Christian Bök, a Canadian poet and an English professor at the University of Calgary, has come up with the daunting idea of effectively storing comprehensible poems in bacterial DNA in order for it to outlast any and all current methods and mediums of long-term storage of printed or electronic intellectual property.
Deinococcus radiodurans, an extremophilic bacteria that is purported to have been on earth for billions of years, is the biological tablet Bök is utilizing in order to inscribe his works using a cipher that uses the four genetic nucleotides (some of the basic units that make up DNA) that are available to him with this particular bacterium strain - adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine - in rearranged combinations of three that end up corresponding to a letter in the English alphabet. These cannot be arbitrarily chosen, however, since there are potentially trillions of possibilities, but only a fraction would yield amino acids that produce a relatively coherent vocabulary in return. He has also written a computer program that is assisting him in this process.
Once the triplet cipher is chosen and finalized, it will likely take multiple attempts of trial and error in order to achieve the most ideal combination of words and phrases that make up the poem, considering the poem will need to "repetitive", and "incantatory", in its qualities.
When the poem is written, a group of lab technicians will append the nucleotides to one another to build a DNA fragment that will be inserted into the bacteria. It does not seem certain as to whether the bacteria will immediately accept the newly formed genetic code or not, but if proven to be successful, it could ultimately be the magnum opus of legacy storage by remaining in the biological makeup of the bacteria for the entire life span of the species.
Some links that proved to be helpful in researching this project are:
Recombinant Rhymer Encodes Poetry in DNA - Wired Magazine
Experimental Poet Puts Poems into DNA - Simon Fraser University
Poet Encodes his Masterwork in Bacterial DNA - io9.com
