In the latest effort to contend with exploding quantities of digital data, researchers encoded an entire book into the genetic¹ molecules² of DNA³, the basic building block of life, and then accurately⁴ read back the text.

研究人员将一整本书通过编码写入生命基本单元──DNA遗传分子中，然后再准确无误地从中读出这本书的文本。这是人类为应对迅猛增长的电子数据所采取的最新行动。

The experiment, reported Thursday in the journal Science, may point a way toward eventual⁵ data-storage devices with vastly more capacity for their size than today's computer chips and drives.

科学》(Science)杂志周四报道了这一实验。该实验可能会为人类开发远超当前电脑芯片和磁盘容量的数据存储设备指明方向。

'A device the size of your thumb could store as much information as the whole Internet,' said Harvard University molecular⁶ geneticist George Church, the project's senior researcher.

该项目的高级研究员、哈佛大学(Harvard University)分子遗传学家丘奇(George Church)说，拇指大小的一个设备就可以存储整个互联网上的所有信息。

In their work, the group translated the English text of a coming book on genomic engineering into actual DNA.

这个团队将一本即将出版的有关基因工程的英文书编译成了真正的DNA。

DNA contains genetic instructions written in a simple but powerful code made up of four chemicals called bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T).

DNA含有用一种简单却无比强大的编码写成的遗传指令，这些指令由腺嘌呤(A)、鸟嘌呤(G)、胞嘧啶(C)和胸腺嘧啶(T)四种被称作硷基的化学物质组成。

The Harvard researchers started with the digital version of the book, which is composed of the ones and zeros that computers read. Next, on paper, they translated the zeros into either the A or C of the DNA base pairs, and changed the ones into either the G or T.

哈佛大学的研究人员首先是从这本书的电子版入手，这个版本由计算机会“读”的1和0组成。接下来，他们再把电子版还原到纸上，将0译成DNA硷基对中的A或C，将1译称G或T。

Then, using now-standard laboratory techniques, they created short strands⁸ of actual DNA that held the coded sequence-almost 55,000 strands in all. Each strand⁷ contained a portion of the text and an address that indicated where it occurred in the flow of the book.

然后，他们利用如今标准的实验室技术，创造出包含编码序列的真实DNA短链，一共大约有5.5万个短链。每条短链都含有这本书本文内容的一部分，还有一个表明它在这本书中位置的地址。

In that form-a viscous⁹ liquid or solid salt-a billion copies of the book could fit easily into a test tube and, under normal conditions, last for centuries, the researchers said.

这些研究人员说，这本书即使有10亿份拷贝，也可轻松以这种形式(粘性液体或固体盐)放到一个试管中，并且在正常情况下可保存数百年时间。

The technique likely is a long way from being commercially viable¹⁰. But it highlights the potential of DNA as a stable, long-term archive for ordinary information, such as photographs, books, financial records, medical files and videos, all of which today are stored as computer code.

这种技术距商业化应用可能还有很长一段距离，但它凸显出DNA可稳定、长久地存储普通信息（如照片、书籍、财务记录、医疗档案和视频）的潜力，这些资料目前都以计算机编码的方式存储。

'It shows that the vast increase in capacity to synthesize and sequence DNA can be applied¹¹ to store significant amounts of data,' said pioneering synthetic¹² biologist Drew Endy at Stanford University, who wasn't involved in the project. 'If you wanted to have your library encoded in DNA, you could probably do that now.'

斯坦福大学(Stanford University)具有开创型的合成生物学家恩迪(Drew Endy)说，这表明人类合成和排序DNA的能力大大提高，这个方法可用于存储大量数据，如果你希望把自己的图书馆编译存储到DNA中，很可能现在就可以这么做了。迪恩没有参与这个项目。