TechStuff Classic: How DNA Computers Work

computers based on DNA. Hope you guys enjoy. We were going to share some twisted logic with you today. Yes, we wanted to talk about dioxy ribonucleic acid computers, DONA, DONA no nonda, do NAA d n A computers And what is a DNA computer? What would it be? Because we're really in the very early stages of using DNA for the reasons of uh purposes of a computer. But what would a DNA computer be? Why would we even

use DNA? And what the heck is this DNA stuff? Anyway? Well, you know, I've got a USB port in the back of my head, so yeah, he also woke up one day and he was in a giant battery and he had to get out. Turns out Chris is the one. And I'm definitely not we got this. You know, We've got agents Smith showing up every other day at the office and we're like, he's not here, today's teleworking and us is irritating. But anyways, a glitch in the matrix DNA.

So DNA is is is important stuff. I mean, this is a molecule that contains information that you know, collectively, this information makes makes organisms what they are, yes and uh and so biologically DNA is used to store information and that is really the key there, you know, saying, wait a minute, if DNA stores information for organisms, could

we use DNA to store information for other purposes. But to to really explain this, DNA, it's this, it's it's that double helix molecule you're pricing, uh, you know, illustrations of it. You may have built a model of it. If you are in school, you may be studying this so much that the terms I'm going to use you're thinking, Wow, he's really glossing over this. But it's because this is tech stuff, not stuff to blow your mind. So we're not going to go too deep into the cellular biology

aspect of DNA. Yes, And if you're looking for your mind being blown, I'm sorry you've come to the wrong place. Right now. DNA has a has a lot of instructions in it. Yes, As it turns out, it's a very tiny molecule with with a very large capacity for for carrying information. Yeah, if you were to actually stretch out a DNA molecule and lay it lengthwise, it would end up taking much more space than it typically does because it has this twisted three dimensional uh uh structure. Hence

my earlier dumb joke. Right, So this twisted structure actually allows this this very dense uh storage medium to exist in a relatively small volume of space. Yeah, because you've twisted it. And you know, it's the whole thing about uh conserving surface area and all that great stuff that all my biologist friends go on and on and on

about and then I end up wandering away. Um. But DNA has, among many other attributes, there are pairs of bases that that pair up in DNA, and this is you know, the the structure of those the sequence of those determines what information is stored in that strand of DNA. Okay, so those four bases you have ad anine, citazine, guanine, and thym ing and usually we just call those A, C, G and T. And the way that those are sequenced, like I said, within a strand of DNA, determines the

type of information that that DNA holds. Uh and uh, it's it's it's that that forms the basis of the idea of using a DNA computer because in our of course, in our our classic computer model, we've got computers thinking quote unquote thinking in binary right, zeros and ones and so uh. With using DNA. Uh, the approach now is to associate certain of those bases with zeros and the others with ones, and the idea being that way you could sequence a DNA down the length of a strand

of DNA with these zeros and ones. You encode a strand of DNA that way, and then you would decode it. You would read back those those base pairings and that would determine whether each pair was a zero or a one, and then you would decode that into binary language, and thus you would get back to whatever information you originally stored onto the DNA. UM. This is it makes it sound pretty simple. But this is high tech science stuff right now. Now, granted it's high tech science stuff that

we have made huge advances in over the last two decades. Really, So things that were seen as practically a possible two decades ago are things that we do almost not quite routinely, but with a greater ease than we could have expected. Yeah, but over the course of of the last few decades. Um, it's the kind of thing that when people see the double helix, it's familiar. Um, you know, it's it's it's it's high tech science, but it's in our public consciousness too,

it's in our DNA. There you go the fact that that that's a a uh slang term, you know for something. When you say it's, it's basically you're saying it's deeply ingrained in your personality or whatever you're saying that about. Um, you know, it's it's certainly something that that we're all familiar with now, but only a few decades ago, you know,

