The newest data-storage device? DNA

Karen Weintraub, Special for USA TODAY | USATODAY

A team of British researchers has used DNA — the genetic building blocks of life — to record Shakespeare's sonnets and excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.

The experiment, along with another published late last year, shows that what we think about as life's alphabet can also be used to preserve our greatest creations, perhaps for thousands or tens of thousands of years.

"The idea that DNA, which people think of as a biological molecule, can be used as a physical storage tape in a non-biological function is pretty incredible," said Drew Endy, a Stanford University bioengineer who was not involved in the work.

"It's a really nice example of how a fundamental investment inhave the capacity to read that information regardless of how technology changes over the next millennia.

The first team, a group at Harvard University led by geneticist George Church, published its results in Science in September.

Europeans Ewan Birney and Nick Goldman, whose study appears in Nature, said they first thought of the idea in a pub, when they were discussing the challenges of archiving vast amounts of data on costly magnetic tape or hard drives. By the second beer, they were sketching their idea out on napkins.

Church, who was involved in the Human Genome Project, said when people would ask him where we would store all the information his genome scans would turn up, "I would respond glibly, well, DNA's not a bad place to store it."

But both groups