It's painful to read the NYT write about something you know about: It would also address a glaring Achilles’ heel at the heart of microelectronic data storage

It's painful to read the NYT write about something you know about: It would also address a glaring Achilles’ heel at the heart of microelectronic data storage systems: Magnetic disks, tape and even optical storage systems safely store information at most for only a handful of decades. It's really not a glaring Achilles heel. This is a solved (for the most part) problem - see http://www.mdisc.com/ http://www.mdisc.com/ for a product which can archive your data a reasonable cost for centuries, and much more conveniently than trying to store/recall from DNA. Here are some of the endurance tests they put the mdic through - http://www.esystor.com/images/China_Lake_Full_Report.pdf http://www.esystor.com/images/China_Lake_Full_Report.pdf. I would be interested in seeing how DNA storage stood up to that sort of testing. The ability to store data in DNA is cool, and it's neat that the teams are making progress - but it's important to put the progress into context right now.