From disks to DNA? New idea in data storage

I heard this story on NPR this morning, and had to share it.

Geneticists working in a British lab were looking at their budgets for data storage, and they were running out of funding & physical space for hard drives and the electricity to power them. So two of them thought hard about the problem and came up with a novel solution: biological data storage.

Just as data is stored as a series of 1s and 0s, DNA works on a coding system of ACGT. So the scientists created a cypher code using those four letters and developing an encoding process for text data, in this case, Shakespeare's sonnets. They sent their specified coding to a lab that creates synthetic DNA and had strands sent back with that coding, which could be sequenced and retranslated back into text.

It's an innovative concept, and of course, it would take time to develop this idea into usable storage--for now, synthetic DNA creation is prohibitively expensive, but could this possibly be a new avenue in data storage?

Full story here: http://www.npr.org/2013/01/24/170082404/shall-i-encode-thee-in-dna-sonnets-stored-on-double-helix