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Thursday, March 05, 2009

Poetry Written in DNA

Specially engineered bacteria will wax poetic.
By Emily Singer

A Q&A in Nature this week highlights Canadian poet Christian Bök's plans to write poetry into the genetic code of bacteria. The project, dubbed Xenotext, was inspired by a previous feat of genetic engineering in which microorganisms were made to carry the tune of Disney's "It's a Small World (After All)" in their DNA.

Bök describes how the poem will be encoded:

The poem can be most easily encoded by assigning a short, unique sequence of nucleotides to each letter of the alphabet, as Wong has done. But I want my poem to cause the organism to make a protein in response--a protein that also encodes a poem. I am striving to engineer a life form that becomes a durable archive for storing a poem, and a machine for writing a poem--a poem that can survive forever.


He also describes his hopes for future generations to find the poem:

My project is analogous to building a pyramid and then leaving undecipherable hieroglyphs all over it: later civilizations may not understand the language, but its presence will testify to the enduring legacy of our own civilization. An alien readership hundreds of thousands of years from now might recognize that such tampering with an organism constitutes evidence of an advanced intelligence trying to communicate.


Tags: DNA, poetry

Comments

  • ode to joy
    Although our DNA was just never intended,
    To be reconstructed into forms too bizarre,
    There are some flaws that need to be mended,
    That the Creator should have brought up to par,
    So now were fiddling with the number of letters,
    That make up this double helix's nice new ring tone,
    The Nucleotide Symphony Orchestra just sounds so much better,
    When played out on a geneticist's cell phone.
    Rate this comment: 12345

    phoenix
    03/06/2009
    Posts:172
    Avg Rating:
    3/5
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Technology Review November/December 2009

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