Back in Hinxton, a computer program reassembled the fragments in the right order, and then converted them back into ones and zeros.

WSJ: Scientists Store King Speech, Shakespeare Sonnets in DNA

The recently formed Hinxton Group, an international consortium on stem cells, ethics and law, met last month to discuss how researchers can establish an international ethical framework for their work.

BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Science moves on from dog clone

"All we're doing is adapting what nature has hit upon a very good way of storing information, " said Nick Goldman, a computational biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England, and lead author of the Nature paper.

WSJ: Scientists Store King Speech, Shakespeare Sonnets in DNA