[Music]
I could fit all movies ever made inside
of this tube if you can’t see it that’s
kind of the point
before we understand how this is
possible it’s important to understand
the value of this feat all of our
thoughts and actions these days through
photos and videos even our fitness
activities are stored as digital data
aside from running out of space on our
phones we rarely think about our digital
footprint but humanity has collectively
generated more data in the last few
years than all of preceding human
history big data has become a big
problem
Digital storage is really expensive and
none of these devices that we have
really stand the test of time there’s
this nonprofit website called the
Internet Archive in addition to free
books and movies you can access webpages
as far back as 1996 now this is very
tempting but I decided to go back and
look at the Ted websites very humble
beginnings as you can see it’s changed
quite a bit in the last 30 years so this
led me to the first ever Ted back in
1984 and it just so happened to be a
Sony executive explaining how a compact
disc works now it’s in its really
incredible to be able to go back in time
and access this moment it’s also really
fascinating that after 30 years after
that first Ted were still talking about
digital storage now if we look back
another 30 years IBM released the first
ever hard drive back in 1956 here it is
being loaded for shipping in front of a
small audience it held the equivalent of
one mp3 song and weight over one ton at
$10,000 a megabyte I don’t think anyone
in this room would be interested in
buying this thing
except maybe as a collector’s item but
it’s the best that we could do at the
time we’ve come such a long way in data
storage devices have evolved
dramatically but all media eventually
wear out or become obsolete if someone
handed you a floppy drive today to back
up your presentation you’d probably look
at them kind of strange maybe laugh but
you’d have no way to use the damn thing
these devices can no longer meet our
storage needs although some of them can
be repurposed all technology eventually
dies or is lost along with our data all
of our memories there’s this illusion
that the storage problem has been solved
but really we all just externalise it we
don’t worry about storing our emails and
our photos they’re just in the cloud but
behind the scenes storage is problematic
after all the cloud is just a lot of
hard drives most of recorded human
knowledge is now digital and there’s a
lot of it modern media lasts tens of
years if we’re lucky reading and writing
and exposure to moisture and heat wears
them out even more quickly we’re lucky
if we get a few years out of these
things man-made devices just are not
very reliable and quickly become
obsolete this was a popular storage
device in the 80s and 90s mostly for
storing cheesy pop songs yet the
important link between these two objects
is already being forgotten the more
advanced computers get the more data we
create storage has really been an issue
since that first ever hard drive and in
fact no media manufacturer in the world
will guarantee that you’ll be able to
recover your data with a exception of a
few costly solutions now most digital
data we could argue is not really
critical surely we could just delete it
but how can we really know
it’s important today we’ve learned so
much about human history from drawings
and writings and caves from stone
tablets we’ve deciphered languages from
the Rosetta Stone you know we’ll never
really have the whole story though our
data is our story even more so today we
won’t have our record recorded on stone
tablets but we don’t have to choose what
is important now there’s a way to store
it all we’ve been steadily improving
this flimsy technology from floppy disks
to flash drives but it’s not enough
these are pretty short-term solutions it
turns out that there’s a solution that’s
been around for a few billion years and
it’s actually in this tube DNA is
nature’s oldest storage device after all
it contains all the information
necessary to build and maintain a human
being but what makes DNA so great well
let’s take our own genome as an example
if we were to print out all three
billion ace t’s c’s and g’s on a you
know standard font standard format and
then we were to stack all of those
papers it would be about a hundred and
forty meters high somewhere between the
Statue of Liberty and the Washington
Monument now if we converted all those
A’s T’s and G’s to digital data to zeros
and ones it would total a few gigs and
that’s in each cell of our body we have
more than 30 trillion cells you get the
idea
DNA can store a ton of information in a
miniscule space DNA is also very durable
and it doesn’t even require electricity
to store it we know this because
scientists have recovered DNA from
ancient humans that lived hundreds of
thousands of years ago
one of those is Otzi the Iceman turns
out he’s Austrian you know scientists
were able to recover DNA from Otzi he
was found high well-preserved in the
mountains between Italy and Austria and
it turns out that he has living genetic
relatives
in Austria today so you one of you could
be a cousin of it see the point is that
we have a better chance of recovering
information from an ancient human than
we do from an old phone it’s also much
less likely that we’ll lose the ability
to read DNA than any single man-made
device every single new storage format
requires a new way to read it we’ll
always be able to read DNA if we can no
longer sequence we have bigger problems
than worrying about data storage storing
