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The prose at the end of the universe
For over a decade, Canadian poet Dr. Christian Bök has toiled to create living prose. Bök calls the project The Xenotext and, should he be successful in his attempts, he will have done something truly special. The idea, at its core? To encipher poetry within an immortal bacterium's genome. Poetry that will last forever. "A big concern is the protection of valuable information in the case of a nuclear catastrophe," Pak Chung Wong told the New Scientist in 2003. Wong, then an information technologist at the Pacific Northwestern Laboratory, had just enciphered some lyrics from "It's a Small World" into the genome of Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium that can survive in extreme conditions. Wong theorized that the DNA of bacteria, and perhaps even hardy organisms like cockroaches and types of weed, could be used to preserve our data for future generations.
