In the latest effort to contend with exploding quantities of digital data, researchers encoded an entire book into the genetic molecules of DNA, the basic building block of life, and then accurately read back the text.
究人员将一整本书通过编码写入生命基本单元──DNA遗传分子中，然后再准确无误地从中读出这本书的文本。这是人类为应对迅猛增长的电子数据所采取的最新行动。
The experiment, reported Thursday in the journal Science, may point a way toward eventual data-storage devices with vastly more capacity for their size than today's computer chips and drives.
《科学》(Science)杂志周四报道了这一实验。该实验可能会为人类开发远超当前电脑芯片和磁盘容量的数据存储设备指明方向。
'A device the size of your thumb could store as much information as the whole Internet,' said Harvard University molecular geneticist George Church, the project's senior researcher.
该项目的高级研究员、哈佛大学(Harvard University)分子遗传学家丘奇(George Church)说，拇指大小的一个设备就可以存储整个互联网上的所有信息。
In their work, the group translated the English text of a coming book on genomic engineering into actual DNA.
这个团队将一本即将出版的有关基因工程的英文书编译成了真正的DNA。
DNA contains genetic instructions written in a simple but powerful code made up of four chemicals called bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T).
DNA含有用一种简单却无比强大的编码写成的遗传指令，这些指令由腺嘌呤(A)、鸟嘌呤(G)、胞嘧啶(C)和胸腺嘧啶(T)四种被称作硷基的化学物质组成。
The Harvard researchers started with the digital version of the book, which is composed of the ones and zeros that computers read. Next, on paper, they translated the zeros into either the A or C of the DNA base pairs, and changed the ones into either the G or T.
哈佛大学的研究人员首先是从这本书的电子版入手，这个版本由计算机会"读"的1和0组成。接下来，他们再把电子版还原到纸上，将0译成DNA硷基对中的A或C，将1译称G或T。
Then, using now-standard laboratory techniques, they created short strands of actual DNA that held the coded sequence
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