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Microsoft Wants To Use DNA For Cloud Data Storage (technologyreview.com)
Last July, researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington said that they had successfully encoded about 200 megabytes of data onto synthetic DNA molecules. The company is now planning to take the technology commercial. "Computer architects at Microsoft Research say the company has formalized a goal of having an operational storage system based on DNA working inside a data center toward the end of this decade," reports MIT Technology Review. "The aim is a 'proto-commercial system in three years storing some amount of data on DNA in one of our four centers for at least a boutique application,' says Doug Carmean, a partner architect at Microsoft Research." From the report: Internally, Microsoft harbors the even more ambitious goal of replacing tape drives, a common format used for archiving information. Major obstacles to a practical storage system remain. Converting digital bits into DNA code (made up of chains of nucleotides labeled A, G, C, and T) remains laborious and expensive because of the chemical process used to manufacture DNA strands. In its demonstration project, Microsoft used 13,448,372 unique pieces of DNA. Experts say buying that much material on the open market would cost $800,000. According to Microsoft, the cost of DNA storage needs to fall by a factor of 10,000 before it becomes widely adopted. While many experts say that's unlikely, Microsoft believes such advances could occur if the computer industry demands them.
There's no biosafety level 5, it only goes up to four.
... I mean, I wouldn't try that myself, but my fears over doing that are purely illogical.
More importantly, no to the rest of it.These are not going to be living things, they're going to be dried nucleotides on paper most likely. There is going to be no transcription or translation and creation of proteins. First of all that's much more difficult and doesn't happen on its own. Second that would defeat the point of data storage. Having the DNA doing stuff would cause its degradation and loss.
It's like saying "don't download that encyclopedia on that external hard drive! It might achieve sentience!" Nothing is happening to the data either way, and in both cases, making "life" would be impossible.
Life requires a lot more than DNA. There are some plant viruses IIRC that can reproduce simply by injecting their DNA or RNA sequence into plant cells. But I didn't hear about any such human viruses. Viruses require protein machinery to take over the cell in addition to their DNA. You synthesize the smallpox genome and inject it into your veins, you're not going to develop smallpox.
The smallpox genome is also a 186 kilobase sequence. It's not something that's sure to show up with much frequency even if all the DNA in MS's storage were to get into your cells. If anyone knows a way of calculating how much DNA you'd need to synthesize at random before you came up with those specific 186000 nucleotides, I'd be very interested, but I'm guessing it's a lot.
Finally, synthesizing nucleotides is old hat. The scale and cost is the new thing here. You want to synthesize a smallpox genome? You can do that already. There aren't even any laws against it yet! It's going to cost you a lot and again, DNA itself wouldn't do shit besides freak people out, but you can. It'd be much easier just to find smallpox itself. But either way, there's nothing completely new here besides it's now cheap and fast enough to consider doing for data storage.
Quit getting spooked by biology.