I thought storing all my manuscripts on a thumb drive and then also in Dropbox was caution enough. To say nothing of them being in the computer and scattered about as email attachments. But turning a book into a DNA sequence leaves me feeling we are entering The Twilight Zone. 

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Scientists Convert a 53,000-Word Book Into DNA

 by Peter Pachal

In a scientific first, Harvard University researches successfully transformed a 53,426-word book into DNA, the same substance that provides the genetic template for all living things. The achievement could eventually lead to the mass adoption of DNA as a long-termstoragemedium.

Published Thursday in the journal Science, the experiment aimed to demonstrate the viability of storing large amounts of data on DNA molecules. Since the data is recorded on individual nucleobase pairs in the DNA strand (those adenine-guanine/cytosine-thymine pairs you may be straining to remember from high school biology), DNA can actually store more information per cubic millimeter than flash memory or even some experimental storage techs, IEEE Spectrumreports.

The difficulty is in the translation — both to DNA and back again (summarized in the diagram below). The researchers started with the book’s content, which included the text as well as 11 images and a javascript program, and converted it to binary code. Then they assigned every 0 and 1 a nucleobase.

(more)

http://mashable.com/2012/08/16/dna-book/