data on DNA is not new nature’s been
doing it for several billion years in
fact every living thing is a DNA storage
device but how do we store data on DNA
this is photo 51 it’s the first ever
photo of DNA taken about 60 years ago
this is around the time that that same
hard drive was released by IBM so really
our understanding of digital storage and
of DNA have co-evolved we first learned
to sequence or read DNA and very soon
after how to write it or synthesize it
this is much like how we learn a new
language and now we have the ability to
read write and copy DNA we do it in the
lab all the time
so anything really anything that can be
stored as zeros and ones can be stored
in DNA to store something digitally like
this photo we convert it to bits or
binary digits each pixel in a black and
white photo is simply a 0 or a 1 and we
can write DNA much like an inkjet
printer can print letters on a page we
just have to convert our data all of
those zeros and ones to a is t’s c’s and
g’s and then we send this to a synthesis
company so we write it we can store it
and when we want to recover our data we
just sequence it now the fun part of all
of this is deciding what files to
include so we’re serious scientists so
we had to include
manuscript for good posterity we also
included a $50 Amazon gift card don’t
get too excited it’s already been spent
someone decoded it as well as an
operating system one of the first movies
ever made and a pioneer plaque some of
you might have seen this it has a
depiction of a typical apparently male
and female and our approximate location
in the solar system in case the Pioneer
spacecraft ever encounters
extraterrestrials so once we decided
what sort of files we want to encode we
package up the data convert those zeros
and ones to a is t’s c’s and g’s and
then we just send this file off to a
synthesis company and this is what we
got back our files were in this tube all
we had to do was sequence it this all
sounds pretty straightforward but the
difference between a really cool fun
idea and something we can actually use
is overcoming these practical challenges
now while DNA is more robust than any
man-made device it’s not perfect it does
have some weaknesses so we recover our
message by sequencing the DNA and every
time data is retrieved we lose the DNA
that’s just part of the sequencing
process we don’t want to run out of data
but luckily there’s a way to copy the
DNA that’s even cheaper and easier than
seek then synthesizing it we actually
tested a way to make two hundred
trillion copies of our files and we
recovered all the data without error
so sequencing also introduces errors
into the into our DNA into the a’s t’s
c’s and g’s Nature has a way to deal
with this in our cells
you know our data is stored in synthetic
DNA in a tube so we had to find our own
way to overcome this problem we decided
to use an algorithm that was used to
stream videos when you’re streaming a
video you’re essentially trying to
recover the original video the original
file when we’re trying to recover our
original files were simply sequencing
but really both of these processes are
about recovering enough zeros and one
to put our data back together and so
because of our coding strategy we were
able to package up all of our data in a
way that allowed us to make millions and
trillions of copies and still always
recover all of our files back this is
the movie we encoded it’s one of the
first movies ever made and now the first
to be copied more than 200 trillion
times on DNA soon after our work was
published we persisted we participated
and it asked me anything on the website
reddit if you’re a fellow nerd you’re
very familiar with this website most
questions were thoughtful some were
comical for example one user wanted to
know when we would have a literal thumb
drive now the thing is our DNA already
stores everything needed to make us who
we are it’s a lot safer to store data on
DNA in a synthetic DNA in a tube writing
and reading data from DNA is obviously a
lot more time-consuming than just saving
all your files on a hard drive for now
so initially we should focus on
long-term storage most data are
ephemeral it’s really hard to grasp
what’s important today or what will be
important for future generations but the
point is we don’t have to decide today
there’s this great program by UNESCO
called the memory of the world program
it’s been created to preserve historical
materials that are considered a value to
all of humanity items are nominated to
be added to the collection including
that film that we encoded well a
wonderful way to preserve human heritage
it doesn’t have to be a choice instead
of asking the current generation us what
might be important in the future we
could store everything in DNA storage is
not just about how many bytes but how
well we can actually store the data and
recover it there’s always been this
tension between how much
data we can generate and how much we can
recover and how much we can store every
advance in writing data has required a
new way to read it we can no longer read
old media how many of you even have a
disk drive in your laptop never mind a
floppy drive this will never be the case
with DNA as long as we’re around DNA is
around and we’ll find a way to sequence
it archiving the world around us is part
of human nature this is the progress
we’ve made in digital storage in 60
years at a time when we were only
beginning to understand DNA yet we’ve
made similar progress in half that time
with DNA sequencers and as long as we’re
around DNA we’ll never be obsolete thank
you
[Applause]
you
I could fit all movies ever made inside
