If you’re a news bug, as I am, when you hear the word DNA, one can immediately recollect the recently-concluded Bihar elections. When Bihari politicians fling about this three-lettered acronym as if it were cannon fodder, you quickly realise that the core concept of DNA has become pretty commonplace.
We are all familiar with the fact that Deoxyribonucleic Acid (or DNA) is an important part of life, and that they store biological data about who we are on a cellular level.
Encoded in this strange double helix structure, is information about how tall we will grow, our skin, hair color and our ability to acquire or reject genetic disorders. Science has come so far in the past century that now we’re now able to read the individual code on the DNA strand. However, reading DNA is one thing but writing code onto it opens up completely new possibilities for genetics as a whole.
So, how about if we play the part of nature, and tried to encode the DNA ourselves? Could we manipulate a child’s height? Or save him from future illnesses? Can we accelerate the human genome’s mutation? Could we manipulate the very source code of a living being?
While waiting for the world to decide whether that’s an utopian future or a dystopian one, scientists from Harvard, have found other ways to manipulate artificial DNA and not cause grandiose ethical dilemmas, they’ve made that DNA into a USB stick.
The scientists were able to store 700 terabytes of coded data, or as your son would know it, four lakh high-definition movies on a single gram of artificial DNA. They’ve figuratively kicked Moore’s law of electronics out the window. The possibilities are endless. A day may soon come, when cloud computing becomes obsolete, and our bodies themselves become data servers. What if sensitive data wasn’t carried on a disk or a computer, but on you, in something so insignificant as a drop a water?
As the age of information technology wanes and ushers in a world where we are all connected through less than four degrees of separation, privacy becomes most precious. What if our bodies then become the structures of data and information, hacker proof by any other than the ones who possess the same source code as the one in our individual DNA. Such a privilege allows us to maintain a bit of our personal space in an ever networked world.
The author can be reached at bhairav.shankar@gmail.com
