Anagha Rajan's idea sounds almost like science fiction—perhaps even impossible at first.
Like many people, I have a complicated relationship with data.
Every day, we create photographs, videos, documents, emails and files that we consider important. Yet many of us are not very good at managing them.
A hard disk crashes and years of memories disappear. A phone gets damaged, and treasured photographs are lost. Important documents are accidentally deleted. Sometimes we run out of storage and keep postponing the inevitable decision to delete something.
Then comes that familiar message:
“Your cloud storage is almost full.”
The solution seems simple—buy more storage.
But another monthly subscription means another permanent expense. So we delete a few files, ignore the warning and carry on.
Multiply this problem by billions of people, businesses, governments and, increasingly, artificial-intelligence systems, and data storage becomes much more than a personal inconvenience.
It becomes a global challenge.
The world’s demand for data centres is growing rapidly. Storing and processing enormous volumes of information requires physical space, servers, cooling systems and electricity. The extraordinary growth of artificial intelligence has made questions about power consumption and environmental impact even more important.
That is when I came across the story of Anagha Rajesh, a young entrepreneur from Bengaluru and founder of BioCompute.
Her idea sounds almost like science fiction—perhaps even impossible at first.
Storing computer data inside DNA.
When I first read about it, I struggled to understand what it actually meant.
We usually think of DNA as life's instruction manual. It carries the biological information that helps determine how living organisms develop and function.
But DNA is also an extraordinarily efficient information-storage system.
Computers store information using combinations of zeros and ones. DNA carries information using four chemical bases—A, C, G and T. Digital information can therefore be converted into sequences represented by these four letters, written into DNA and later read back and converted into digital data again.
This is where the numbers become almost unbelievable.
Researchers have demonstrated experimental DNA-storage densities of up to around 215 petabytes per gram of DNA.
That is roughly 215 million gigabytes of information in a single gram.
Imagine the huge rooms filled with servers and storage equipment that could one day be supplemented—or, for certain long-term archival purposes, partly replaced—by something incredibly small.
DNA also offers another fascinating advantage: longevity.
Under suitable conditions, information stored in DNA could remain readable for hundreds or even thousands of years. Unlike conventional electronic storage systems, DNA doesn't require a continuous supply of electricity to preserve information.
Of course, DNA will not replace the hard drive in our laptops tomorrow.
Major challenges remain, including cost, speed, reliability, and the practical difficulties of writing and retrieving information from DNA. But the possibility itself is remarkable.
For billions of years, living organisms have carried one of the most sophisticated information-storage systems imaginable. Only now are we beginning to seriously explore whether the same system could help solve some of humanity’s future digital-storage problems.
DNA could eventually become not only life's biological software, but also part of humanity’s digital archive.
Anagha’s story reminded me of another scientist whose work I have followed with great admiration: Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind.
Together with John Jumper, Hassabis helped develop AlphaFold2, the artificial-intelligence system that transformed scientists’ ability to predict the three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino-acid sequences.
For decades, protein-structure prediction was one of biology’s great challenges. AlphaFold dramatically changed the field.
Hassabis and Jumper were awarded half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein-structure prediction, while David Baker received the other half for computational protein design.
AlphaFold is already helping researchers understand proteins much faster and could significantly accelerate research into diseases, medicines, and new treatments.
That is one of the most exciting aspects of science today.
Every day, the news reminds us of war, poverty and division. Yet away from the headlines, scientists, engineers, and young innovators quietly work on ideas that could change the future.
Their work gives us hope.
These are the stories we should tell more often.
