1.6.10

Literature encoded in DNA

The J. Craig Venter Institute this year managed to build a complete genome sequence--artificial DNA-- and install it into a bacterial cell. The strand took over operations of its host cell and began reproducing. Many have claimed that this event might be remembered as a major step toward artificial life.


There is something sinister about the entire enterprise, to me at least, but there is one aspect of the story that reminds us that even the mad scientist bent on playing God harbors a latent artist within.  The Venter team apparently encrypted several literary passages and coded them into otherwise unused portions of the DNA sequence.  This is actually something of a trend nowadays amongst that small group of actual artists (harboring latent scientists within) for whom genes are a primary medium.  See, for example, artists Joe Davis and Eduardo Kac.


The quotations encoded onto the bacteria's DNA:

See things not as they are, but as they might be.” -- Robert Oppenheimer
What I cannot build, I cannot understand.”  -- Richard Feynman
To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to recreate life out of life.” -- James Joyce


I would like to learn that the Venter Institute folks have given up their Frankensteinian hubris and have instead chosen to devote their time to a hunt for encoded poetry in the unused portions of existing creatures.  Could there be alien Kabbalah the strands of my own cells?