TEXTO PARA A QUESTÃO
Scientists have long touted DNA’s potential as an ideal
storage medium; it’s dense, easy to replicate, and stable over
millennia. But in order to replace existing silicon‐chip or
magnetic‐tape storage technologies, DNA will have to get a lot
cheaper to predictably read, write, and package.
That’s where scientists like Hyunjun Park come in. He and
the other cofounders of Catalog, an MIT DNA‐storage spinoff
emerging out of stealth on Tuesday, are building a machine
that will write a terabyte of data a day, using 500 trillion
molecules of DNA.
If successful, DNA storage could be the answer to a
uniquely 21st‐century problem: information overload. Five
years ago humans had produced 4.4 zettabytes of data; that's
set to explode to 160 zettabytes (each year!) by 2025. Current
infrastructure can handle only a fraction of the coming data
deluge, which is expected to consume all the world's
microchip‐grade silicon by 2040.
“Today’s technology is already close to the physical limits
of scaling,” says Victor Zhirnov, chief scientist of the
Semiconductor Research Corporation. “DNA has an
information‐storage density several orders of magnitude
higher than any other known storage technology.”
How dense exactly? Imagine formatting every movie ever
made into DNA; it would be smaller than the size of a sugar
cube. And it would last for 10,000 years.
Wired, June, 2018. Disponível em https://www.wired.com/. Adaptado.