DNA may soon be used to store computer data

DNA IS THEDNADNA oldest information-storage system known. It predates every other, from pencil and paper to computer hard drives, by billions of years. But attempts to employ it to store data generated by people, as opposed to data needed to bring those people (and every other living thing) into being in the first place, have failed.The reason is not so much technological difficulty as cost. Encoding a single gigabyte in would run up a bill of several million dollars. Doing so on a hard drive costs less than a cent. Catalog, a biotechnology firm in Boston, hopes to bring the cost of data-storage below $10 per gigabyte. That is still on the pricey side. But for really large storage requirements a second ratio also comes into play: gigabytes stored per cubic metre.