For a very long time, the world of physical sciences and biological science remained parallel to one another so much so that you could hardly find life/pure sciences engage in collaborative projects with applied/physical sciences. We're beginning to see a change in that. Recently, scientists were able to successfully store and retrieve 215 petabytes of data in one gram of DNA. For context, 215 petabytes is 215,000 terabytes which is the amount of data Google processes on an average of ten days, yes, it's a lot of data.
CAPITALISM DRIVEN BY COST INCENTIVES
As the cost of operating data storage facilities keeps climbing due to the rising cost of running these facilities and the impact of data centres on the climate, scientists are beginning to explore more cost-saving and environmentally friendly options. What this can possibly mean for software engineering is that we may eventually have to write code that is meant to be transmitted to and interact with DNA, when you pair this with IoT (Internet of Things) and the growth of wearable tech, we have an interesting future ahead of us 😉.
ENVISIONING EXCITING POTENTIALS
As the possible applications of software engineering continue to expand, it is expected that a lot of ethical debates will begin about how much is too much and what should be the rules that dictate how we play with the polarizing subject we know as DNA. The key takeaway today is that we're now able to store data in DNA like you would a memory card. Whether we can make this work at scale remains to be seen. It would however be exciting for us to be able to pull it off and apply it medically.
Medically in the sense that if we can store and retrieve data in DNA, can we write software code that interacts with DNA in a way that can also manipulate DNA or solve medical challenges that we struggle against? At the very least, the ability to use code to monitor the biological state of an organism in real-time, store (within the DNA) and transmit this information for analysis on the cloud thus automating the process of healthcare diagnosis is one that will be invaluable.
A RELATABLE EXPLANATION
Imagine being able to monitor the state of your health from your mobile phone in real-time, being alerted of threats to your health along with practical advice that can be implemented on the fly simply by authorizing the software in your DNA to take action. It's becoming increasingly important that other fields and disciplines integrate their work with software development in order to unlock previously underutilized potentials within individual disciplines and implement innovation at scale.
FINALLY
This is one of the reasons why we have to encourage people from other disciplines to learn software development, creativity leverages a base level of knowledge. You can only innovate and imagine things that are related to what you currently know. If I were to ask the average person to evaluate isozymes and allozymes as molecular markers, the average person would be confused. I am able to imagine this because of my background in biological science.
Some of you may be wondering if all these are just talks, I happen to be someone who puts his money where his mouth is. I have begun my Master's degree programme in molecular systematics with a plan to eventually obtain a PhD in molecular biology in order to explore the potential of combining my software engineering and biological sciences experience to solve world problems 😎.