When Nick Goldman first opened the package, he couldn’t quite believe that it contained anything at all, much less all of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The parcel had come from a facility in the US and arrived at the European Bioinformatics Institute in the UK, in March 2012.  It contained a series of small plastic vials, at the bottom of which were… apparently nothing. It was Goldman’s colleague Ewan Birney who showed him the tiny dust-like specks that he had missed.

These specks were DNA, and they contained:

The team sent the vials off to a facility in Germany, where colleages dissolved the DNA in water, sequenced it, and reconstructed all the files with 100 percent accuracy. It vindicated the team’s efforts to