discussing how our institute would store genetic information on computers and the cost of doing that and at the end of the day with german beer we were talking about other ways maybe you could store information and the inspiration initially was to think of a way that would be less expensive. and between ourselves the joke was that we realized that you could use d.n.a. itself as a storage medium as well as the source of the information we wanted to store. it s an amazing idea to engineer d.n.a. to store data. first goldman and his team had to. develop a code to translate the ones north of digital data into a ts and g. s the four letters that correspond to the basic elements of d.n.a. . and they have to break them up into manageable chunks of d.n.a. . a machine a d.n.a.