James Joyce Encoded in Venter’s Artificial Life

You may have heard the news last week: J. Craig Venter and a team of scientists created the first living organism – a “synthetic cell” – by way of a computer-generated genome. We’re now seeing the beginnings of artificial life. And it’s a big story, with many far-reaching implications. But where does James Joyce fit into this picture? Let me add this little factoid to the mix: According to The Christian Science Monitor, Venter’s team inserted DNA watermark codes into the genome so that they can distinguish between natural and synthetic bacteria moving forward. And when this code is translated into English, it will “spell out the names of the 46 researchers who helped with the project, quotations from James Joyce, physicist Richard Feynman and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and a URL that anyone who deciphers the code can e-mail.” Lots of smarts packed into the tiniest of packages.

UPDATE: The quotes in watermark apparently read: “TO LIVE, TO ERR, TO FALL, TO TRIUMPH, TO RECREATE LIFE OUT OF LIFE.” – James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; “SEE THINGS NOT AS THEY ARE, BUT AS THEY MIGHT BE.”-A quote from an Oppenheimer biography, American Prometheus; “WHAT I CANNOT BUILD, I CANNOT UNDERSTAND.” – Richard Feynman.


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  • Neville says:

    Wow! This is amazing :) !

  • pathus says:

    La manipulación de genomas se basan en conocimientos basicos en la respuesta que un gen puede dar como acción valvula abierto o cerrado en codigo binario, una cadena de ADN se comporta entoces como una red binaria, como la red computacional. Al agregar los datos se logran configuraciones genicas de prueba, que se simulan en PCs y se realiza un mapa de respuestas, como es el comportamiento de la membrana celular y otros comandos que configuran una acción metabólica.específica, luego en la practica se calculan los potenciales electricos de las moléculas a unir, mediante una interfaz semejante a un procesador computacional comandado por computador, esta interfaz consta de cientos de terminales sobre una solución neutra en forme de cuadricula que por medio de electroforesis comandada se enfilan las moleculas en el sitio deseado segun los nanovolts aplicados, luego se elimina la fuerza eléctrica y se forman sólas las uniones intermoleculares y se conforma la fibra de cromatina, con el comportamiento deseado. De esto militarmente hace mucho rato, h1n1- htlv1 y otros. El primero derivado de un virus del porte de una ballena (Influenza) y el otro de un linfocito T4, las claves de mutagenicidad y expresion epidemiológica simuladas en un lindo pentium II, ADIOS

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