How To Become A Successful Inventor In Nigeria — Getting Support For Your Inventing Activities 2

Image of open human head with various objects belongs to IPOwatchdog.com

By Kenneth Nwachinemelu David-Okafor

Welcome to the ninth installment of this serialized post.

In this installment I will wrap up the point on getting competent technical and professional support for your inventive undertaking. Requisite and timely competent technical and professional support can make all the difference in the world.

In that last post, I dwelt on getting competent technical and professional support for your inventive undertaking. Using news reports about these three sets of young inventors, I provided a graphic imagery of how requisite and timely competent technical and professional support can make all the difference in the world.

In the eighth post, I shared the news reports about three sets of young inventors, one of Emmanuel Okekunle from Nigeria and 10 successful applicants selected from 369 young Nigerian inventors in ICT to participate in the 2016 Gulf Information Technology Exhibition (GITEX) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates as well as the other of Olivia Hallisey from America, to drive my point home with a multi-dimensional mental picture.

In this post, I wish that you would see how Nigeria has changed in terms of the support available to inventors and would-be inventors. If you have not gone through the post, CLICK HERE.

In order to compare and contrast, let me share with you the following news from the Africa Innovation Foundation’s (AIF) 2016 Innovation Prize for Africa (IPA) awards.

The story I have excerpted about 3 Nigerians among the Top 10 innovators selected from 985 submissions across 46 African countries was published by VenturesAfrica on June 15, 2016:

Meet The 3 Nigerian Innovators Shining As Part Of The Top 10 Nominees For The Innovation Prize For Africa 2016 Awards

The 10 nominees for Africa Innovation Foundation’s (AIF) 2016 Innovation Prize for Africa (IPA) awards were announced on May 9 ahead of the event which commemorates the fifth year of the ‘Made in Africa’ themed initiative. The event is scheduled to take place in Gaborone, Botswana on the 22nd and 23rd of June.

For five years now, the AIF has been using the IPA to encourage and promote growth and prosperity in the African continent by showcasing the innovative solutions developed by Africans for Africa. Out of 985 submissions made this year by innovators from multidisciplinary industries in 46 African countries, only 10 innovators made it to the final selection stage. All 10 innovations being recognized this year have recorded breakthroughs in the IPA categories of malaria and other public health burdens, smart solutions for farmers, and dynamic energy initiatives.

Following the outcome of one-on-one meetings and pitching sessions, the panel of judges will announce the top three winning innovations for 2016 at the June 23 awards ceremony holding in the Gaborone International Conference Centre (GICC). IPA 2016 judge, Dr. Toluwalogo Odumosu discloses that picking a winner entails understanding how the innovation can be potentially transformative and positively affect life on the continent. Also, the ingenuity of the inventor is also a factor in his decision making.

“I must admit that I am beyond impressed by the nominees for 2016. Without exception they are impressive candidates and foresee a very difficult decision process for the judges! This of course is a wonderful problem to have and only reflects positively on our slate of candidates for this year’s Innovation.”

This year’s event in Botswana will also witness IPA’s first ever Innovation Ecosystems Connector which is endorsed by Botswana’s President, H.E. Lieutenant General Seretse Khama Ian Khama. The president will also be presiding over the awards ceremony proper celebrating IPA’s fifth anniversary. “It goes without saying that I am very grateful to H.E. President Lieutenant General Seretse Khama Ian Khama, the President of Botswana, for his endorsement of the Prize being held in Gaborone”, says AIF Founder Jean Claude Bastos de Morais.

According Mr Bastos de Morais, some of the highlights to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the initiative include launching a new online platform that will connect African innovators and innovation enablers and a book comprising of the contributions of innovation influencers in the Africa. He also mentioned that because capacity building and knowledge transfer is a key focus for AIF, this year’s programme will feature mentoring sessions and boot camps for innovators to understand and navigate intellectual property rights, business model development, pitching skills, and communications.

