In early 2015, Professor Nick Goldman of the European Institute of Bioinformatics developed a new way of storing digital information in DNA. During his speech at the World Economic Forum, he told about it to the audience, and then offered to solve the puzzle: after giving the test tube samples with DNA samples, he asked them to decode the information coded in it. The winner was one Bitcoin, and the deadline for the task was set for January 21, 2018.
Belgian microbiologist Sander Vuitts only in December 2017 found out about the riddle of Goldman, but was able to solve the puzzle a week before the end of the competition. Aspirant Vuettes specializes in studying the genome of bacteria and loves programming, but solving the problem turned out to be somewhat more complicated than previously thought. Despite the fact that to decode the DNA and detect the hidden key it was only necessary to have access to the machine for sequencing and understand the principle of the code, the first attempt to get the encrypted private key failed.
To unravel Woits with colleagues and supervisor returned after the Christmas holidays, having thoroughly rested and rechecked the lines of code. As a result, the graduate student found a typo in one of the lines of the algorithm, which did not allow access to the encoded information.
In 2015 Bitcoin cost about $ 200, but now its cost has risen to 11 thousand dollars. The graduate student does not plan to become a crypto-investor, but he is going to sell honestly earned Bitcoin.
Announcing the unusual competition, Nick Goldman wanted to draw the attention of scientists to the idea of using DNA as a universal repository of non-biological information, rightly believing that this topic is capable of opening new prospects for researchers and attracting new specialists. The professor was right, the idea attracted attention - in the autumn of last year, scientists wrote down malicious code in DNA that could infect computers during analysis.
The article is based on materials .
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