it was completely foreign to us. Yeah. So yeah, let's we'll do a quick, quick rundown of the history of our knowledge about DNA, because clearly DNA has existed for millions of years, but we've only really been aware of it sense about well, we knew something about it back in eighteen yes when Freedrich Meischer, who was thank you was he was a biologist from Switzerland and he was

looking at something pretty darn gross. He was looking at bandages that had puss on them, and he isolated DNA from the pus on the bandages, and he thought that perhaps the this stuff, these nucleic acids, which is DNA is a nucleic acid. He thought that perhaps this stuff might contain information in it that would determine why stuff is the way it is so, genetic information. He thought that that probably did contain that information, but there was no way for him to be able to confirm it.

He could not point to anything and say see, I'm right. So that had to wait for future scientists to uh, to really dive into it. Not not the past that bi gross, but to really dive into the information and study it and and figure out more details. So in ninete some scientists at Rockefeller University, including Oswald Avery, showed that DNA taken from a bacterium could make a non

infectious type of bacteria become infectious bacteria. So The thought was that there must be some information from this nucleic acid taken from one type of bacteria that could transfer properties to a different bacteria that otherwise would not have that infectious property. But what does it r Yes, that's kind of what everyone was saying. Well, there's some sort of information holding material here. We don't really in ud stand the mechanism by which it stores information, nor how

does it impart that information uh or or replicated. We didn't know that at the time. Uh. And then in nineteen fifty two, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase showed that to make new viruses bacteria fage virus injected DNA into the host cell, which was important because previously it was thought that perhaps it was through protein exchange, but instead of protein exchange, it was DNA exchange. So that showed, yes, there's something in this. This d N A is what

is important. And then came along Watson and Crick. Yes, James D. Watson and Francis Crick. Yeah. They it was clear that, uh, that people were already onto something. Hershey and Chase had something there, and it was only a year later when Watson and Crick, uh you know, made their announcement they had discovered the structure of DNA, right, and so this is when we started to really learn what how DNA you know, forms, and what shape it

takes and why that's important. And um So once all of that was taken, once we learned all that, we began to see that these base pairings I was talking about, we learned that they pair in very specific ways. You know, I mentioned there are the four different bases. There's A, the A, C, G T. Well, half of those A and G are called purines. Uh, C and T are uh perimidines. I'm glad you took that part. Yeah, me too, Uh you know, way back when I was actually really

good at biology. But man, that was a few decades ago. So anyway, uh puriings and peri perim pyrimidines. Look, I can't even do it now, periods of paramidines. Still, glad you took that bond together. Right, So, uh, you don't get two puringes bonding together, and you don't get two pyramidines bonding together. And to be even more specific, A and T will bond together and C and G will bond together. All right, so that that means that you know,

you can't. You're not going to get a strand of DNA where A and C or A and G are paired together. It does not happen, right they Structurally that doesn't happen. So uh. That also dictates the rationale behind using uh these pairings as zeros and ones, because you can either have uh. You can either have the A T pairing or the C G pairing, right, so that that lets you say, okay, well that's binary. It's either you you just designate that one means one, pairing means zero,

the other pairing means one. Um. If it weren't that case, if we could have multiple pairing multiple uh uh, like like if A could pair with G instead of just A and T, then you would say, all right, well, now we've got a system that goes beyond binary, which, in theory, if you completely change the way computers work, would mean that you could dramatically increase parallel processing because

you could designate things. It would almost be like the cubits of a quantum computer, where you know the basic explanation as a cubit represents both a zero and a one and all values in between in superposition of one another, and that if you have enough cubits, you can perform a massive parallel processing problem all at the same time because those that that one group of cubits is behaving as if it's uh, you know, a huge number of

traditional bits. I think it's important to remember too that no matter how many bases DNA has, they all belong to us. Oh I knew it. I knew it. I was like, oh, I's gonna do an all your base I belonged to us if someone set us up the bomb, so well, it could be Actually, if you if you were trying to if those pairs become corrupted, they will not work and uh and a cell can die. Actually, we're getting a lot of this information to from our our excellent article on how stuff Works dot com about

how DNA works. It gets into a whole lot more detailed, right, Yeah, if you want to learn more about and and it's very accessible. It's a very accessible article. So if you're curious about you know, you've always heard about d N A, and you've heard about DNA testing, and you know about chromosomes and genes, but you're not really you know, beyond that, you're kind of confused. I highly recommend you read how

