Human genome stored on 'everlasting' memory crystal
(southampton.ac.uk)59 points by breck 10 months ago
59 points by breck 10 months ago
I really like the concept. But it also sort of makes me sad - what about all the DNA we haven't archived, which could hold so many secrets about solving diseases? Of course we don't all want it sequenced when we're alive because of the privacy concerns.
I foresee a future where people obtain genetic samples of their long-dead ancestors and they decide to clone and gestate them in artificial wombs.
Imagine a weird youtube channel that is a combination of urban exploration / it's just a prank bro / DIY science where they break into a crypt to dig up the bones of some historical figure to grow a clone in a vat for clout.
Scribble there best quotes on the tombstone. Nobody remembers names, besides those who already knew a guy. But good recipes, good quotes, they are memes, glider guns they will see heat death.
This is the coolest thing I've seen here in a while. Not to spoil it, but Liu Cixin goes into durability in the final book in the Three Body series, it left me thinking for a while about just how transient we are. How exciting that we're working to solve that problem.
It is worse than that. There is drift within an organism. The genome on your scalp is different than the genome on your toes.
Worse than that, by count, only a minority of the cells using a person's DNA make up that person. The number of other cells are 10x, but being smaller, only make up 1% to 3% by mass. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-human-micr...
> There is drift within an organism. The genome on your scalp is different than the genome on your toes
> Also chimeras exist
This provides a deep insight into the nature of multicellular life. People think that a "unicellular organism" eventually turned into a "multicellular organism". But they're not so distinct. The latter is really still just a bunch of cells coordinating, but their coordination is so deep, and the number of cells and functions so large, that emergent properties arise.
any human differs less than 1 % (although it really depends on how you count differences). It would make sense to store one reference, and then everybody is stored as a delta relative to that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRAM_(file_format) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_of_genomic_sequenc...)
I feel like I've been reading about variations on this concept (storing data in crystals using a pair of lasers) for my whole life. I've never seen articles about anything other than research stage work though... no companies trying to commercialize, no engineering prototypes, etc.
I could just have missed them, but the longevity of the idea compared to lack of product makes me wonder what the hold-up is... too expensive to make? Bad data transfer rates?
On its surface (pun not intended) a super long-lasting high capacity, write-only storage medium seems to have all sorts of good use cases, so I can't imagine a lack of demand would be a problem.. without some deeper technical holdback.
If anything exists to read and use this data it probably won’t be all that exciting to bring back legacy humans.
We could use it to restore our own genome. The Y chromosome may become extinct in as little as 5Myr[1], such a record may allow our descendants to refresh it. We'd be avoiding a pretty common scifi trope (although the trope usually arises due to cloning).
Urban legend. Almost all of the gene loss happened 200 million years ago in early mammals. In the past 40 million years, our ancestors lost one Y-chromosome gene one single time about 20 million years ago. In the 7 million years since we separated from chimps, there have not been any genes lost from the Y.
Note: a similar shrinking pattern is seen in birds, where females have a small W chromosome and males have two large Z's.
Team mentioned this as homage to Pioneer's plaque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
> Unlike marking only on the surface of a 2D piece of paper or magnetic tape, this method of encoding uses two optical dimensions and three spatial co-ordinates to write throughout the material - hence the ‘5D’ in its name.
Ummmmm.......
Yeah. That and
> a revolutionary data storage format that can survive for billions of years
Clearly it hasn't been verified to be able to survive for billions of years, but it is thought to be able to survive for billions of years based on extrapolation from tests done over time scales multiple orders of magnitude smaller.
This is kind of my idea for how to update funeral rites in the time of science: When someone passes, fully sequence a number of samples of their genome and put the data into a really good archival medium. To me, this feels like a great way to preserve information about loved ones worth caring about (and potentially useful to their descendants), more so than the physical remains.
A family mausoleum full of ancestral DNA would be quite nice and meaningful, even if many other things about the person are lost. It's probably how I'd like to be "buried".
Maybe this is the suitable medium.