Among the 10 finalists who are up for the US$150,000 prize money this year are three Nigerian innovators – Dr. Eddy Agbo, Godwin Benson, and Femi Odeleye. Dr Eddy Agbo is a molecular biotechnologist and the Chairman and CEO of Fyodor Biotechnologies. His innovation, Urine Malaria Test (UMT), is a rapid non-blood diagnostic medical device that can diagnose malaria in less than 25 minutes. Godwin Benson’s online platform Tuteria allows “people who want to learn any skill, whether formal or informal, to connect with anyone else in proximity who is offering that skill.” And Femi Odeleye is an automobile designer whose Tryctor is transforming small scale farming in Nigeria.

Ventures Africa caught up with these change makers as they prep ahead of IPA 2016 to find out their thoughts on being potential winners of the prestigious IPA award, their innovations, and their short and long term plans.

EDDY AGBO – Urine Malaria Test (UMT)

Ventures Africa (VA): What was your first thought when you learned that you were being considered for the Innovation Prize for Africa 2016?

Dr. Eddy Agbo (DEA): First was astounding disbelief, then I was like, “waoh, thank God!” It is really such a great honor to be considered for this high profile prize.

VA: What primary action are people expected to take after they use the Urine Test for Malaria and are positively diagnosed?

DEA: Already, for most people with fever, they just treat or are treated for malaria without knowing whether it’s due to malaria or not. What the UMT does is to provide that clarity, so that when positive, the person or healthcare provider knows for sure what they are treating. They can just buy an anti-malaria medicine, which does not require a doctor’s prescription in most African countries. So, no more guesswork!

To put this in context, imagine a mother in a Nigerian village whose child is sick. Maybe the fever and malaise are caused by a virus and will pass in a day or two. Or, perhaps they are early signs of malaria requiring prompt medical attention. Should she and her child start the two-hour walk to the nearest clinic or medical lab, or gamble that she will soon be feeling better?

Now, imagine that she can avoid the dilemma altogether. From her cupboard, she takes a cardboard strip and dips it in a tablespoon of her child’s urine. If two lines appear on the strip, the child is positive for clinical malaria and the mother knows instantly that the infection very likely is malaria. If positive, then one issue is clear: it’s malaria. The mother can then walk to the nearest medicine store or clinic to buy the drug.

Now, further imagine that she can avoid this trek altogether by pulling out a pack of affordable artemisinin-based drug co-purchased with the UMT. This is our next focus!

VA: What has been the critical response to your innovation thus far?

DEA: We have been receiving a lot of requests from healthcare providers and policy makers on how/where they could get the UMT. University and hospital researchers are contacting us for samples to be used for their research.

VA: What has been the commercial response to your innovation thus far?

DEA: The response has been great. There have been a lot of interest and requests from companies and individuals in Nigeria and many other countries (including South Sudan, Angola, Mozambique, Malawi, Ghana, Brazil, India, Cote d’Ivoire, etc.) with expressions of interest to enter into marketing agreements with us.

We have been making presentations to healthcare providers, who have warmly welcome the UMT and are ordering the kits; they see they can now test all patients who come it with fever. They see that this brings immense value to their practice, and enhances best practices and standard of care; they see they can now test all patients first in a simple non-invasive (painless) manner, thereby increasing their patient experience. Individuals also see the simplicity of the UMT and are ordering and using the test in increasing numbers. Our current task in Nigeria is increasing the awareness about the UMT.

VA: What pressing project of yours would the IPA prize go towards if you win it?

DEA: With the IPA prize (oh my God!), we will move very quickly to expand UMT introduction into other African countries. This process will require some steps including regulatory registrations and approvals in selected countries, identifying sales and marketing partners in the countries, modifications to product packaging to conform each individual country requirement, and sales and marketing effort (awareness) in the respective countries. Our goal is to get the UMT in the hand of every African who needs it within the shortest possible time, and the IPA Prize will definitely help make that happen speedily!

