Scientists Encoded The Entire Wizard of Oz Into DNA
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- DNA can store far more data than a magnetic hard drive, but the technology is limited because the genetic material is prone to errors.
- Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have come up with a way to store information in strands of DNA, while also correcting those errors.
- To prove it, they’ve put the entirety of The Wizard of Oz— translated into Esperanto— into strands of DNA, with greater accuracy than prior methods.
When the Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977, ready to study the outer limits of our solar system, they brought with them two golden phonograph records that each contained an assemblage of sounds and images meant to represent life on Earth. But in the future, the perfect next-gen space capsule could be found within our bodies.
That’s because DNA is millions of times more efficient at storing data than your laptop’s magnetic hard drive. Since DNA can store data far more densely than silicon, you could squeeze all of the data in the world inside just a few grams of it.
“Because DNA has been chosen by all of life as the information storage medium of choice…it turns out to be very robust,” Ilya Finkelstein, an associate professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin, tells Popular Mechanics. “ Long after our magnetic storage becomes obsolete, nature will still be using DNA.”
Finkelstein is part of a team at the University of Texas at Austin who are pushing the limits on DNA-based storage methods. While this research area at the intersection of molecular biology and computer science has been around since the 1980s, scientists have struggled to find a way to correct the errors that DNA can be so prone to making.
In a new paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Finkelstein and company detail their new error correction method, which they tested out on a classic novel. They were able to store the entirety of The Wizard of Oz , translated into Esperanto, with more accuracy than prior DNA storage methods ever could have. We’re on the yellow brick road toward the future of data storage.
Archived from Popular Mechanics on 2025-02-09.