As reported widely last week, Seth Shipman, from Harvard Medical School, has used CRISPR-Cas technology to encode a 36 x 26 pixel movie into the DNA of living E. coli bacteria.

“The mini-movie, really a GIF, is a five-frame animation of a galloping thoroughbred mare named Annie G. The images were taken by the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1800s for his photo series titled ‘Human and Animal Locomotion.'”

They explain it all in a bigger movie:

They hope to turn cells into living recorders to store information from the immediate environment.

Curiously, the scientists who did this in March of this year don’t seem to have received much coverage. And they accomplished much more: encoding, among other things, a gift card and a computer virus. Obviously, the Harvard brand has better publicists.

And similar feats have been done before. IBM spelled out its name in atoms in 1989.

My take: this is just a stunt to prove we can encode information in DNA, something Mother Nature has been doing for billions of years. But of course, let’s not forget the unintended consequences. When you mess around with Mother Nature, things don’t always go as planned. Imagine encoding ‘Godzilla‘ — and then the DNA mutates!