VA: Is Fyodor planning to replicate its success with malaria testing in other parts of the health sector?

DEA: Yes, we are planning on developing a non-blood urine test for Ebola. This is particularly urgently needed because during the last outbreak in West Africa that killed thousands of people in a very short time, many patients with fever during the period were automatically considered Ebola in the absence of a thorough check. The fact of the matter was health care providers were avoiding patients with fever-related symptoms, while at the same time patients with such symptoms were avoiding health facilities with the fear that they would be diagnosed with Ebola. Some patients with malaria who went to the healthcare centre caught Ebola there. Healthcare providers did not want to do a blood test because they could be infected it is Ebola. Urine is safe to test as Ebola virus is not found in urine, so in Ebola outbreak situations, the UMT will be immensely helpful; people can test themselves in the comfort of their home.

We are also developing another urine test that can be used to test for a set of 5 diseases, to confirm which of the diseases is causing the fever, using only one urine sample.

GODWIN BENSON – Tuteria

Africa (VA): What was your first thought when you learned that you were being considered for the Innovation Prize for Africa 2016?

Godwin Benson (GB): I was really excited to learn that I was one of the nominees for the IPA 2016. When I got the news of my nomination, my team and I, had a little celebration in the office! We were grateful, and also inspired. This was my second application. I had applied in 2015, but wasn’t selected. This made me feel that we actually had a chance at succeeding in Africa.

VA: What has been the critical response to your innovation thus far?

GB: Well, the concerns people have expressed towards the innovation has been around safety and quality of tutors. However we have put some measures in place to keep Tuteria safe for both tutors and clients. First of all, all tutors must verify their online and offline identities before they can even begin the application process. They supply us with their government issued IDs, personal details as well as profile photo, and also connect to one of their social networks.

We manually review all the details and information from all three sources must match before they can even proceed. Those who can’t provide these requirements or whose information is not consistent, are automatically denied. We also partnered with a background check company to conduct background checks on tutors, at the request of clients – they do criminal record check and address verification check. We also get references and guarantors for each tutor, who are respected persons that can vouch for the tutors’ conduct and personality. We also have a slightly different process for verifying the guarantors.

Also, after every lesson, we give clients and tutors opportunities to review each other which will be publicly displayed on their profiles. So clients can feel safer when they see reviews from a few clients who have engaged a tutor in the past

Moreover, for most subjects, tutors have to pass various competency tests and write about their experience with the subject and/or provide supporting documents to prove their proficiency e.g. an ICAN tutor would need to send us his/her ICAN certification etc.

VA: What has been the commercial response to your innovation thus far?

GB: The fact is, many people need tutoring, so we have seen huge demand for private lessons. Since we launched in October of 2015, we have received over 16,000 tutor applications, out of which we have approved a little over 6,000 tutors, and have received about 2,500 requests from interested learners across the country worth about US$300,000.

Some requests have led to actual sales, about US$75,000.

VA: What pressing project of yours would the IPA prize go towards if you win it?

GB: First would be office infrastructure and team expansion, and then marketing – a lot of targeted marketing. Along with these, we will also invest in developing the product and building technologies to improve the quality and variety of services available to our users.

VA: Will Tuteria be restricted to students in academic institutions alone? If no, are there any future plans to expand the model to suit vocational learning? And how achievable is the concept, in your opinion?

GB: Tuteria is not restricted to students alone, even right now. We already offer tutoring for vocational skills such as Makeup, Bead Making, Cooking, Fashion Designing etc. Although we focus mostly on academics, we’ve also had a number of students for non-academic and skill acquisition subjects. There however has to be a few modifications to our current model in order to suit vocational learnings.

For example, our current model uses per hour billing, but most vocation trainings, at least here in Nigeria, do not have the concept of per hour billing. Such trainings are usually billed for 3 months, 6 months, 9 months etc. So while we’re focusing on academics, we’re also building out another model to support vocation trainings.

