Sending Secret Messages Through DNA

That DNA itself might someday be used a medium for sending messages is a fun idea (and inspired no fewer than two of my own sci-fi short story ideas; with one involving a race of GM sea turtles and the other a plot for world domination, we can all be thankful that I'm a journalist, not an author.) And as described by Dennis Overbye in today's New York Times, Japanese researchers have done just that:

Using the same code that computer keyboards use, the Japanese group, led by Masaru Tomita of Keio University, wrote four copies of Albert Einstein’s famous formula, E=mc2, along with “1905,” the date that the young Einstein derived it, into the bacterium’s genome, the 400-million-long string of A’s, G’s, T’s and C’s that determine everything the little bug is and everything it’s ever going to be.

The point was not to celebrate Einstein. The feat, they said in a paper published in the journal Biotechnology Progress, was a demonstration of
DNA as the ultimate information storage material, able to withstand floods, terrorism, time and the changing fashions in technology, not to mention the ability to be imprinted with little unobtrusive trademark labels — little “Made by Monsanto” tags, say.

Overbye points out that Jaron Lanier and David Sulzer once proposed encoding a year's worth of the New York Times Magazine into the DNA of cockroaches, guaranteeing its earthly survival in the cells of those ever-adaptable creatures. Overbye then goes on to ask, why not people?

The answer, unfortunately, is that the information would be encoded in our "junk" DNA -- the 97% of the genetic code that doesn't seem to do anything. Except, as scientists have recently shown, junk DNA isn't junk after all, but important for regulating the other three percent.

Oh well. Still good for sci-fi, though.

Human DNA, the Ultimate Spot for Secret Messages (Are Some There Now?) [New York Times]