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Comment by wf | Hacker News Reader

Right now I can go to one of many websites to encode a program into a DNA sequence[0] and then to another website to paste that sequence into a text box and order that DNA.[1] This is all doable right now by every one of us. It's just not useful yet.

[0]http://www.sgidna.com/translator.php [1]http://dna.macrogen.com/eng/service/seq/standard/standardseq...

edit: Let me add that I think this is crazy interesting and even if the DNA is never executable itself, it's a very very interesting way to store a program that can later be extracted.

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I was at Compute Midwest (a tech conference in Kansas City, Missouri) this past fall and saw a demo of this very thing by Autodesk's Andrew Hessel. He ordered some customized bacteria (maybe yeast? I don't exactly recall) with the conference title encoded and then sequenced into the microbes. It was very interesting to me that that level of manipulation is available to any of us, right now (even if it's not exactly useful).

It did bring up some concerns, though -- do we now have mail-order anthrax manufacturing? This isn't something I'm seriously worried about, but it does seem like something to consider in the future as this technology evolves.

Something else I just thought of while typing this is that this would make an awesomely sci-fi means of information storage. No need to remember a password, we've encoded your gut flora with your private key!

I love the internet. I was at Compute Midwest too. His talk was where I initially learned about this. Are you from KC?

Yep, sure am! I really like CM as it's a "big ideas" type-of tech conference, compared to the other sorts we tend to have in the area, which are more geared towards flavor-of-the-month web framework demos and the like.

>Something else I just thought of while typing this is that this would make an awesomely sci-fi means of information storage. No need to remember a password, we've encoded your gut flora with your private key!

Was the first thing that occurred to me too. Talk about steganography.

First occurred to me as interesting too. Then I realized that you'd be dropping your private key in every toilet you defecate into. Not to say that secure intra-body information storage isn't possible though.

Then again, re: the steganography -- gut flora's pretty diverse (and there's a lot of it). People might not necessarily think to, or want to, dig through your shit.

I doubt the author has any comprehension of the errors involved in synthesis of a physical sequence from a text string, the mutations introduced into the sequence during the lifecycle of the organism, or the errors involved in sequencing the DNA back into an abstract text string. Life is largely accustomed to these errors and drifts of sequence, computer code is incredibly intolerant.

A serious discussion of this concept would involve encoding the information with some sort of channel coding and calculating the likelihood of any such program of minimal length successfully propagating itself.

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