‘Conan the Bacterium’ is now a poet
Texas Engineer Lydia Contreras teamed up with renowned poet Christian Bök to encode poetry into a “deathless bacterium”
University of Texas at Austin
image: Texas Engineer Lydia Contreras
Credit: The University of Texas at Austin
Editor's Note: Here from Bök and Contreras in their own words here.
Greek doctor and philosopher Hippocrates once said (loosely translated), “life is short, and art is long.”
History is littered with quotes from great thinkers with the same idea: art endures. But limitations remain. Classic works get lost or changed as they pass through generations. Paper decomposes.
Enter world-renowned poet Christian Bök and Texas Engineer Lydia Contreras. They have collaborated to make a piece of art that can live on forever. They have used synthetic biotechnology to encode one of Bök’s poems about a famous Greek tragedy, implanting this poem into a “deathless bacterium” that, in turn, recites a complementary poem, expressed as an engineered, RNA-encoded protein.
“We’ve made very few things that could outlast the sun. This artifact is a gesture, a way of showing that we could conceivably build technology that might preserve messages over the lifespan of Earth, hardening our cultural heritage against planetary disasters that could wipe out our civilization.”
Christian Bök
This work is the centerpiece of a new book called The Xenotext: Book 2, the second entry in a series Bök has worked on for over 25 years. The first entry, released in 2015, serves as proof of concept. Bök gives readers a refresher in genetics, showing his first steps in developing this poetic microbe, encoding his work into a much less durable organism.
This time, he has fully accomplished his goal, with the help of Contreras and her research team, led by graduate student Antonio Cordova. Together, they have encoded a poem, written in the limited language of DNA, inserting this gene into Deinococcus radiodurans, an “extremophile” microorganism, otherwise known as “Conan the Bacterium” because it is among the most resistant to tough conditions, like desiccation, UV light, and radiation.
Biotechnology, the controlled use of organisms to perform specific tasks, plays a role in many products that we use every day. It’s how genetically engineered bacteria make plastics, everyday chemicals, and components of drugs.
“The synthetic use of this really robust organism to merge the borders of language—genetic language and the English language—is philosophically very exciting,” said Contreras, a professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at UT.
Bök was inspired by scientific research focused on extraterrestrial communication as well as technologies for the genetic engineering of bacteria. Bök started on this quest to make real the sci-fi idea of using bacteria to encode messages for other species across the universe to read, while making something that could outlive us all.
He worked with several partners throughout his project. He found Contreras and her work on Deinococcus radiodurans, and so he cold-emailed her, kicking off what has become a years-long partnership.
Contreras was impressed by Bök’s work, and her students were enthusiastic about participating and having an opportunity to make a broader impact with their research. Contreras’ and her students’ long-term expertise in Deinococcus radiodurans proved critical for this plan to work.
There are always risks that when a new piece of code is added to an organism’s genetics, the life form might reject it, or the code might not perform the desired action, since this code is of no native benefit to the organism. It has taken many periods of trial and error to get the process just right.
Encoded into the genome of the bacterium is a poem that Bök has written, called “Orpheus,” (whose opening line reads: “Any style/of life is prim”). When the bacteria is chemically activated, it “reads” this poem as a set of genetic instructions for writing a complementary poem, entitled “Eurydice” (whose opening line reads: “The faery/ is rosy of glow”). The organism translates the DNA into a series of amino acids, which produce a protein. Each piece of DNA and each acid in the protein corresponds to a letter of the English alphabet. Moreover, the protein has been engineered to glow bright red, so that the organism fluoresces rubescently, like the “faery” described in the poem itself.
Orpheus and Eurydice is a classic Greek tragedy. Orpheus uses his unmatched musical talent to rescue the love of his life, Eurydice, from the underworld, only to lose her on their way home.
To write the two poems, Bök developed a mutually bijective cipher, a type of code in which each letter of the alphabet corresponds exclusively to another. For example, in the first line of “Orpheus” and “Eurydice,” the letters A and T are mutually transposable, as are the letters N and H and Y and E. These letter-to-letter substitutions must hold for all the words used in both poems.
The poems, Bök said, took four years to write. He also spent many years learning engineering and coding skills to prove to potential scientific partners that his ideas could be realized with the right expertise.
While this exciting feat has immense implications for creating living art, the potential applications go beyond this accomplishment. Robust tiny organisms can better store information than any man-made technology. Scientists across disciplines are hard at work figuring out how to use these skills to revolutionize modern data storage because the future of technological growth demands more efficient methods for archiving data.
“What this ultimately comes down to is how do we store information that will forever survive,” Contreras said. “How do we keep it and guard it? Living organisms are the ultimate storers of information, and it’s something these technologies are showing with ideas of synthetic biotechnology being incorporated into other futuristic applications like self-healing buildings.”
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