FEMI ODELEYE – Tryctor (Agriculture; smart solutions for farmers)

Ventures Africa (VA): What was your first thought when you learned that you were being considered for the Innovation Prize for Africa 2016?

Femi Odeleye (FO): Naturally, I was overwhelmed with a great sense of joy, achievement, and privilege to represent my country and be selected as one of the 10 best innovators in Africa.

VA: What has been the critical response to your innovation thus far?

FO: It has been extremely positive and [people are] enthusiastic about the possibilities of a new revolution which will contribute to the end of the pressing mechanization problems currently experienced in African agriculture.

VA: What has been the commercial response to your innovation thus far?

FO: We have already sold 10 units and are currently concluding our last test pilot schemes in Nigeria. The exposure from being a nominee of the IPA has resulted in a huge amount of enquiries pouring in by the day and we are confident to receive a sizable number of orders before the year runs out.

VA: What pressing project of yours would the IPA prize go towards if you win it?

FO: It will surely go towards the further development of the Tryctor with emphasis on facilitating the final drive needed to push the Tryctor commercially into the market.

VA: Are you planning to use your skill and experience in automobile design to advance Nigeria’s auto industry in the future, or is the agricultural sector your sole interest?

FO: Most definitely, my ultimate intention is to contribute to the development of the Nigerian Automotive industry. It has always been a childhood dream of mine to design vehicles for Nigeria. Building a tractor is already a step in this direction, of which I’m extremely grateful to God for.

Note that I am not suggesting by this illustration that you must become involved in a competition to get help.

TO BE CONTINUED

GUEST BLOG POST: How To Build A Life Of Inspiration In Four Easy Steps — Tanner Christensen

Image source: creativesomething

“We are influenced by drives to which we have little access, and which we never would have believed had not the statistics laid them bare.” – David Eagleman.

By Tanner Christensen
No matter where you look, you’ll discover that a crucial part of living a creative life involves being inspired in some form or another. Either being inspired to act or being inspired by something. Despite its prevalence in the creative culture, inspiration is a peculiar subject to try and understand.

Of course inspiration is a very real phenomenon. It’s likened in some psychological studies and historical literature as another type of emotion, akin to ecstasy or sadness. Ample anecdotal evidence indicates that inspiration can provide a positive state of mind and propel or encourage more creative behaviors and experimentation in those who are struck by it. For some individuals a lack of inspiration can lead to lethargy, even depression.

To really understand where inspiration comes from and how it impacts us, we must look at it through the lens of where it unequivocally resides (no matter its source or how it makes us feel): all inspiration lives within the mind. We can study inspiration in the contexts of psychology to grasp at it.

To this day, unfortunately, the mind continues to be a very mysterious device. As David Eagleman states in his 2011 book "Incognito": inspiration is often the result of drives to which we have little awareness. Or, to put it another way, as designer and author Eric Karjaluoto once wrote:

“The problem with inspiration is that it’s random, which leads you to focus your hope on outside influences you can’t rely on.”

Eagleman and Karjaluoto make a fair point: as much as we want to feel inspired, the sudden flash of insight or energy we get from inspiration often eludes us. We’re left feeling unmotivated and without insight more often than we’d like in both our lives and work.

There is hope for understanding some level of what inspiration is and how it works in the mind, however. We have a solid amount of research at our fingertips for better understanding how to live more inspired lives. One study of recent note was conducted by Tobin Hart in 1998. Aptly titled: “Inspiration: Exploring the Experience and its Meaning,” Hart worked with 70 participants to understand the experience of inspiration. What they found can be summarized simply enough:

“Inspiration cannot be willed into being, but it can be cultivated through the influence of set and setting.”