DNA works at how stuff works dot com. We also have an article on how DNA computers work, which is pretty interesting because it's talking about an earlier era of DNA computers, but recent developments have really brought it brought to lights some interesting, uh, new technologies and new use cases for d n A and we'll get into those

in a second. Yeah, It's it's funny that you say that, because I'm sure that people this is futuristic enough where people are saying, what are you talking about new developments? We haven't heard of a d n A computer before? But yeah, that's that's not really surprising. This is the kind of thing like like quantum computing, where they've been working on it for some time, but it's not at a point where they can really, you know, put something on a shelf and go look at this. Yeah, yeah,

where people really take notice of it. In general, this is all stuff that's taking place in universities and research facilities, and it's you know, most of these machines that are being made now or or these implementations of using DNA for information digital information are are really in the prototype stage. But we're getting the technology that allows us to create these machines is becoming more and more sophisticated and less expensive,

which of course is key huge any news. And Gordon Moore explained that back and when he did his his paper about cramming more components onto an integrated circuit. His point was not just that technology was advancing to a point where we could shrink stuff down and fit twice as many components onto a square inch of silicon as we could a year ago. It was also that the manufacturing process was becoming efficient enough and cheap enough where

that made sense. So same sort of thing here. Well, all right, so we've we've determined that DNA contains information. It because of its very structure, it can contain a lot of information in a small volume. Uh. And then it wasn't until about nine and I remember it was the it was the fifties, the early fifties when we started to really understand what DNA was and how how it formed and how and its structured and everything like that. Into a man named Leonard Edelman came up with this idea.

He sort of uh introduced the idea of using DNA to solve math problems. And it was essentially this idea of coding DNA as if it were a strip of binary code. And so he took this idea and he sort of ran with it. He began to formulate an idea about how to how to create an experiment that

could show that this would work. And it's funny because it's talking about a DNA computer, but if you read about the experiment, it sounds more like someone in a chemistry lab mixing various chemical compositions together and then coming up with a solution at the end of it. And that's it turns out that this is a computational solution, not just a chemical solution. I see what you did there, Ye little word play there. Yeah, it's a little a

little incredible. So he yeah, he um, he dissolved my objections. Chris and I have more to say about DNA in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Let me read I'll read the steps from our article on DNA computers, because I want to explain how this early, early, early implementation of a DNA computer, how it how it played out, and it's

kind of amazing. All right. Here are the steps. Number one strands of DNA represent the seven cities now when it says seven cities in here, what he was doing was he was trying to solve something called the traveling salesman problem, also the directed Hamilton's path problem. The idea being that you're supposed to find the shortest route between a group of cities and and it could be any number really of cities, but you have to only go through each city one time, um, and it becomes more complex.

This is this is why this is such a fascinating problem uh as Jonathan pointed out to me right before, he reminded me that this is something that quantum computing is fascinated with because this is such a I don't know what you call it, thorny, a thorny problem. So it was that problem that they were were that he wanted to work on, and he chose, I believe seven cities, he said, that is his benchmark he wanted to do.

