In my novel Containment, I write about a computer scientist (Arik) and a biologist (Cadie) who work together on a project to use human DNA as a general data storage medium. They call the project ODSTAR for Organic Data Storage and Retrieval, and the first big piece of data they store and successfully retrieve is an image of earth known as The Blue Marble (one of the most famous photographs in history taken by the crew of Apollo 17). Their ODSTAR technology eventually gets used to store critical research which they discover can actually get passed down to future generations.

As was the case with artificial photosynthesis and the proposal to use light pollution from distant worlds to detect the existence of extraterrestrials, technology proposed in Containment has again become a reality. Researchers at Harvard University encoded a 53,426-word book into DNA and then decoded it again with an error rate of only ten bits total.

If you have a subscription to the journal Science, you can read the paper here. Otherwise, you can find more details on Mashable. And, of course, you can find Containment on Amazon.