In 2014, Markowitz had foreseen a big problem, not only for intelligence agencies such as the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency, but also for other government departments, and even big tech companies. Many were generating exabytes worth of data, but the supply of data storage on that scale was becoming too scarce or too costly for government units, whose budgets could not expand exponentially to accommodate all the valuable information they were collecting.
DNA, nature’s nanoscale information coding material, was a possible answer. In 2016, Markowitz designed a program to test the feasibility of DNA data storage as an alternative to conventional media such as hard drives and magnetic tape. Various research teams had already “written” binary code into synthesized DNA sequences.
