Dr. Yaniv Erlich is the Chief Science Officer of MyHeritage.com and formally Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computational Biology at Columbia University.

 

Dr. Erlich ran a team at The Erlich lab at Columbia University and the New York Genome Centre specialising in computational genomics where he pioneered new means for DNA data storage with DNA Fountain.

 

Yaniv found some time in his busy schedule to speak with me in Jan 2018. In our relatively brief conversation I managed to talk to him about his fascinating research that he and his team conducted into DNA Fountain during his time at Columbia University. We chatted about the process of turning digital information into DNA and then reading it again, the advantages of DNA over other storage mediums, Ancient DNA (aDNA), Robert Grass’ research into long lasting DNA, the challenge of storing all the worlds data on DNA, the Shannon Limit, and clarification on the actual digital files the Erlich Lab stored onto the DNA.

 

This is an abridged version of our full conversation, a number of other subjects were also discussed that feature in the film.