DNA poetry

Christian Bök is about to bring a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘publish or perish’. In a decidedly curious experiment dubbed ‘Xenotext’, he will attempt to encode a short poem directly into the DNA of Deinococcus radiodurans, one of the most resilient bacteria known to science. His endeavour could well mean that his words outlive the human race—Deinococcus radiodurans, fondly named Conan the Bacterium by those in the know, has the ability to survive all manner of onslaughts such as dehydration and extremely low temperatures (it’s one of the few organisms found in the areas surrounding the North Pole). More importantly though, it can withstand a thousand times more radiation than any other life form on Earth, effectively making it the super cockroach of the genetic world. In a short paper published in technological journal SCRIPTed, Bök said that he was inspired by the work of cybernetic expert Pak Wong, who had engineered the very same durable DNA to carry the lyrics of Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World (After All)’. One has to wonder about the choice of song though, especially given their belief that such experimental communication has the potential to act as a genetic time capsule for our entire civilisation. In an online interview with science journal Nature, Bök likened his project to ‘building a pyramid and then leaving undecipherable hieroglyphs all over it’. His ‘living poetry’ will be a testament to our complex and cultured society: ‘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’.

Yet such longevity does not come easy. Bök will first need to create a kind of chemical alphabet by linking each triplet of genetic nucleotides (the molecules that make up DNA) to specific letters. Adenine, cytosine and thymine (ACT) would, for example, come to represent ‘A’. Further complicating the task, Bök wants the protein that the cell produces to create a second, comprehensible poem in its own right. ‘I am striving’, he said, ‘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.’ Bök will have his work cut out in this respect. According to US Wired magazine, while there are eight trillion possible combinations, ‘depressingly few of them yield useful two-way vocabularies’.