Bök has manufactured a “Xenotext” by writing a poem, encoding it within a sequence of DNA, and inserting it into the genome of a living organism. The cellular machinery of the organism “reads” the enciphered poem and synthesizes a protein. The structure of the protein can be decoded into a complementary poem, totally distinct from the original. The cell has essentially “written” its own poem in response to the poem penned by Bök. The organism that has been selected to play host to The Xenotext is the extremophile bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans (D. radiodurans). Once described as the “most DNA damage-tolerant organism ever identified” [2], D. radiodurans is remarkable for its tolerance for inhospitable conditions. This germ can withstand very low temperatures, long periods of drought, partial vacuum, and 1000-times the dose of gamma radiation that can kill a human [2-5]. This makes it an ideal host for The Xenotext because any information carried within its genome is unlikely to degrade or change with time. The intent is for The Xenotext to remain intact and unaltered by natural selection so that it “might persist long after terrestrial civilization has gone extinct.” Bök has declared that he is attempting to “write a book that is quite literally immortal.”
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 17:13:31 +0000
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