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already shown in 2012 by Church’s research group in the USA (Church et al. 2012). A

working group at the European Bioinformatics Institute (Goldman et  al. 2013) then

showed that it is possible to read longer texts, images and also sound recordings into DNA

very well and also encode them securely with an appropriate error correction code. By

considering the error codes and sequencing the DNA twice, all this information can also

be read out very reliably. What’s more, in 2015 the research group led by Prof. Stark at

ETH Zurich showed that vitrification of the DNA makes it possible to store this informa­

tion unchanged for up to a million years. Add in the fact that optical switches like the

BLUF domain also switch very quickly (within femtoseconds), and the outlines of a tech­

nology that is much faster (a million times) and more durable (100,000 times longer) than

our computer, and also has a much higher storage density (exabytes versus terabytes),

become visible here. In the process, optical switches would replace transistors, DNA

would replace memory disks, and the silicon matrix would be replaced by nanocellulose.

Nature, especially bacteria, show us that this technology has been working smoothly in its

components for billions of years, we just need to put them together efficiently.

13.4a

2012

2012

2013

2015

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13.4b

2013

2013

­

2013

13.4c

2012

2016

13.4a

­

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1986

13.7  Future Level of Communication: The Nanocellulose Chip