Recombinant Rhymer Encodes Poetry in DNA

From Wired:

Illustration: Nishant Choksi

Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race. But it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem. Here’s a peek at the hellish task this DNA Dante has condemned himself to.

Devise a cipher

Bök will create a code that links letters of the alphabet with genetic nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, aka ACGT). Each triplet of nucleotides will correspond to a letter so that, say, ACT represents the letter a, AGT represents the letter b, and so on.

Foresee the reply

Bök will have to choose his ciphers carefully, as his poem chemically ordains the sequence of amino acids that the bacteria will create in response. There are 8 trillion possible combinations, but depressingly few of them yield useful two-way vocabularies.

Write the poem

After using hand-coded software to determine which ciphers will give him the maximum two-way potential, Bök will finally start composing. He says his poem will probably need to have a “repetitive, incantatory quality.” We can imagine.

Insert the DNA

Once the poem is complete, lab technicians will string together the nucleotide polymers, creating a DNA fragment to insert into D. radiodurans. It’ll probably take several attempts to get the bacteria to accept the genetic info. Talk about publish or perish."

This is just about the craziest shit I have ever heard.

Sean Haldane: 'I now think poetry has more capacity to change people than psychotherapy'

From The Observer:

"Has work been done in studying the effects of reading poetry on the brain?

Neuropsychology can help to explain poetry, to demystify the impulse. There has been work done on why poetry can send shivers down our spine. The poem activates the same parts of the brain that react when a child is separated from its mother. A deep sense of separation and longing.

To borrow from psychoanalysis, do you think poetry gives closure on emotions?

I do think they finish things off, yes. Most of my poems are written in the heat of emotional things. I publish them much later. Someone once asked my wife what my poems were about. And she replied 'what torments him'. Because I am almost too close to them, it has taken me almost until last year to read them to other people."

The quotation in the headline is alone worth the interview—the other choice parts of the interview are excerpted above. I'll have to check out his poetry, at some point. We need more poet-scientists. And we surely need more scientists in literary study.