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Comment by gersh | Hacker News Reader

Can we encode all of human knowledge into the DNA of some organism? How can organisms access data stored in their DNA? Imagine being born with knowledge of every Wikipedia article, or even every website. What would that be like?

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I think you're misunderstanding things a bit. In the context of DNA as a data storage medium, it no longer functions as a "building block of life". It'd be like taking some binary image data and overwriting it with binary audio data. You can still technically interpret it as image data, but it's just going to be a random jumbled mess, and will probably error out immediately.

But you can also embed interesting information into an image without distorting the image itself (much). Similarly, the DNA of most organisms have a ton of garbage space that could be used to encode information without hurting the organism.

Not saying it's practical or desirable, just that it is possible.

So, we could end up with a (drum roll please) stenographic stegosaurus?

Edited to add: Ruined my own punchline. Steganographic stegosaurus, damnit!

It's even better - it would be a steganographic stegosaurus.

Since we are using DNA to record information of life experience, it's in fact a steganographic stegosaurus stenographer.

Leads me to wonder if the current "garbage" sequences in our own DNA could be encoded information that we were meant to decode - and by that I mean that that information may not just be entirely genetic code.

That's some seriously astute extrapolation! Nice idea, friend.

It's the memories of all of our ancestors.

I must not fear, fear is the mind killer...

They are not garbage sequences iirc, they control gene expression. DNA is a string that is coiled tight several times over itself (can't explain better than that, see the video below :)). So the garbage sequence is like padding that pushes genes in and out of areas that can be read. Changing amount or composition(?) of the garbage can turn a gene on or off just because it becomes inaccessible to RNA replication mechanism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW5JnYZImJA

Education would no longer be necessary or valued.

Experience and creativity would be what everyone garners to get a job.

You may be interested in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series

I think we'd be past "jobs" if it were possible to store and read memory in DNA with the human brain.

Then who would be in charge of creating new knowledge, and who would put it into our brains or DNA? Knowing everything humans have discovered so far would only change the type of jobs we would have, we would still need to have jobs though.

Hence the quotations, we'd be past the traditional 9 to 5 and in pursuit of loftier ambitions.

At the point where we'd engaged in massive-scale genetic engineering to insert knowledge into our DNA chain, jobs may no longer be the significant driving force of our lives. Or, at least, I'd like to hope that we'd have been able to move beyond them.

Your parent asks about simply storing data in DNA-form, and splicing it into an organism. Splicing computer data into your DNA does not immediately fill your head with knowledge.

If it did, why, you'd never have to study protein sequences- you'd already know how to make hemoglobin!

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