of this tube if you can’t see it that’s
kind of the point
before we understand how this is
possible it’s important to understand
the value of this feat all of our
thoughts and actions these days through
photos and videos even our fitness
activities are stored as digital data
aside from running out of space on our
phones we rarely think about our digital
footprint but humanity has collectively
generated more data in the last few
years than all of preceding human
history big data has become a big
problem
Digital storage is really expensive and
none of these devices that we have
really stand the test of time there’s
this nonprofit website called the
Internet Archive in addition to free
books and movies you can access webpages
as far back as 1996 now this is very
tempting but I decided to go back and
look at the Ted websites very humble
beginnings as you can see it’s changed
quite a bit in the last 30 years so this
led me to the first ever Ted back in
1984 and it just so happened to be a
Sony executive explaining how a compact
disc works now it’s in its really
incredible to be able to go back in time
and access this moment it’s also really
fascinating that after 30 years after
that first Ted were still talking about
digital storage now if we look back
another 30 years IBM released the first
ever hard drive back in 1956 here it is
being loaded for shipping in front of a
small audience it held the equivalent of
one mp3 song and weight over one ton at
$10,000 a megabyte I don’t think anyone
in this room would be interested in
buying this thing
except maybe as a collector’s item but
it’s the best that we could do at the
time we’ve come such a long way in data
storage devices have evolved
dramatically but all media eventually
wear out or become obsolete if someone
handed you a floppy drive today to back
up your presentation you’d probably look
at them kind of strange maybe laugh but
you’d have no way to use the damn thing
these devices can no longer meet our
storage needs although some of them can
be repurposed all technology eventually
dies or is lost along with our data all
of our memories there’s this illusion
that the storage problem has been solved
but really we all just externalise it we
don’t worry about storing our emails and
our photos they’re just in the cloud but
behind the scenes storage is problematic
after all the cloud is just a lot of
hard drives most of recorded human
knowledge is now digital and there’s a
lot of it modern media lasts tens of
years if we’re lucky reading and writing
and exposure to moisture and heat wears
them out even more quickly we’re lucky
if we get a few years out of these
things man-made devices just are not
very reliable and quickly become
obsolete this was a popular storage
device in the 80s and 90s mostly for
storing cheesy pop songs yet the
important link between these two objects
is already being forgotten the more
advanced computers get the more data we
create storage has really been an issue
since that first ever hard drive and in
fact no media manufacturer in the world
will guarantee that you’ll be able to
recover your data with a exception of a
few costly solutions now most digital
data we could argue is not really
critical surely we could just delete it
but how can we really know
it’s important today we’ve learned so
much about human history from drawings
and writings and caves from stone
tablets we’ve deciphered languages from
the Rosetta Stone you know we’ll never
really have the whole story though our
data is our story even more so today we
won’t have our record recorded on stone
tablets but we don’t have to choose what
is important now there’s a way to store
it all we’ve been steadily improving
this flimsy technology from floppy disks
to flash drives but it’s not enough
these are pretty short-term solutions it
turns out that there’s a solution that’s
been around for a few billion years and
it’s actually in this tube DNA is
nature’s oldest storage device after all
it contains all the information
necessary to build and maintain a human
being but what makes DNA so great well
let’s take our own genome as an example
if we were to print out all three
billion ace t’s c’s and g’s on a you
know standard font standard format and
then we were to stack all of those
papers it would be about a hundred and
forty meters high somewhere between the
Statue of Liberty and the Washington
Monument now if we converted all those
A’s T’s and G’s to digital data to zeros
and ones it would total a few gigs and
that’s in each cell of our body we have
more than 30 trillion cells you get the
idea
DNA can store a ton of information in a
miniscule space DNA is also very durable
and it doesn’t even require electricity
to store it we know this because
scientists have recovered DNA from
ancient humans that lived hundreds of
thousands of years ago
one of those is Otzi the Iceman turns
out he’s Austrian you know scientists
were able to recover DNA from Otzi he
was found high well-preserved in the
mountains between Italy and Austria and
it turns out that he has living genetic
relatives
in Austria today so you one of you could
be a cousin of it see the point is that
we have a better chance of recovering
information from an ancient human than
we do from an old phone it’s also much
less likely that we’ll lose the ability
to read DNA than any single man-made
device every single new storage format
requires a new way to read it we’ll
always be able to read DNA if we can no
longer sequence we have bigger problems
than worrying about data storage storing
data on DNA is not new nature’s been
