Science Journal 1: DNA information Storage
DNA Information Storage
In short, this article discussed how a team of two scientists at Harvard,
George Church and Sri Kosuri, have successfully been able to store 5.5 petabits
of information onto a single gram of DNA.
The article then goes on to provide several comparisons in order to gain
a better view of just how big of an achievement this is. To attain the same level of storage, one must
use 233 harddrives with 3 TB of storage, which, at a weighty 150 kilograms,
would make DNA storage look atomic! DNA
storage is quite useful because it is very dense and long lasting. Also, the whole process of putting
information onto DNA takes less than a day, which is useful for huge
corporations, such as Microsoft, who have thousands of bytes of information
that they need to store in databses.
Upon first discovering this article, I looked at it to find any signs of
bias. Though bias may be unintentional,
it can also be quite detrimental to the reader since it gives them an
impression of an idea that might not be true.
The website I found this article had a “.com” ending, making me slightly
suspicious of the trueness of its content.
However, upon further investigation, I found that the author of the
article had done many things to increase the credibility of the article such as
quoting the researchers in many places and providing a link to the full
research paper. I think that the article
was slightly biased in that in mainly provided advantages of DNA storage. This might be due to the fact that the name
of the website is “extremescience”, so they would try to make the science seem
more “extreme.” I found another copy of
this article on a Harvard website, with the ending “.edu”. This article was slightly more detailed than
the first; however it too promoted the achievements of the scientists. This is probably because the website is
affiliated with Harvard, and so are the scientists.
One of the things that I really
enjoyed about the article was that it provided many points of comparison in
order to help readers gain a better understanding of the magnitude of the
researchers’ achievement. To many
people, the words “5.5 petabytes” don’t mean a lot. I myself had to use Google to see exactly how
a petabyte compares to the other units of information. Being an IBT student, information storage
comes up a lot in my everyday life, and so this article had a really big impact
on me. It amazes me to think of how far
scientists have come in the field of information storage. I remember using floppy disks to store
information, and having those slowly change to CDs and then to USBs. Around
21 Exabytes (1 million petabytes) of information goes through the internet
daily, and with the improvement of DNA storage, people could store massive
archives of information. Every piece of
media, books, movies, music, etc., can be stored for later usage and, at the
current rate, probably not take up more than a small room. This article was quite easy to understand,
but it required me to do some more research in regards to how DNA is
organized. This DNA storage looks to be
one of the early attempts at mass information storage, and I am eager to see
the advancements that will be soon made.
This new capacity of information
storage can be both negative and positive. Though it will reduce the amount of resources
used, it will also decrease the amount of privacy people have and increase the
amount of information that passes in front of us each day. Retrieving footage from video cameras used to
be an issue since companies would get rid of tapes due to storage issues. Now, people can store thousands of hours of
video on a single gram of DNA. This
might result in every street corner being monitored, causing some people to
feel that their privacy has been violated.
Another issue with DNA storage is that it might cause an increase in
information. Though information isn’t
bad, being bombarded by stories, ads, and interesting articles cause attention
spans to shorten. People might develop
issues with focus, though focus is what the scientists at Harvard needed in
order to achieve DNA information storage.
The problem of information storage reminds me about the problem of
electricity storage. Many types of
energy sources provide a lot of electricity which goes to waste since there is
no way of storing so much power. Like
information, we might be able to find the solution to electricity storage in
something basic and fundamental, such as DNA.
In short, this article discussed how a team of two scientists at Harvard,
George Church and Sri Kosuri, have successfully been able to store 5.5 petabits
of information onto a single gram of DNA.
The article then goes on to provide several comparisons in order to gain
a better view of just how big of an achievement this is. To attain the same level of storage, one must
use 233 harddrives with 3 TB of storage, which, at a weighty 150 kilograms,
would make DNA storage look atomic! DNA
storage is quite useful because it is very dense and long lasting. Also, the whole process of putting
information onto DNA takes less than a day, which is useful for huge
corporations, such as Microsoft, who have thousands of bytes of information
that they need to store in databses.
Upon first discovering this article, I looked at it to find any signs of
bias. Though bias may be unintentional,
it can also be quite detrimental to the reader since it gives them an
impression of an idea that might not be true.
The website I found this article had a “.com” ending, making me slightly
suspicious of the trueness of its content.
However, upon further investigation, I found that the author of the
article had done many things to increase the credibility of the article such as
quoting the researchers in many places and providing a link to the full
research paper. I think that the article
was slightly biased in that in mainly provided advantages of DNA storage. This might be due to the fact that the name
of the website is “extremescience”, so they would try to make the science seem
more “extreme.” I found another copy of
this article on a Harvard website, with the ending “.edu”. This article was slightly more detailed than
the first; however it too promoted the achievements of the scientists. This is probably because the website is
affiliated with Harvard, and so are the scientists. 
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