There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over. I don't know the comparable figure for a willow seed or an ant, but it will be of the same order of staggeringness. There is enough storage capacity in the DNA of a single lily seed or a single salamander sperm to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica 60 times over. Some species of the unjustly called 'primitive' amoebas have as much information in their DNA as 1,000 Encyclopaedia Britannicas.
Amazingly, only about 1 per cent of the genetic information in, for example, human cells, seems to be actually used: roughly the equivalent of one volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Nobody knows why the other 99 per cent is there. In a previous book I suggested that it might be parasitic, freeloading on the efforts of the 1 per cent, a theory that has more recently been taken up by molecular biologists under the name of 'selfish DNA'. A bacterium has a smaller information capacity than a human cell, by a factor of about 1,000, and it probably uses nearly all of it: there is little room for parasites. Its DNA could 'only' hold one copy of the New Testament!
Modern genetic engineers already have the technology to write the New Testament or anything else into a bacterium's DNA. The 'meaning' of the symbols in any information technology is arbitrary, and there is no reason why we should not assign combinations, say triplets, from DNA's 4-letter alphabet, to letters of our own 26-letter alphabet (there would be room for all the upper and lower-ease letters with 12 punctuation characters). Unfortunately, it would take about five man-centuries to write the New Testament into a bacterium, so I doubt if anybody will bother. If they did, the rate of reproduction of bacteria is such that 10 million copies of the New Testament could be run off in a single day, a missionary's dream if only people could read the DNA alphabet but, alas, the characters are so small that all 10 million copies of the New Testament could simultaneously dance upon the surface of a pin's head.