In his study, as well as research into the historical literature on inspiration, Hart uncovered four parts to a pattern of inspiration that allow us to cultivate the right settings for it to strike. Whenever an experience of inspiration occurred, Hart learned, the process was almost always the same: a pattern of inspiration. Hart gives us the four parts to the pattern of inspiration as follows:

1. Find connection

Before any inspiration can occur, we must feel some sense of connection to the work and world immediately around us.

The mind performs this type of emotional connection almost constantly, naturally for us. To again quote David Eagleman, from his book "Incognito":

“Brains reach out into the world and actively extract the type of information they need. The brain does not need to see everything at once…it only needs to know where to go to find the information.”

Studies have gone on to shown that the mind, when left with a gap of information, will magically fill it with whatever available information it has. We see serendipitous patterns and connections everywhere because that’s how our brains tend to work.

However, there are things that get in the way of feeling connected, as you may know all too well. Stress, fear, and exhaustion limit our ability to create a feeling of connection. Rather than feeling like the world is setting us up for insight, we feel like it’s bearing down on us in an attempt to crush our spirits.

To have a feeling of connection requires a sense of openness, relaxation, calmness, a sense of wonder. Having a child-like curiosity in play, the longing to explore the world through imagination, or the peace that can come from a long walk, are all prime examples of setting the stage for connection and, ultimately, inspiration.

2. Become open

Hart identified that once an individual feels connected to the work and world around them, they become open to new possibilities.

Psychologist Art Markman defines openness to experiences as: 

“The degree to which a person is willing to consider new ideas and opportunities.”

Once we begin to feel a connection we open ourselves up mentally, physically, and emotionally; creating a natural drive to engage ideas as they appear. And the world is so vastly complex that ideas are nearly always around us, if we merely open ourselves to them. We know this because all great discoveries were not new discoveries, they were merely new ways of seeing what already existed.

Here, too, we run into obstacles on our path to experiencing inspiration. Ego, a lack of awareness, or (most notably) fear, keep us closed off and un-open to new ideas or possibilities. To overcome those obstacles we must embrace naivety, the possibility of being wrong, and our perceived limits. IDEO founders David and Tom Kelley give us this bit of advice, from their book "Creative Confidence":

“Start with a growth mindset, the deep-seated belief that your true potential is still unknown. That you are not limited to only what you have been able to do before.”

3. Embrace clarity

If we’re connected to the world around us, and if we’re open to the ideas it presents, we will experience what Hart describes as a “distinct phenomena.” Clarity. The “flash” part of inspiration that feels like a sudden light switch being flipped or a shock of lightning to the brain.

Clarity occurs when we are both connected and open. To get to this point in the pattern of inspiration, we must first have perceived connection to the world around us and openness to what it might present. In other words: we can only experience clarity when we’re we’re paying attention.

And this, Hart explains, is the real crux of what it means to experience inspiration. The phenomena of clarity is a sudden insight or revelation brought about by our ability to connect with and remain open to the world, patiently waiting for it to uncover itself to us. Designer and writer Christopher Simmons elegantly explains this lesson by saying:

“If you look at the world both critically and with wonder, there are lessons to be learned everywhere. Every object, experience, relationship, environment, phrase—everything—has locked inside it an insight it wants to share.”

All it takes is connection, openness, and time. But the pattern of inspiration is not done just yet.

4. Utilize your energy

Once clarity occurs, the inspiration carries with it a type of motivation or, as Hart explains, energy: 

“A dramatic shift in emotional as well as physical energy.”

The lull before the flash of insight can be viewed as a battery cell that is energizing before the spark, ready to fuel what may come next.

It’s the energy that we get from being connected, open, and aware of the moment of clarity, that enables us to live the experience of inspiration fully. Without the energy, Hart describes, it is not inspiration but some other understanding that we have experienced.

Here, however, we begin to set ourselves up for disaster. Fueled now by the energy of insight, we must carry it through self-doubt, critique, and further fear in order to see what our clarity can become. Sometimes that means remarkable inventions or discoveries, other times the energy merely turns into a scribble idea on a crumpled up paper or a less-than-ideal day dream.

