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Poet to Preserve Prose in DNA

Mar 25, 2010

A Canadian poet wants to encode his work directly into the DNA of the Deinococcus radiodurans bacteria in an effort to preserve his prose for billions of years, Wired reports. Christian Bök is going 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." To do this, he is creating a code that links letters of the alphabet with nucleotide triplets in hopes that "his poem chemically ordains the sequence of amino acids that the bacteria will create in response."

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