A Smear of DNA Can Hold 10,000 Gigabytes of Data

Facing a storage crisis, the U.S. is investing $48 million to turn DNA into living hard drives

Emily Mullin
OneZero
Published in
5 min readFeb 5, 2020

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Interior of a futuristic data center server room.
Photo: imaginima/E+/Getty Images

AAround the world, warehouses the size of several football fields store millions of hard drives’ worth of data. Every time we send an email, search Google, upload photos to Facebook, or stream a movie on Netflix — which is to…

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Emily Mullin
OneZero

Former staff writer at Medium, where I covered biotech, genetics, and Covid-19 for OneZero, Future Human, Elemental, and the Coronavirus Blog.