Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction!

[vineyarddawg]

Well, truth is copying what Brandon wrote, anyway. 

 

(If you don't want to click, the story is about scientists storing data inside human DNA. In other words, the plot of Legion:Skin Deep.)

Edited February 17, 2015 by vineyarddawg

[Kobold King]

We all knew this would happen eventually. Brandon Sanderson's writing is so awesome, it's beginning to issue harmonics down the quantum strings and altering reality on a base level.

 

Right now, this manifests as technology being subtly steered towards his more Earth-like stories. Once the third Mistborn trilogy has been finished, the Milky Way galaxy will become a carbon copy of the Cosmere.

[king of nowhere]

it's not new, at least to me (I work in the nucleic acids field). the potential to store inromation in the dna has existed for at least a couple of decades, since we learned to make automatic synthesizers that can assemble strands of dna with good speed and yield.

 

However, it's not so easy as that.

first, as the article said, there is the cost. those synthesizers require a lot of solvents and reagents to work, and they need to be in very high purity, which makes them very expensive.

Second, reading it is also expensive. you need to degrade those silica shells first, then analyze them. to the best of my knowledge, reading a sequence of dna requires extensive preparation done by highly qualified personnel to do it. You can't just do it on your pc.

Third, we are limited in our capability of making long sequences. those DNA synthesizers have an efficiency that is slightly above 99% for each base added. Try that for 300 bases. Now try that for the 4 million bases it would take to store a single megabyte of infomration.

Fourth, reading it destroys it. the techniques to read DNA all require its degradation. Sure, you can make another copy of it after that, but the cost keeps growing.

Fifth, the time factor. Reading a human-lenght DNA (750 megabytes) takes arounnd overnight. A DNA synthesizer can add one base (2 bits of information) in a bit less than one minute. SO encrypting your data in DNA is going to take a lifetime.

 

All those aren't simple technical difficulties that can be solved with a bit of research. they are hard limits to our current DNA-manipulating technology. To go above that level we'd need to master the chemistry of life, to make artificial proteins. We are far from that. So very far. We had plenty of success in biochemistry with replicating what we already found in nature, we even made something new by putting together different bits from her and there, but are nowhere near being able to replicate it. We are like rennaissance scientist who had been given an unlimited supply of space shuttles to tinker with. We learned to disassemble and to assemble them, we learned to fly them around a bit, but we don't have the capacity to make starships of our own. I think it is at least as far as the space elevator.

 

So, while storing information in DNA is possible, it is far from practical. Not even spies could make use of it. Sure, a nanoparticle coontaining the information stored in DNA is sure to escape detection, but to make it you'll need plenty of chemical stuff that is not found on a grochery store.

 

Long story short, don't expect that to happen on a commercial level anytime soon. The title "death of the hard drive" is as much accurate as "death of the walking shoes" would be for the construction of the first prototype steam engine. Sorry to spoil your fun.

 

P.S. I haven't read legion, so I don't know how realistic the plot is. I'm pretty sure, however, that brandon will have made a thorough research of it.

Edited February 17, 2015 by king of nowhere

[Cheese United]

We all knew this would happen eventually. Brandon Sanderson's writing is so awesome, it's beginning to issue harmonics down the quantum strings and altering reality on a base level.

 

Right now, this manifests as technology being subtly steered towards his more Earth-like stories. Once the third Mistborn trilogy has been finished, the Milky Way galaxy will become a carbon copy of the Cosmere.

Good.