And see, this is this is an interesting problem for uh in computers because think about it, you've got seven cities, you can only travel through each city once. You have

to find the most efficient pathway to go. Well, the way a computer would do this, generally speaking, is to start going through every single possible um permutation of that trip going from city to city and determining which of those is the most efficient by the end of it, by comparing them all, which can take ages and as as of course, as you add more cities, as you add complexity to the problem, it creates an exponentially more difficult problem for the computer to solve. You know, I

don't think it's that unlike trying to crack a password. Yeah, in the in the you know, other references we've made to these again, parallel processing. That's another reason why quantum computers are very scary for anyone who's in cryptography who wants to create good encryption, because they're talking about using parallel processing to attack, you know, do a brute force

attack on a password. You can really reduce the amount of time it would take you to crack a password, like a password that would probably take you thousands of years in classic computer time might only take an hour in using a quantum computer because it's using that parallel approach. So just remember, quantum computing is the cure for the common code. Man, what is it with you today? I don't know. Chris is in a move anyway? All right, Getting back to getting back to this thing, this set

of steps. All right, So Edelman creates strands of DNA that represent the seven cities. Uh and so it's these A, T, and CG pairings and then um, these various sequences represent each city and possible flight path. He then took the molecules that these strands of DNA and mixed them in a test tube, and some of the strands of DNA stuck together in a chain. Of those strands represented a potential answer to that question, which of these you know,

which route is the most efficient. Within a few seconds, all of the possible combinations of DNA strands were created in the test tube, and then Adelman eliminated the wrong molecules through chemical reactions, which left behind only the flight

paths that connect all seven cities. So here he was doing chemistry and looking at molecules by uh and it was and it was biological chemistry because he was using organic DNA um and and trying to come up with the answer that way, which is pretty interesting to me.

I mean, it looks that sounds so different from the way we think of computing today, where you're using microprocessors and you know, the user interface looking at screen this guy is using test tubes and molecules um and he was actually thinking at the time that this would be DNA computing is going to be the future because it packs so much information in such a small form factor and it's plentiful. Yes, because there's a lot of life

out there, and organic life relies on DNA heavily. There's some that rely on RNA, but we're not going to go into that. But anyway, a great amount of organic life out there has lots and lots of DNA, so the we've got plenty of materials to work from. Uh. What's interesting is that since that time where his first experiments were showing the viability of a DNA computer, our ability to sequence synthetic DNA has improved to the point where organic DNA is not really what we care about anymore.

We can synthesize DNA in the lab and just make it ourselves so we don't have to um harvest it. As Chris was saying in the pre show, you know, it would be a totally different world if you realize that your computer was running out a memory, so you checked another hamster into your machine so that you could finish whatever it was you were doing. That was a

particularly gory idea. Well we didn't know, but yeah, I left out the part about the grinding noises, you know, and for flying out the back you yeah, and I thought that was my contribution. Um, yeah, they University of Rochester, there were some researchers at found ways to use DNA to create logic gates. Again in the it looks like um so uh and that's we've touched on on several occasions, but that those logic gates are basically key to classic computing. Yeah,

this is what uh, this is. This is what allows the computer to dictate how information moves through it so that it has any meaning. You know. The logic gates essentially dictate whether the zero or one that goes into the gate comes out at zero or one on the other side or something. Usually it's a pair. If it's a zero and a one on the other side of the gate, is that going to be a one or zero?

And it all depends on the type of gate it is. Um. And of course you you can link a bunch of gates together to create all sorts of different outcomes depending upon what the input is. This is all very important from classical computing. So getting to that step of being able to build logic gates out of d in a it was pivotal if you want to be able to eventually build a true DNA computer. And again this is you know, you compare the components of a DNA computer

to those of a an inorganic computer. UM. And we have, as a Jonathan pointed out and Gordon Moore's uh famous prediction that the transistors would double in number per square inch of silicon back in the original prediction, UM, you know every you know over a certain period of time, which again has changed, you know, year, year and a half, two years. The thing is, um, we're talking about a

flat piece of silicon. And we've also talked about how hard drives, the classical hard drive, UM, you know has so much information on it. It's in a it's in a flat plane. We've talked about electronic memory and how you know this information is is getting stored. But we basically been talking two dimensional and and a long time ago we talked about processors and how at some point, due to the limitations of physics like it's at some point electrons will begin to tunnel through layers of the

