In the history, human civilization progresses rapidly because of the invention of paper and digital information which help people to transform information more effectively and store more information. The digital information continues to accumulate higher density and the longer-term storage solution is necessary (Church et al, 2012, p1628). In the recent 5 years, the information explosion exceeded our expectations. The space of human information is now doubling every 18 months (Velshi, 2017). In order to solve the problem of information explosion and seek the new development opportunity for human information technology and the human civilization, a new way to store, access and communicate information is necessary.
I did some researches on the information, then find the bio-material (DNA) will be a good material for the next information era. According to Church et al (2012), There are many advantages of DNA storage, DNA storage is very dense 455 exabytes per gram of single-stranded DNA and Unlike most digital storage media, DNA storage is not restricted to a planar layer and is often readable despite in nonideal conditions over thousands years. DNA’s essential biological role provides access to natural reading and writing enzymes and ensures that DNA will remain a readable standard for the foreseeable future. Moreover, the cost of DNA synthesis and sequencing is dropping more faster than the electronic media. In 2016, a strategy named DNA fountain has been introduced. Erlich and Zielinski stored a full computer operating system and movies into DNA.So, There is a great possibility that DNA information technology will be used in real life in ten years.
DNA information is just a technology and storage is the first step. We will think more about people how to use it to access and communicate the information. For example, before the Internet has been introduced, although we have the technology of digital information, we do not know how to share the digital information and to give more value to the digital information, as well as we did not anticipate the huge change which was caused by the digital information. We will think about the society impacts of the Bio-information as well.
Reference
Church, G., Gao, Y. and Kosuri, S. (2012). Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA. Science, 337(6102), pp.1628-1628.
Erlich, Y. and Zielinski, D. (2017). DNA Fountain enables a robust and efficient storage architecture. Science, 355(6328), pp.950-954.
TED (2017). How Fake News Grows in a Post-Fact World, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkAUqQZCyrM [Accessed 9 Mar. 2017].