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.