material used to create transistors, basically making them ineffective. So at some point, theoretically the traditional transistor chip is going to be so full that you cannot fill it anymore without having serious electrical problems. So they were talking about going into three D processors. Well, d N a kind of goes around that problem or is a natural if you will solution. Hey, for once, that wasn't a pun intended um, because DNA is volumetric. It isn't it can

fit because of its its natural characteristics. It doesn't have to be in a two dimensional flat shape. You don't have to stretch out the helix and stick it on a piece of silicon or whatever to make it work. Um, and that gives uh, that gives computing so much more advantage to move to a DNA based existence, right. Yeah.

The the challenge is building The challenge is building the equipment that allows you to sequence and decode that information because you know that's where where that's where the bottleneck is. Right now, is that the it's not simple, Yeah, we have to get there. Yeah, But once we get to a point where we're able to construct the DNA and lay it out in such a way where we're able to pack in all that information, and then we have the companion devices that can decode that and make it

meaningful to a computer. Again, then you're talking about some huge leaps in storage capacity. One gram of d n A can store up to four hundred and fifty five billion gigabytes of data, which is about a hundred billion DVDs worth of information. Yea, yea. As a matter of fact, this is the article that sort of uh turned me onto this idea was something that my friends Kim and Tim pointed out to me in the in the Guardian, which really wasn't that long ago August two thousand twelve.

They started talking about how books had been encoded in dna UM and that that got me to thinking and to suggesting this to Jonathan as a potential topic because it's it's fascinating that d n A, something so small, can hold that much information. Yeah, and it's funny because the story goes it talks about how Professor George Church lead this project and he belongs to he well, he teaches, he teaches at HAVD, but not just Harvard, it's Harvard

Medical School. This is this is one of those weird things, uh that this this overlaps science, computer science, and uh medicine. Yeah, so you've got I'm sorry, physical science and medical science. Let's say that right. No, No, that's that's fine. That's a computer science and and medical science. It's it's multidisciplinary obviously, just like nanobiology or nanotechnology is a multidisciplinary approach. So

is this DNA computer or DNA storage idea. We've got a little bit more about DNA ahead of us, and before we get to that, let's take another quick break. So what what Professor Church did was they decided to take a book that was about five point to seven megabits of digital space once you converted into digital information, and to uh encode that as d N A and UM.

They didn't do it just once. They decided to duplicate it a few times, seven seventy billion times, seventy billion copies of this book, which, according to an article in Extreme Tech, prompted them to joke that it made it the best selling book of all time, yes, and that it was. The seventy billion copies totaled about forty four peta bytes of data. UM. So that is slightly larger than the N A S I have attached at my network at home. Yeah, yeah, forty four pea bites. That's

an incredible amount of information. It's also quite a bit smaller than my n A s Yeah. So so when you think about it, the the promise of d n A is that with a relatively small amount of DNA you could store the sum total of all human knowledge in a very tiny compartment, relatively speaking, a tiny compartment. And uh, if you're able to use that same sort of uh of capacity in a processing way as opposed to just storage storage is great. I mean, that's fantastic.

The the the this project was really showing how using DNA is great for archival purposes if you want to store information for longevity's sake. And another point about that is that this yeah, is that here's here's an issue that we have with storing information. The way we access information changes over time, and some of the there there

are multiple problems here. Sometimes the way we store information, uh, we store it on a medium that can decompose, which means it as time passes, the likelihood that that data is intact decreases. So let's say like a book. Okay, books are susceptible to lots of different environmental factors that can make them impossible to read. So as time goes by, a book's ability to preserve the information decreases, particularly depending

upon its environment. Yeah. And and one of the things that's funny to me about this is, and I'll keep this short, but it's it's funny to me that in a way, Uh, the increase in technology, um has only increased the rate of data rot as some people call it. Because you think about something like the Rosetta stone and how long ago that was chiseled, but it's still there

