Catalog Technologies Unveils First Commercially Available Book Encoded into DNA

Catalog Technologies, Inc. announced it has delivered the 1^st commercially available book encoded into DNA (video).

The book, available from Asimov Press, includes a DNA capsule provided by Catalog and retails for $60. This anthology features nine essays and three works of science fiction.

Catalog created approximately 500,000 unique DNA molecules to encode the 240 pages in the book, representing 481,280 bytes of data. Once converted into synthetic DNA, it was stored as a dry powder under inert gas to eliminate moisture and oxygen in the capsule.

“Providing 1,000 copies of this latest Asimov book encoded into DNA is a significant milestone as we commercialize our DNA Storage and Computation technology,” said Hyunjun Park, co-founder and CEO, Catalog. “Our DNA Computing platform – which uses very little energy – is quickly becoming an attractive option as emerging workloads including AI require unsustainable amounts of energy to process.”

The computing power needed for AI is doubling every 100 days, while computational capacity is reaching an ‘extinction event’ curtailed by the energy supply that will eventually force a plateau in computational growth. In response, big tech companies are turning to nuclear energy to power rapidly growing AI systems.

Catalog developed the solution to reduce the resources needed to store, compute, and secure data by turning to nature. For billions of years, biology has relied on DNA as the data storage and computation medium for its most precious data. Just as trillions of cells in a human body make thousands of secure DNA-based calculations each moment using little energy, the DNA-based platform of Catalog leverages parallelization, low energy, low physical footprint, and secure computing.