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Poet Christian Bök to Inscribe a Bacterium's DNA With His Lofty Lines

by Matthew Zuras on March 28, 2010 at 08:45 AM

All writers want their words to be immortalized in posterity, but poet Christian Bök has some serious issues with his work falling under the sands of time. Bök is planning to inscribe his poetry within the DNA of a tough-as-nails bacterium known as Deinococcus radiodurans so that it will potentially last for billions of years. The bacterium can survive acids, freezing temperatures, dehydration and absorb an insane amount of radiation without so much as breaking a microbial sweat. (D. radiodurans can withstand up to 5,000 Gray units of ionizing radiation; it only takes 10 Grays to kill a human.)

Bök, whose poetry tends toward the cyperpunkish avant-garde, is planning on creating a code from the bacterium's nucleotides, with which he will inscribe his poem. (A nucleotide string made up of, say, adenine, cytosine, and thymine will represent the letter 'A,' and so on.) It will be a horrendously time-consuming process, but a fascinating experiment in genetic engineering, nonetheless.

But this is not the first time that D. radiodurans has been used to store data. In 2003, scientists experimented with the bacterium to see if it could act as a living hard drive in the event that a nuclear catastrophe wiped out the world's mainframes. They were able to inscribe a translation of 'It's a Small World' into the bacterium, and retrieve it 100 bacterial generations afterward. [From: Wired]

Tags: bacteria, biochemistry, biology, christian bök, ChristianBök, deinococcus radiodurans, DeinococcusRadiodurans, dna, genetic engineering, GeneticEngineering, genetics, literature, poet, poetry, science, top

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