Ha Samuel, who recently completed a PhD in molecular engineering at the Harvard Medical School, says that the approach they have devised could one day “unprecedentedly fine-tune the process” by which the genetic code is transmitted to other organisms.

Citing “the great advances in DNA sequence data mining”, Joshua Gans, who will be a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas School of Medicine in Houston in 2015, points out that even for life, information on the order of 10bn bits – or trillion – could be stored on a single chromosome.

“The fact that we are trying to do something so fundamental and vast is very exciting,” says Gans.

That’s because sequencing, not just genome mapping, is an important starting point for the pursuit of artificial life. If humans and other life forms could be sequenced, it would serve as the benchmark on which those approaches could be benchmarked: more of a barometer of their potential to be as alive as possible.

“You could get the first results that tell us about the biological nature of human intelligence, but also about whether we are alone in the universe,” says Samuel.

Journal reference: Advanced Healthcare Materials, DOI: 10.1016/j.abbim.2014.09.006