doing it for several billion years in
fact every living thing is a DNA storage
device but how do we store data on DNA
this is photo 51 it’s the first ever
photo of DNA taken about 60 years ago
this is around the time that that same
hard drive was released by IBM so really
our understanding of digital storage and
of DNA have co-evolved we first learned
to sequence or read DNA and very soon
after how to write it or synthesize it
this is much like how we learn a new
language and now we have the ability to
read write and copy DNA we do it in the
lab all the time
so anything really anything that can be
stored as zeros and ones can be stored
in DNA to store something digitally like
this photo we convert it to bits or
binary digits each pixel in a black and
white photo is simply a 0 or a 1 and we
can write DNA much like an inkjet
printer can print letters on a page we
just have to convert our data all of
those zeros and ones to a is t’s c’s and
g’s and then we send this to a synthesis
company so we write it we can store it
and when we want to recover our data we
just sequence it now the fun part of all
of this is deciding what files to
include so we’re serious scientists so
we had to include
manuscript for good posterity we also
included a $50 Amazon gift card don’t
get too excited it’s already been spent
someone decoded it as well as an
operating system one of the first movies
ever made and a pioneer plaque some of
you might have seen this it has a
depiction of a typical apparently male
and female and our approximate location
in the solar system in case the Pioneer
spacecraft ever encounters
extraterrestrials so once we decided
what sort of files we want to encode we
package up the data convert those zeros
and ones to a is t’s c’s and g’s and
then we just send this file off to a
synthesis company and this is what we
got back our files were in this tube all
we had to do was sequence it this all
sounds pretty straightforward but the
difference between a really cool fun
idea and something we can actually use
is overcoming these practical challenges
now while DNA is more robust than any
man-made device it’s not perfect it does
have some weaknesses so we recover our
message by sequencing the DNA and every
time data is retrieved we lose the DNA
that’s just part of the sequencing
process we don’t want to run out of data
but luckily there’s a way to copy the
DNA that’s even cheaper and easier than
seek then synthesizing it we actually
tested a way to make two hundred
trillion copies of our files and we
recovered all the data without error
so sequencing also introduces errors
into the into our DNA into the a’s t’s
c’s and g’s Nature has a way to deal
with this in our cells
you know our data is stored in synthetic
DNA in a tube so we had to find our own
way to overcome this problem we decided
to use an algorithm that was used to
stream videos when you’re streaming a
video you’re essentially trying to
recover the original video the original
file when we’re trying to recover our
original files were simply sequencing
but really both of these processes are
about recovering enough zeros and one
to put our data back together and so
because of our coding strategy we were
able to package up all of our data in a
way that allowed us to make millions and
trillions of copies and still always
recover all of our files back this is
the movie we encoded it’s one of the
first movies ever made and now the first
to be copied more than 200 trillion
times on DNA soon after our work was
published we persisted we participated
and it asked me anything on the website
reddit if you’re a fellow nerd you’re
very familiar with this website most
questions were thoughtful some were
comical for example one user wanted to
know when we would have a literal thumb
drive now the thing is our DNA already
stores everything needed to make us who
we are it’s a lot safer to store data on
DNA in a synthetic DNA in a tube writing
and reading data from DNA is obviously a
lot more time-consuming than just saving
all your files on a hard drive for now
so initially we should focus on
long-term storage most data are
ephemeral it’s really hard to grasp
what’s important today or what will be
important for future generations but the
point is we don’t have to decide today
there’s this great program by UNESCO
called the memory of the world program
it’s been created to preserve historical
materials that are considered a value to
all of humanity items are nominated to
be added to the collection including
that film that we encoded well a
wonderful way to preserve human heritage
it doesn’t have to be a choice instead
of asking the current generation us what
might be important in the future we
could store everything in DNA storage is
not just about how many bytes but how
well we can actually store the data and
recover it there’s always been this
tension between how much
data we can generate and how much we can
recover and how much we can store every
advance in writing data has required a
new way to read it we can no longer read
old media how many of you even have a
disk drive in your laptop never mind a
floppy drive this will never be the case
with DNA as long as we’re around DNA is
around and we’ll find a way to sequence
it archiving the world around us is part
of human nature this is the progress
we’ve made in digital storage in 60
years at a time when we were only
beginning to understand DNA yet we’ve
made similar progress in half that time
with DNA sequencers and as long as we’re
around DNA we’ll never be obsolete thank
you
[Applause]
you
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