From DNA storage to Net Zero Carbon: The 10 Biggest WOW’s of ABLC’s Closing Day

10. Yes, you have 10 billion 6TB hard drives…inside you.

A remarkable presentation from early-stager Iridia highlighted, in profiling the opportunities of DNA-based data storage, how massively compacted DNA data really is. Iridia CEO Murali Prahalad noted in this slide that every human has the equivalent of an awful lot of data storage in the DNA in our cells. First, think of a two terabyte hard drive, as you may have for all the memory in your high-end personal computer or your external hard drive. How much memory do you have in your DNA? 30 billion of those hard drives. 

Let’s put that in perspective. That’s 20 quintillion songs. You could play those songs continuously for the next 100,000 billion years and still not have finished the playlist.