But we cannot let the times when inspiration fails us prevent us from continuing to feel connected and open to the world, attentive to the clarity we may experience. To do so is to snuff out the flame that fuels inspiration to begin with.

Tanner Christensen is a creativity expert, author of The Creativity Challenge, a web developer, entrepreneur, designer at Facebook, and part-time artist. Christensen started Creative Something in 2008 with the goal of researching and sharing answers to the question: How can we better understand our creativity in order to do more with it?

Originally published in Creative Something

NEWS POST: Scientists Work Toward Storing Digital Information In DNA

This Wednesday, April 24, 2002 photo shows a gel image of the Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) of 96 horses displayed on a computer monitor at the UC Davis veterinary genetics lab in Davis, Calif.  DNA is an information-storing molecule; the genes passed from generation to generation transmit the blueprints for creating the organism. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

Her computer, Karin Strauss says, contains her "digital attic" — a place where she stores that published math paper she wrote in high school, and computer science schoolwork from college.

She'd like to preserve the stuff "as long as I live, at least," says Strauss, 37. But computers must be replaced every few years, and each time she must copy the information over, "which is a little bit of a headache."

It would be much better, she says, if she could store it in Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) — the stuff our genes are made of.

Strauss, who works at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, is working to make that sci-fi fantasy a reality.

She and other scientists are not focused in finding ways to stow high school projects or snapshots or other things an average person might accumulate, at least for now. Rather, they aim to help companies and institutions archive huge amounts of data for decades or centuries, at a time when the world is generating digital data faster than it can store it.

To understand her quest, it helps to know how companies, governments and other institutions store data now: For long-term storage it's typically disks or a specialized kind of tape, wound up in cartridges about three inches on a side and less than an inch thick. A single cartridge containing about half a mile of tape can hold the equivalent of about 46 million books of 200 pages apiece, and three times that much if the data lends itself to being compressed.

A tape cartridge can store data for about 30 years under ideal conditions, says Matt Starr, chief technology officer of Spectra Logic, which sells data-storage devices. But a more practical limit is 10 to 15 years, he says.

It's not that the data will disappear from the tape. A bigger problem is familiar to anybody who has come across an old eight-track tape or floppy disk and realized he no longer has a machine to play it. Technology moves on, and data can't be retrieved if the means to read it is no longer available, Starr says.

So for that and other reasons, long-term archiving requires repeatedly copying the data to new technologies.

Into this world comes the notion of DNA storage. DNA is by its essence an information-storing molecule; the genes we pass from generation to generation transmit the blueprints for creating the human body. That information is stored in strings of what's often called the four-letter DNA code. That really refers to sequences of four building blocks — abbreviated as A, C, T and G — found in the DNA molecule. Specific sequences give the body directions for creating particular proteins.

Digital devices, on the other hand, store information in a two-letter code that produces strings of ones and zeroes. A capital "A," for example, is 01000001.

Converting digital information to DNA involves translating between the two codes. In one lab, for example, a capital A can become ATATG. The idea is once that transformation is made, strings of DNA can be custom-made to carry the new code, and hence the information that code contains.

One selling point is durability. Scientists can recover and read DNA sequences from fossils of Neanderthals and even older life forms. So as a storage medium, "it could last thousands and thousands of years," says Luis Ceze of the University of Washington, who works with Microsoft on DNA data storage.

Advocates also stress that DNA crams information into very little space. Almost every cell of your body carries about six feet of it; that adds up to billions of miles in a single person. In terms of information storage, that compactness could mean storing all the publicly accessible data on the internet in a space the size of a shoebox, Ceze says.

In fact, all the digital information in the world might be stored in a load of whitish, powdery DNA that fits in space the size of a large van, says Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England.

