The Xenotext: Book 1

"Christian Bök’s Xenotext project is an attempt to write an eternal poem, one that will survive in the DNA of extremophile bacteria when all other life on the planet is extinguished. Christian wrote a pair of mutually-enciphered sonnets, ‘Orpheus’ and ‘Eurydice,’ so that either poem can be translated as the other using a cipher he called ‘ANY-THE’—so, “oh stay / my lyre” in ‘Orpheus’ becomes “in fate / we rely” in Eurydice’s corresponding lament. He then assigned each letter of the alphabet to a codon of DNA (combinations of three of the four nucleobases, adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T)), so that he could encode ‘Orpheus’ in the genome of d.radiodurans , an extremophile that so far scientists have been unable to kill. It can withstand more than 1000 times the lethal dose of gamma radiation for humans. In 2002, NASA sent it into space where it was directly exposed to solar radiation, but the sample returned alive. Christian’s intention was to exploit RNA inscription to produce his eternal poem: once ‘Orpheus’ is encoded in d.radiodurans ’ DNA, the bacterium will produce a protein that can be extracted and decoded to produce ‘Eurydice.’ The idea is that, because it can’t be killed, d.radiodurans will be host to the lament of Orpheus and Eurydice for eternity. I just find it such a compelling idea, that the last trace of human life to exist on the planet would be a pair of poems, recalling one of the world’s greatest love stories, woven into the life of this fearsome microbe. So far as I know, to date Christian has been able to successfully introduce ‘Orpheus’ into the genome of d.radiodurans , but not to retrieve Eurydice. As in the myth, she continues to fall back into darkness. But to be honest, this failure doesn’t matter to me. It’s such a mind-expanding idea, for one thing. But it also makes me feel more hopeful about the deep future. There’s hope in the thought that our last trace is still unmade. The story of our mark on deep time hasn’t yet been fully told. There’s time, still, to decide how we want to be remembered."