[gwern]

> What possibilities are opened up when 215Pb/Gram with good I/O and price is reality?

The data storage is almost totally irrelevant. When you improve DNA synthesis by 3-4 orders of magnitude, you make it dirt-cheap to synthesize whole custom genomes, hyper-optimized for anything you wish. (Currently, the state of the art is synthesizing an E coli genome takes multiple years and a large international collaboration.) CRISPR only lets you do a few edits at a time at most, in some parts of the genome; imagine being able to do tens of thousands of edits as easily as 1 edit. At that point, you're hardly even 'editing', you're designing organisms as a whole. The Church lab has some astounding proposals for things you can do when you are able to synthesize a whole genome, like cleaning out all the retrovirals, movable elements, recoding the genome for total viral immunity, on top of the obvious stuff like eliminating all mutation load or increasing specific traits by dozens or hundreds of standard deviations. The mind boggles.

[jgill4]

Craig Venter, Clyde Hutchison and Daniel Gibson produced a minimal genome in a relatively short period of time and even transplanted it. This was a "bottom up" approach in which all of the DNA was synthetic. This is a trivial thing for this team now. As you mentioned, when synthesis costs drop dramatically, things will get interesting!