developments in coding theory to the domain specific constrains of DNA storage. To test our strategy, we stored an entire computer operating system, a movie, a gift card, and other computer files with a total of 2.14×106 bytes in DNA oligos. We were able to fully retrieve the information without a single error even with a sequencing throughput on the scale of a single tile of an Illumina sequencing flow cell. To further stress our strategy, we created a deep copy of the data by PCR amplifying the oligo pool in a total of nine successive reactions, reflecting one complete path of an exponential process to copy the file 218×1012 times. We perfectly retrieved the original data with only five million reads. Taken together, our approach opens the possibility of highly reliable DNA-based storage that approaches the information capacity of DNA molecules and enables virtually unlimited data retrieval.” https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/074237v2
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“They [Team Erlich] say DNA Fountain, so named because it uses fountain codes, which are used for video streaming to mobile devices ‘approaches the Shannon capacity while providing robustness against data corruption’. According to Science Daily, they used DNA Fountain to generate 72,000 DNA strands or oligos that were sent to Twist Bioscience, the DNA synthesis firm that supplied Microsoft’s synthetic DNA… As the researchers highlight, DNA storage in this study cost $3,500 per megabyte. However, they see the cost falling with improvements to DNA synthesis chemistry, as well as ‘quick-and-dirty oligo synthesis methods’ that consume less machine time.” https://www.zdnet.com/article/dna-data-storage-landmark-now-its-215-petabytes-per-gram-or-over-100-million-movies/
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Genome_Center
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“Yaniv Erlich is an Israeli-American scientist. He is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and the Chief Science Officer of MyHeritage… Erlich was born in Israel. He earned BSc in Brain Sciences in 2006 from Tel Aviv University and a PhD in bioinformatics in 2010 from Watson School of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. From 2010 to 2015, Erlich was a Fellow at the Whitehead Institute, MIT. Since 2015, he leads a lab at Columbia University in computational genomics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaniv_Erlich
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“…DNA storage has been estimated to have a longevity of 2,000 years.” https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-buys-10-million-dna-molecules-to-try-fitting-todays-sprawling-data-vaults-on-a-match-head/
DNA Data Storage Alliance Launches With Illumina …
By Bio-IT World Staff December 1, 2020 | Twist Bioscience Corporation, Illumina, and Western Digital announced an alliance last month with Microsoft to advance the field of DNA data storage.
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Illumina is mentioned here: previous blog post ‘Biology is Nanotechnology’
https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2021/01/13/biology-is-nanotechnology/
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“DNA is an incredible molecule that, by its very nature, provides ultra-high-density storage for thousands of years,” said Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience… By 2024, 30% of digital businesses will mandate DNA storage trials, addressing the exponential growth of data poised to overwhelm existing storage technology… DNA Data Storage Alliance plans to develop use cases in various markets and industries as well as promote and educate the larger storage community to promote adoption of this future solution…
About Illumina
Illumina is …the global leader in DNA sequencing…
About Western Digital
Western Digital creates environments for data to thrive. As a leader in data infrastructure, the company is driving the innovation needed to help customers capture, preserve, access and transform an ever-increasing diversity of data… Our data-centric solutions are comprised of the Western Digital®, G-Technology™, SanDisk®, and WD® brands.
About Twist Bioscience Corporation
Twist Bioscience is a leading and rapidly growing synthetic biology and genomics company that has developed a disruptive DNA synthesis platform to industrialize the engineering of biology. The core of the platform is a proprietary technology that pioneers a new method of manufacturing synthetic DNA by “writing” DNA on a silicon chip. Twist is leveraging its unique technology to manufacture a broad range of synthetic DNA-based products, including synthetic genes, tools for next-generation sequencing (NGS) preparation, and antibody libraries…” https://investors.twistbioscience.com/news-releases/news-release-details/twist-bioscience-illumina-and-western-digital-form-alliance
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