Will the archives of the future be made of the strand of DNA?

The prospect of combining archives and DNA feels like a plotline of a Twilight Zone episode. What's exciting however is that it is a distinct possibility. The Guardian have just released a story about the DNA inscription of a book (  http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/aug/16/book-written-dna-code) initially reported in the US journal, Science. The book composed of 53,000 words includes eleven images and a computer program. The 5.27 megabit collection of data created over several days was produced by Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School.

The method they used, in principle, was the same as digital inscription: encoding all the book information into a binary sequence. The DNA base pairs in this case representing 1's and 0's with Arginine (‘A’) and Cytosine (‘C’) representing zero, and Guanine (‘G’) and Tyrosine (‘T’) representing one. The team developed a system in which an inkjet printer embeds short fragments of artificially synthesized DNA onto a glass chip. Each DNA fragment contains a digital address code that denotes location within the original fiDNAle.

What makes DNA such a brilliant medium for storage is its data storage with estimates suggesting a gram of DNA can store 455 billion gigabytes. The data is easily readable and copied and maintains its stability for several thousand years.  

The possibilities are fantastic. To put this in perspective, most digital formats require an upgrade after five years with physical data storage such as DVDs having, at most, a twenty year life span. This is because of the constant change in informational software packages within sturdy digital formats, such as TIFFs and PDFs having 10-15 year maximum life span. A DNA code sequence is therefore more desirable than a digital approximate, but neverless it is an exciting development and will potentially rival the paper record revolution in record keeping. This is an exciting archival perspective.

As a cataloguer and digitiser of the DNA related material of the Kings college London archive such a development is one of a personal joy. It would feel wonderfully apt to have the papers charting the discovery of the structure of DNA are encoded into DNA for future generations.

August Project Update

The project is entering its final months and a quick update as it what has been happening is in order:



To date, 24,000 images have been produced by our digitisers which roughly breaks down as 4000 glass plate and acetate images and 20,000 images from the paper collection. Over the next two months the remaining part of the paper collection will be scanned. Sections that have already been scanned include papers from Wilkins’ early life, scientific working papers, correspondence with scientific colleagues, papers associated with the history of the research on DNA and sections of his autobiography.

Above, is a low resolution copy of some of the images that are being produced. The example is a postcard received by Maurice Wilkins from Francis Crick dated May 1955 and sent from Paris. The postcard reads: "Having a lovely time telling people about your work and my ideas! Hoping to see you in Cambridge for a quiet weekend - Francis".





Our main tasks over the next few months involve the construction of metadata and copyright and sensitivity checking. The latter is the most time consuming as a detailed survey requires a systematic check of all potentially risky material. Our catalogue descriptions are written at a level to summarize the contents of the physical file but because the images will be accessible individually an item level approach to sensitivity and copyright is needed to be certain that legally and ethically all necessary precautions are taken before publishing on-line. Needless to say this process is time-consuming and has proved to be the most taxing element of the project.




Apart from the construction of metadata and the sensitivity checking the only other main strand of the project to update everyone with is outreach. The project continues to gather interest from its social media sites (like the one I’m writing on now). Besides the blogs, the project has had a presence on Twitter and new images have been added to the project’s Flickr site. In May, the archives participated in a Radio 4 piece on the Wellcome Digital Library which was reported previously on this blog. Alongside this, we were privileged to have been visited by Raymond Gosling in March as part of a television documentary. It was wonderful to meet a contemporary of Wilkins and Franklin and hear from one of the key workers his own experience working at King’s at the time. We are quite fortunate to have a copy of Gosling's original 1954 PhD thesis, titled ''X-ray diffraction studies of Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid' which has been selected to be digitised as part of the King's College London Biophysics collection.