DNA as a storage medium

I blogged last October about a paper from Harvard in Science describing using DNA as a digital storage medium. In a fascinating keynote at IDCC2013 Ewan Birney of EMBL discussed a paper in Nature with a much more comprehensive look at this technology. It has been getting a lot of press, much of it as usual somewhat misleading. Below the fold I delve into the details.

Talk at IDCC2013

At IDCC2013 in Amsterdam I presented the paper Distributed Digital Preservation in the Cloud in which Daniel Vargas and I described an experiment in which we ran a LOCKSS box in Amazon's cloud. Or rather, I gave a talk that briefly motivated and summarized the paper and then focused on subsequent developments in cloud storage services, such as Glacier. Below the fold is an edited text of the talk with links to the resources. I believe that video of the talk (and, I hope, the interesting question-and-answer session that followed) will be made available eventually.