🍄 The Alphabet Of Life

DNA as the eternal ledger of memory.

Jun 13, 2025

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Long before we captured thoughts in ink or etched knowledge onto silicon, nature had already written her masterpiece. The double helix—spiraling, infinite, precise—held the blueprint not only for life, but for the act of remembering itself. DNA, the original library, encodes the silent symphony of existence, weaving our past into the present with a code that whispers across generations.

Now, as our digital world threatens to collapse under the weight of its own excess, we turn back to this primal script—the alphabet of life—to rescue memory from its fragile, fleeting mediums. For in DNA, we glimpse a vessel capable of carrying humanity's vast and growing story far beyond the lifespans of servers, data farms, or even civilizations themselves. Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander…

Biological flash drive

The notion of storing digital data in DNA is not fundamentally new, a quest that researchers lead by a pioneer in the field, George Church, have been gripping with for several years. While scientists have already proven that texts and images can be encoded into DNA, the ability to retrieve specific files from this molecular sea has remained elusive—until now. Researchers at MIT and the Broad Institute have pioneered a method: encapsulating data within microscopic silica spheres, each tagged with DNA barcodes for targeted retrieval. This advancement transforms DNA data libraries from theoretical constructs into vast, navigable repositories, capable of scaling to 10²⁰ files.

“The idea of storing digital information in the pattern of adenines (As), thymines (Ts), cytosines (Cs) and guanines (Gs) in synthetic DNA has been floating around for decades,” writes Nina Notman for Chemistry World. “It offers a more compact and long-lasting alternative to binary code (the strings of zeroes and ones) used in traditional computing.” The last dozen or so years has seen a flurry of robust examples of the storage of DNA data in action. Other demonstration projects include storing Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, part of an audio file of Martin Luther King’s 1963 ‘I have a dream’ speech and the first episode of the Netflix series Biohackers.

An ancient molecule refined by eons of evolution, DNA may now serve as the vessel for humanity's digital future. A single coffee mug of DNA could theoretically hold all of the world's data—compressed into molecular silence, stable across epochs, virtually eternal. Unlike flash memory, DNA requires no energy to preserve encoded information. It simply exists. Evolving from the language of biology into the scaffolding of digital eternity—a living architecture where information transcends its mortal origins. Each strand holds not only the code of life but the breath of civilizations, waiting in molecular stillness to be awakened.

The future is molecular

DNA data storage doesn’t simply represent a technological breakthrough—it signals a potential shift in how human civilization organizes, safeguards, and transmits knowledge across generations.

• Companies will no longer be constrained by physical server farms or costly energy consumption. DNA storage offers ultra-dense, energy-free data preservation, revolutionizing cloud services, archiving, and digital asset management.

• Sovereign data policies will evolve to regulate the ownership, privacy, and access to encoded biological information.

• Cybersecurity will face new molecular dimensions of encryption, retrieval protocols, and information warfare.

• Education curriculums will incorporate bioinformatics, molecular coding, and hybrid data sciences as core disciplines.

• Ancient and modern knowledge could be preserved side by side, accessible to future generations through molecular libraries that withstand geopolitical collapse or technological obsolescence.

• Humanity may ultimately evolve new custodianship models for managing knowledge as a planetary commons rather than as isolated national or corporate assets.

DNA data storage may become the vault not only for information, but for civilization itself—a molecular bridge between past, present, and the unimaginable futures ahead.

What else we are wandering…

🖼️ DNA Portrait
A portrait of Rosalind Franklin, one of the pioneers in DNA research, is a black acrylic ink painting of Franklin over a collage of nearly 2000 photographs, reportedly hanging on the wall of the Bill and Melinda Gates Center for Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. The images are all snapshots of precious memories submitted by the public to Luis Ceze, a professor of computer science and engineering—but in reality, the acrylic ink contains synthetic DNA encoded with all the digital information needed to reproduce each photograph in the collage. (via Chemistry World)

🎶 DNA music sequencer
Scientists have shown that they have figured out a way to encode music from the popular Super Mario Brothers game into 12 synthetics strands of DNA and play it back on the computer. Researchers used a well known method from the computer chip manufacturing industry and adapting it to DNA sequencing. The method uses light to induce a chemical change thereby transferring images onto a substrate, or the surface of a material—like working with film in the dark room, where a photographer uses light to expose image. (via Forbes)

📷 DNA may be your new photo library
Scientists have already demonstrated that they can encode images and pages of text as DNA. However, an easy way to pick out the desired file from a mixture of many pieces of DNA will also be needed. Bathe and his colleagues have now demonstrated one way to do that, by encapsulating each data file into a 6-micrometer particle of silica, which is labeled with short DNA sequences that reveal the contents. Using this approach, the researchers demonstrated that they could accurately pull out individual images stored as DNA sequences from a set of 20 images. (via MIT News)

📈 ChatGPT for DNA data recover?
Artificial intelligence can read data stored in DNA strands within 10 minutes rather than the days required for previous methods, bringing DNA storage closer to practical use in computing. Daniella Bar-Lev at the University of California, San Diego and team developed an AI-powered method called DNAformer that can quickly and accurately decode jumbled DNA sequences. The system includes a deep learning AI model trained to reconstruct DNA sequences, a separate computer algorithm that identifies and corrects errors and a third decoding algorithm that converts everything back into digital data while fixing any remaining mistakes. (via New Scientist)

🧠 AI-derived DNA?
Marking a major milestone for biomolecular sciences, a team of researchers — made up of scientists from UC Berkeley, Arc Institute, UCSF, Stanford University and NVIDIA — have developed a machine learning model trained on the DNA of over 100,000 species across the entire tree of life. The model, called Evo 2, can identify patterns in gene sequences across disparate organisms that experimental researchers would typically need years to uncover. In addition to identifying disease-causing mutations in human genes, Evo 2 can design new genomes that are as long as the genomes of simple bacteria. (via Berkeley Engineering website)

🦴 Old bones, new storage
Translating DNA into a physical data storage system is challenging because preventing synthetic DNA from degrading usually requires extreme conditions. Yet, it’s possible to sequence DNA from bone that is thousands of years old. “Fossil records show us there is a stability that gets added to DNA by being in bone.” That’s the idea behind the research of Robert Grass from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, that showed drying solid state DNA with three different inorganic salts could elevate the potential of using DNA to store data. (via Chemistry World)

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