DNA data storage

OK, so a whole lot of flashy science announcements are kind of silly and gimmicky, but this is in my area of expertise and it definitely is not. When I saw this article, I confess my first thought was "oh, what now". It looked kind of fluffy and pompous. (Sorry, full text not available online for free.) But it turns out that DNA is a distinctive and possibly practical way of storing really really REALLY large amounts of information, if you are willing to go to a whole lot of work to read it out. That it has suddenly been accomplished for a multi-megabyte document is surprising, though not so much in retrospect. All the steps described make sense and use currently available technology, it was just put together in an unusually clever way. Current trends point towards this being a genuine niche application for some really esoteric librarians.

One thing about this that's sort of interesting is that if it gets really cheap, information could be mingled with the environment in a new way. Consider the possibilities of "data spray". You could encode a document into DNA and put it into a cologne, then later sequence it off of someone's lips after they kissed whoever used it. (As in, a spy could now actually do this today for maybe a few million dollars.)Silly example, but I'm sure real ones are not far behind. It all seems very James Bond.

(Update: quickie cell phone shot of article here.)