because hey, you know it's stone. If now, if you left it out in the elements, eventually the the writing on it will wear away due to the effects of erosion. But um, that's longer lived than say, paper, which could be eaten by weevils or could be affected by mold or mildew or or even water or fire. Um. You know there there are many things acid in the paper. Um. But but that would be longer lived than say, um, a magnetic storage medium, which might may only live a

few decades. Yeah, because you've got with magnetic storage, eventually that magnetic properties starts to kind of and I have Dad gets corrupted. Yeah, and I've had CDs and DVDs that I've burned and a few years ago that are starting to show signs of deterioration. And I'm thinking all this futuristic stuff, it's kind of funny. The stuff that's chiseled in stone is still there well. And on top of all that, besides the fact that you've got these media,

these media that will that can degrade over time. Um, magnetic definitely is more susceptible that I would say than optical storage. But but both can can degree and both are susceptible to damage. I mean, just about everything is. But but the other problem is that we move away from those older forms of media and eventually we get to a point where nothing we have can read what we used to use, or if you do have something

that can read it, it's a legacy system. So like the keeping old computers around simply to read those documents, right, like like anything that's on an old five and a quarter inch diskette from the early days of the personal computer, you know, and I still have something, I would wager that most people do not have easy access to such a disk drive. Um, you know, especially if you're just kind of an average user and you've gone out and you're like, oh, I want a new laptop. You go again.

If you buy a new laptop today, you might not even have an optical drive, which means that there you could come across records of information that you have no way of accessing because you do not have the tech

capable of accessing it. Well, d n A is a basic building block of organic life, and so the idea is that because it's something so basic, we will always have the ability and assuming that you know, we don't have some sort of post apocalyptic event, while an apocalyptic event that then leads to post apocalyptic events, um, then we should be able to have equipment that can read this same information. Hey, do you have the instructions on how to read DNA? Yeah? I saved it on that

magnetic wa now here in Atlanta. Were used to post apocalyptic events because we've got zombies. Yes, you may have seen if you've watched the documentary The Walking Dead as seen on TV. So, um, yeah, the the idea was that this will d n A does not degrade over time. Well, it takes a much longer time than something like a paper book. Right, So since you're not worried about degrading. I mean when I say it doesn't degrade over time, we're talking generations here, the undreds of thousands of years

so people. So yes, I wouldn't know eventually it will degrade, but for the foreseeable future it won't. Uh. It takes up far less space. We don't have to worry so much about not being able to access the information anymore because against the basic building block, we will presumably be still be interested in DNA in the future. Uh. In fact, it become increasingly interested as we learn more about how to uh to tweet DNA to do things like fight

off illnesses and other scientific applications of that knowledge. So that was kind of the whole point was that it's great for archival and that reason it's gonna be. It's it's it's a it's a more permanent solution in multiple ways. And uh, that's really where the focus is on the recent articles that we've been reading, although there's still obviously quite a bit of development on the research and about building a true DNA computer that would have of an

incredibly small form factor. I mean, you're talking about, uh, DNA being the size of a couple of atoms, and this is some small stuff. I mean, we could theoretically have a DNA computer capable of performing huge calculations and storing an enormous amount of data in a tiny, tiny

form factor. It would be amazing if we could look into the future, maybe I don't know, twenty fifty years something like that, where perhaps we have reached the point where this technology is viable and reproducible and economic, where we could see it in applications that actually the average consumer could access. It wouldn't just be the realm of the scientific community or the research community. It would also

be within our grasp. Because then can you imagine you can have a smartphone that could literally contain all the data that we have ever generated ever since the dawn of man on your phone. I was waiting for you to go all the data. No, that was it, just all of all the data, um well, all the data we have access to. Um there there. It's astounding to think of something uh so common that has been with us for so long being an answer and fairly easy