What's more, advocates say, DNA storage would avoid the problem of having to repeatedly copy stored information into new formats as the technology for reading it becomes outmoded.

"There's always going to be someone in the business of making a DNA reader because of the health care applications," Goldman says. "It's always something we're going to want to do quickly and inexpensively."

Getting the information into DNA takes some doing. Once scientists have converted the digital code into the 4-letter DNA code, they have to custom-make DNA. For some recent research Strauss and Ceze worked on, that involved creating about 10 million short strings of DNA.

In this Oct. 18, 1962 file photo, Dr. Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins, 46, of Greenwich, England, stands with a model of a DNA molecule during a news conference in the New York office of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. Specific sequences of four building blocks — abbreviated as A, C, T and G — found in the DNA molecule give an organism directions for creating particular proteins. Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize for medicine with two other biochemists, Drs. Francis Harry Compton Crick and James Dewey Watson. (AP Photo/Anthony Camerano)

Twist Bioscience of San Francisco used a machine to create the strings letter by letter, like snapping together Lego pieces to build a tower. The machine can build up to 1.6 million strings at a time.

Each string carried just a fragment of information from a digital file, plus a chemical tag to indicate what file the information came from.

To read a file, scientists use the tags to assemble the relevant strings. A standard lab machine can then reveal the sequence of DNA letters in each string.

Nobody is talking about replacing hard drives in consumer computers with DNA. For one thing, it takes too long to read the stored information. That's never going to be accomplished in seconds, says Ewan Birney, who works on DNA storage with Goldman at the bioinformatics institute.

But for valuable material like corporate records in long-term storage, "if it's worth it, you'll wait," says Goldman, who with Birney is talking to investors about setting up a company to offer DNA storage.

Sri Kosuri of the University of California Los Angeles, who has worked on DNA information storage but now largely moved on to other pursuits, says one challenge for making the technology practical is making it much cheaper.

Scientists custom-build fairly short strings DNA now for research, but scaling up enough to handle information storage in bulk would require a "mind-boggling" leap in output, Kosuri says. With current technology, that would be hugely expensive, he says.

George Church, a prominent Harvard genetics expert, agrees that cost is a big issue. But "I'm pretty optimistic it can be brought down" dramatically in a decade or less, says Church, who is in the process of starting a company to offer DNA storage methods.

For all the interest in the topic, it's worth noting that so far the amount of information that researchers have stored in DNA is relatively tiny.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that a team including Strauss and Ceze had stored a record 200 megabytes. The information included 100 books — one, fittingly, was "Great Expectations" — along with a brief video and many documents. But it was still less than 5 percent the capacity of an ordinary DVD.

Yet it's about nine times the mark reported just last month by Church, who says the announcement shows "how fast the field is moving."

Meanwhile, people involved with archiving digital data say their field views DNA as a possibility for the future, but not a cure-all.

"It's a very interesting and promising approach to the storage problem, but the storage problem is really only a very small part of digital preservation," says Cal Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina's School of Information and Library Science.

It's true that society will probably always have devices to read DNA, so that gets around the problem of obsolete readers, he says. But that's not enough.

"If you just read the ones and zeroes, you don't know how to interpret it," Lee says.

For example, is that string a picture, text, a sound clip or a video? Do you still have the software to make sense of it?

What's more, the people in charge of keeping digital information want to check on it periodically to make sure it's still intact, and "I don't know how viable that is with DNA," says Euan Cochrane, digital preservation manager at the Yale University Library. It may mean fewer such check-ups, he says.

Cochrane, who describes his job as keeping information accessible "10 years to forever," says DNA looks interesting if its cost can be reduced and scientists find ways to more quickly store and recover information.

Starr says his data-storage device company hasn't taken a detailed look at DNA technology because it's too far in the future.

There are "always things out on the horizon that could store data for a very long time," he says. But the challenge of turning those ideas into a practical product "really trims the field down pretty quickly."

Originally published by Associated Press