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The Glory of Big Data: We enter an era in which digital data merges with biology
“The amount of data available to us is increasingly vast. In 2010 we played, swam, wallowed, and drowned in 1.2 zettabytes of the stuff, and in 2011 the volume is predicted to continue along its exponential growth curve to 1.8 zettabytes. (A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes; that’s a 1 with 21 zeros trailing behind it.) (…)
Big Data is about to get much, much bigger, as we enter an era in which digital data merges with biology. This synthesis of codes takes the abstract world of digits and brings it back into the physical world. We of course know quite a bit about how life is expressed—in the four letters of DNA, in more than 20 amino acids, in thousands of proteins. (…)
In this new era—the transition from digital code to digital-plus-life code—the capacity to generate data exceeds our capacity to store and process it. In fact, life code is accumulating at a rate 50 percent faster than Moore’s Law, it at least doubles every 12 months. Without extraordinary advances in data storage, transmission and analysis, within the next five years we may simply be unable to keep up. (…)
Programmable cell platforms are like computer chips. They could eventually be designed to help create or do anything, if you figure out the right code for what you wish to make. (…)
Life programming may also solve the problem of how to store gargantuan data sets. All digital data can be coded into life-forms, and all life-forms can be coded as digital data. In theory, this means you could eventually store, and copy, all the words and images from every issue of the New York Times in the gene code of a few bacteria.”
“The amount of data available to us is increasingly vast. In 2010 we played, swam, wallowed, and drowned in 1.2 zettabytes of the stuff, and in 2011 the volume is predicted to continue along its exponential growth curve to 1.8 zettabytes. (A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes; that’s a 1 with 21 zeros trailing behind it.) (…)
Big Data is about to get much, much bigger, as we enter an era in which digital data merges with biology. This synthesis of codes takes the abstract world of digits and brings it back into the physical world. We of course know quite a bit about how life is expressed—in the four letters of DNA, in more than 20 amino acids, in thousands of proteins. (…)
In this new era—the transition from digital code to digital-plus-life code—the capacity to generate data exceeds our capacity to store and process it. In fact, life code is accumulating at a rate 50 percent faster than Moore’s Law, it at least doubles every 12 months. Without extraordinary advances in data storage, transmission and analysis, within the next five years we may simply be unable to keep up. (…)
Programmable cell platforms are like computer chips. They could eventually be designed to help create or do anything, if you figure out the right code for what you wish to make. (…)
Life programming may also solve the problem of how to store gargantuan data sets. All digital data can be coded into life-forms, and all life-forms can be coded as digital data. In theory, this means you could eventually store, and copy, all the words and images from every issue of the New York Times in the gene code of a few bacteria.”
— Juan Enriquez, the founding director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, The Glory of Big Data, PopSci, Oct 31, 2011
