Empresa inovadora converte código genético humano em dispositivo de armazenamento por valor acessível de US$ 1.000

Especificamente for technology lovers and, of course, those who have spare money in their account. For “mere” US$ 1,000 (about R$ 5,000 in direct conversion), a French startup is offering a service that is unprecedented – and that we would only expect to see in futuristic science fiction movies. With the proposal of preserving memories beyond life, Biomemory promises to store a text note in your own DNA. Yes, like a pen drive!

It is amazing to say, but currently, DVDs and even pen drives are already considered things of the past. Does anyone remember cassette tapes or VHS? The new (and expensive) trend is to store digital data in human DNA – yes, this is already possible and it has a price.

The latest product from Biomemory is the DNA Card. With the same size as a regular credit card, the card can store up to 1K (one kilobyte) of data in text. It would be enough, for example, to store a short email or a longer tweet; all stored in a sequence of DNA. It is molecular computing reaching the conventional consumer.

A DNA card instead of a pen drive

So, how do you store data in human DNA? The complex process translates the text (or note) into a series of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs – the building blocks of DNA. The personalized strand is then synthesized, dried, and sealed in a card, protected from the wear and tear of time and technology itself.

As distant from reality as it may seem, this form of data storage is quite promising. Human DNA is very dense in terms of data storage capacity. For example, a single gram can hold about 215,000 terabytes – enough to archive the entire Netflix library in a drop of liquid!

But it’s not that simple. Currently, the Biomemory Card takes about eight hours to encode just one kilobyte of text. Besides that, it’s not cheap. The data storage method used by the French startup is not necessarily new, what is attention-grabbing is turning the technology into a product for the end consumer.