Team:Edinburgh UG/Integrated Practices
Integrated Human Practices
DR SZYMANSKI AND DR SCHYFTER
After coming up with a project idea and designing a way to test out our method, we decided it was time to start a discussion about whether or not our project had practical applications. Our first meeting was with Dr Erika Szymanski and Dr Pablo Schyfter of the University of Edinburgh’s Science, Technology and Innovation Studies Department.
Their input really put our project into focus and laid down a track for the rest of our human practices. They told us that we were trying to target too many people with our DNA storage system and that we needed to be practical about who would actually use our product. As reading and writing data in DNA is slower than storing and retrieving something from a USB drive or even downloading a file from the internet, we needed to focus more on long-term, low access data storage. After this meeting we got in contact with local librarians and data experts. Return to the timeline to read more.
Another takeaway point from the meeting was that up until this point we had not thought about the physical storage of our DNA. Were we planning on storing the DNA in some sort of time capsule that was only to be opened at certain times? Or were we going to focus on more practical and accessible storage of DNA in vials? We addressed this when we tested the viability of DNA in different storage conditions.
DR ANDY TURNER AND DR ADAM CARTER FROM ARCHER/EPCC
Following our meeting with Drs Szymanski and Schyfter, we set up a time to talk to Dr Turner and Dr Carter from ARCHER and EPCC. ARCHER is a supercomputer at the University that runs simulations and calculations that are too resource intensive to be performed on a regular computer. EPCC hosts ARCHER along with other computing and data facilities. Drs Turner and Carter have extensive experience with generating and storing large amounts of data.
Though very positive of our idea, they confessed that DNA data storage would not work best for them. The simulations and research they facilitate require data to be generated and stored instantly and in high volumes, whereas DNA has a read and write time that is too slow to accommodate supercomputing. They suggested that we meet with librarians or archivists that store important, historical data for long periods of time. It is important to securely store this kind of data since it is often unique and cannot be regenerated or simulated.
They agreed that using Basic English as a proof of concept was very illustrative of our method, however, they pointed out that we should view the information coded in BabbleBricks to be flexible and that we should stress its arbitrary nature to others. Along with saying that this was one of our strengths, they encouraged us to come up with some sort of cost analysis comparing our assembly method to other storage techniques. They said that defining the ‘workflow’ of our project would help us decide whether we envision a BabbleBlock factory that stores all data in DNA, or whether we could scale down the system to a single machine. See how we investigated this with the Edinburgh Genome Foundry here.
Demo 3 Example 3
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Demo 3 Example 3
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Demo 3 Example 3
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