Health Data Storage Has a Climate Cost. In the Future Data May Be Stored in DNA

A lot of energy is required to analyse and store large amounts of data. We may therefore have to take a different approach to data storage in the future. So says a professor Søren Brunak at the University of Copenhagen. In Denmark, we are good with health data. In fact, we are among the best in the world. But analysing and storing huge amounts of health data comes at a climate cost.

“We have begun to consider the carbon footprint of bioinformatics and CO2 emissions resulting from data analysis,” says Professor Søren Brunak. He is a leading scientist in the field of big data and head of Disease Systems Biology at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research.

One of the main problems is the substantial amounts of data we want to archive and store for possible future use. So how do we make data storage more eco-friendly? The answer may surprise you. Because research suggests that data may be encoded into DNA, Søren Brunak explains. Read more at University of Copenhagen https://healthsciences.ku.dk/newsfaculty-news/2024/03/health-data-storage-comes-at-a-climate-cost.-in-the-future-data-may-therefore-be-encoded-into-dna/

Source: ENN