A book has been written in DNA and read back

In 2012 a team encoded a book of about 53,000 words, and images, into DNA, stored it, and read it back with a few errors per million bits.

George Church, Yuan Gao, and Sriram Kosuri converted a digital file — an HTML draft of a book, with images — into a sequence of DNA bases, synthesised it as short strands, and recovered the file by sequencing. At the density of the molecule, the amount of data that fits in a gram is astronomical. That sentence is about the chemistry. It is not about a product. Synthesis and sequencing are slow and expensive beside a disc, and a gram of DNA in a tube is not a gram of a working archive, once you count the machines that write and read it.

DNA is attractive for a different reason than speed. It is stable when it is dry and cold, it can be copied with biology’s own tools, and the reader is a technology we are already improving for medicine. An archive that must last centuries and be touched rarely is the job people actually propose. An archive that must answer in a millisecond is not.