Beyond Synthetic Neanderthals: Synthetic DNA Computers

I posted a few days ago about Harvard biologist George Church's views about the likelihood that Neanderthals will be created/born in the foreseeable future and that DNA techniques will ultimately to design machines and devices. Admittedly those views seem farfetched (as well as presenting ethical issues). Anyway, now comes news in the leading peer reviewed  journal Nature of the development of "practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA." To quote the summary:

Previous DNA-based information storage approaches have encoded only trivial amounts of information or were not amenable to scaling-up, and used no robust error-correction and lacked examination of their cost-efficiency for large-scale information archival. Here we describe a scalable method that can reliably store more information than has been handled before. We encoded computer files totalling 739 kilobytes of hard-disk storage and with an estimated Shannon information of 5.2 × 106 bits into a DNA code, synthesized this DNA, sequenced it and reconstructed the original files with 100% accuracy. Theoretical analysis indicates that our DNA-based storage scheme could be scaled far beyond current global information volumes and offers a realistic technology for large-scale, long-term and infrequently accessed digital archiving.

The idea of DNA based computers is not new. This study shows a significant step in this direction, and that regardless of computing methodology biologic based encoding seems a very good method for digital memory.

A bonus note: as to the history of computing (including memory methods), this video from 1983 is very cool.