answer to a lot of these problems. I mean, like I said, it's not easy to get there, but the idea is like really just DNA. As it turns out. You know, they've they've been using synthetic DNA to run these experiments, and there are some drawbacks, one of which is it can't be rewritten. That is true. So once you write that data, it's that's another reason why people are talking about for archival purposes. Once you write the data,

that's it. Now. Granted, you're talking about a construct that's so small that you could keep doing that indefinitely and not have to worry about taking up too much space. But that's just the way they're thinking of it right now. Right. But but you know you can't. You can't always think that way because someday that will catch up to you. Apparently that might be when we're actually saying, hey, hey, we finally got a plan on how to get off this rock because the Sun's gonna swallow us up in

another million years. That that would never happen. By the way, don't don't write into me and explain to me why that would be ridiculous. I understand. I was just using that as a an example. Well, and and the other thing is, um, you know, and yes, I realized that this is you know that you could destroy DNA, but um,

thinking about that the sensitive information can't be erased. Then you would need to keep up with your Let's say you had a DNA drive like you have a flash drive to carry back and forth with you, uh, and it gets lost and it had I don't know importance and sitive documents related to national security or um you know, the secret um uh copy of your unpublished book, and somebody else runs across it and makes billions of dollars off of it because they found it. You can't you

can't remotely wipe that information. I don't know how you would do that without destroying without physically destroying the material. So it's that's sort of a a minor drawback, really, but it's something it's it's something very different from the media that we typically talk about. So clearly in that case, you would be talking about, all right, well, now we've got this incredible archival ability. Now we have to figure

out a way of securing it. Oh well, don't see that. Well, and this brings me to my brilliant science fiction idea which I I said in the pre show. I said, if if someone steals this, I will find you. See. That was my That was my like shout out to your no, no, I'm sharing it because if someone out there makes the us, I want to cut. So here's

the sci fi idea. Guys. You have a character who is just an ordinary guy or girl, you know, someone who is going through life and they've got the same sort of challenges and problems and joys and despairs as all the rest of us. But then suddenly they noticed that they're being watched and people are closing in on them, and they don't know why because they're just a normal person, and so they're trying to get away, and it turns out they find out that they themselves are a synthetic

life form. They were built in a lab from the ground up, and in fact, their DNA contains this incredibly important information encoded into this person's very being is a secret message of such import that various forces are closing in on them, determined to get hold of this person, lop off a finger and figure out what the heck is going on, And so the character has to go through this incredible series of adventures in order to figure out.

It's kind of a journey of self discovery as well as protection, and there's a whole like hero arc and the credits are great and Bruce Willis Stars and I want to cut I've got data under my skin, are in it and through it. So, guys, yeah that was I'm sure someone's gonna write in and say, yeah, that was a great story when so and so wrote it years ago. I want to read it. Yeah, yeah, I I have no illusions that someone has not already come

up with that idea. But if they haven't, and then you guys think that's a great idea and you want to go out and make it. Remember, I want to credit and some money or at least a sandwich. Come on, writer's gotta eat all right, assassinating stuff though, it's it's the kind of thing that I would never have thought to do, so, I mean, I'm blown away by that. Yeah, it's a it's a pretty fascinating subject. And like we said, there's that we have some great articles on how stuff.

We actually can go and check those out and read up on DNA and DNA computers and you know, like I said, they are the articles on the Guardian as well as other places that are talking about this storage medium and it blows my mind. Hey, guys, hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff Always a joy to revisit the old episodes we did in the past.

It's also interesting that I decided to throw this one in there, because obviously a lot has happened since two thousand twelve, so I may have to do a full update episode about d n A computers in the near future. If you're interested in hearing such a thing, let me know. The email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or jump on over to

the website that's text stuff podcast dot com. That's where you're gonna find an archive to all of our previous episodes, as well as our presence on social media, and you also find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How

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