Scientists at the University of California at Riverside have worked out a way of storing binary data on a person's DNA.

In their paper, “Length-based Encoding of Binary Data in DNA,” which was published by the American Chemical Society, the researchers showed that it is possible to store 750 megabytes of data on a DNA strand. Since we only need three percent of DNA there is plenty of room to encode information in a genome, allowing the information to be preserved and replicated in perpetuity.

What has been developed at UCR is a method to encode a message in DNA in a way that does not require an expensive sequencing machine.

At the moment any decoding still requires a a wet lab procedure, but this appears to be a start.

More here.