Moore's law is not like a law of nature, a law of physics, it's a law of human determination.

They would just will it into existence. The race is to do is to be able to build the Moore's Law for DNA. That feels like one of the last big

unlocks in the synthetic biology. Actually that's where you really quickly get humbled by how

all nature has done it itself. A thousand years from now humans

will know how to read DNA. Biology has had a huge storage problem on its own. It's dealt with it

within the biological context. The fact that you look out in a world with trees and people and birds and so on, there's tons and tons of bits there and bites all other place that's been there for millions of years. Life itself is literally digital.

Hello A16Z podcast listeners, welcome to 2024.

At the speed that many fields have been moving recently,

whether it be AI or robotics or biotech, almost nothing feels impossible.

And that's why we're kicking off this year with a topic that does sound outlandish, but

might actually be within our field of view. That topic, DNA as data storage.

Scientists have estimated that the average human body has trillions of cells,

with billions replaced daily.

Now that's an incredibly efficient machine driven by the genetic code in every single one of us

and of course that's DNA. This blueprint has also evolved and become optimized for space and longevity.

You cannot see it with the naked eye, yet it can last for hundreds, maybe even millions of

years. And get this, the storage capacity of a single gram of DNA is over 200

million gigabytes. The amount of DNA in your body? 150 billion terabytes capable of storing every single movie released in the 21st

century, billions of times over.

Or equivalent to thousands of data centers, except requiring way less energy and

lasting much longer. So it should be no surprise that humans wanted to leverage this

quote natural intelligence built in all of us.

...