Who Needs Hard Drives? Scientists Store Film Clip in DNAbr “Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small which does what we want!”br Dr. Feynman’s idea “was a seminal piece — it gave us a direction,” said Leonard Adleman, a mathematician at the University of Southern Californiabr and co-inventor of one of the most used public cryptography systems, RSA (the A is for Adleman).br Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematics professor and expert on digital technology at the Universitybr of Minnesota who was not involved in the new research, called it “fascinating.”br Imagine, he said, “the impossibility of controlling secrets, when those secretsbr are encoded in the genomes of the bacteria in our guts or on our skins.”br The renowned physicist Richard Feynman proposed half a century ago that DNA could be used for storage in this way.br “Right now, we can measure one neuron at a time with electrodes, but 86 billion electrodes would not fit in your brain,” Dr. Church said.br Dr. Church and his colleagues have already shown in past research that bacteria can record DNA in cells, if the DNA is properly taggedbr It would be, said Dr. Church, analogous to the black boxes carried by airplanes whose data is used in the event of a crash.br George Church, a geneticist at Harvard and one of the authors of the new study, recentlybr encoded his own book, “Regenesis,” into bacterial DNA and made 90 billion copies of it.