[strategofr]

"He says that the protein layer, made from tiny genetically altered microbe proteins, "COULD" allow DVDs and other external devices to store terabytes of information.

Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston reported his findings at the International Conference on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Brisbane this week.

"What this "WILL" do eventually is eliminate the need for hard drive memory completely," he says. "

Notice the 2 words I have made all caps & in quote. Tense is important. The article is nonsense.

But noteworthy. The level of nonsense in science is increasing.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

"COULD" allow DVDs and other external devices to store terabytes of information. Professor V Renugopalakrishnan of the Harvard Medical School in Boston reported his findings at the International Conference on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Brisbane this week. "What this "WILL" do eventually is eliminate the need for hard drive memory completely," he says. "

Your point has merit.

But the "COULD" claim applies to projected storage capacity well into the terabyte range - a mass storage function, done by tapes in the bad old days and now by multiple DVDs.
And the "WILL" claim applies to the different, tho similar, function of the hard drive.

It can be read, "The difficult (making something which supplants the hard drive" we do immediately (a matter of months). The impossible (supplanting the DVD with the same technology that supplants the hard drive) takes a little longer (a matter of a couple of years)."

A claim of "commercialization in 12 months" is basically a claim that "It's easy to make these things right now; it's only a matter of ramping up production to commercial scale."