Crossing should be scientific and gentle

Gurtej Sandhu, senior fellow and director at Micron Technology, is exploring whether DNA could be a storage medium.

DNA storage, or what he calls nucleic acid memory (NAM) .

Sandhu believes that DNA can last for thousands to millions of years, and it can store archival data for the world using much less space and energy. In other words, NAM can serve as a time capsule for a massive record .

This seems like something out of a science fiction novel. In the famous video game "Assassin's Creed," players can travel back in time through their ancestors' DNA and relive their memories and lives. Sandhu's children have also played this game.

What seems like science fiction sometimes turns out to be provable once we learn more about science.

So far, researchers have used DNA to store books, songs and videos in a storage device the size of a sugar cube.

How do you store things in DNA?

In digital space, we store information as either 0 or 1. In DRAM, it’s a charge or no charge command. Same thing in NAND. Each bit is represented by a storage unit of information, 0 or 1, called a binary system. If you have two bits—01 or 10—then that’s 2 to the power of 2—4 pieces of information. If you have four bits, then it’s 2 to the power of 4—16 different states .

DNA is very interesting. It has four bases. Four strands of DNA can store a lot of information, and each strand can represent a combination of four different states.

This is a great example of information density . In a given amount of material - every transistor on every device right now stores information. In magnetism, every domain is a certain size. In DNA, every molecule stores this information, so the density of information is very high. However, there is still a lot of work to be done on how this will actually work. How will this information be accessed and manipulated? It will not look like a hard drive, it will look very different.

How to define the information stored in DNA?

If you store information in DNA, does it become part of the organism, or does it become some kind of electronic organism?

In Sandhu's view, this is a relative statement. Now people have developed a lot of synthetic DNA. Even nature may have gone through many designed DNAs to eventually form life as we know it. Even the DNA in our bodies, how much is support material? How much is the program of life? There is no way to know.

But there is a lot of synthetic DNA . These are organic molecules that are similar to DNA in function, but they don't mimic any life form as we know it, or anything that can sustain life. This might be a way to go. We have to make a lot of DNA, and the DNA in our bodies is a natural miracle of millions of years of evolution. It might not be the cheapest DNA for this application. We might build designer DNA molecules in a chemistry lab and use them, and they're not necessarily related to life as we know it.

If you go back 1,500 years to the Vedic era in India, they would tell you that our bodies have eight different types of memory . The memory we store in our brains - the things we learn over time - is just one of those eight. Their view is that our bodies - the skin, the facial features, for example, are actually the memory of your ancestors - no matter how many generations you want to go back. Our bodies store a lot of information, but it's just a memory of a period of time. We call it evolution, it's a feature that has been passed down through our generations.

In the next issue, we will continue to share Sandhu and his Micron colleagues ' thoughts on the research.

This article is compiled based on the interview records between VentureBeat and Gurtej Sandhu. Click to read the original text to learn more.