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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