For more than a decade, Canadian poet Christian Bök has been toiling on a book of poems. But his is not the typical authorial angst: Bök intends his poems to outlast human civilization, and indeed the planet itself. And his authorial palette is not typical either: rather than inscribing his poems on paper, he’s attempting to put them in a bacterium.
Poet Christian Bök wants to use extremophile Deinococcus radiodurans (pictured here in a transmission electron micrograph) as a sort of information time capsule. Image courtesy of the Uniformed Services University (Bethesda, MD).
Bök, a visiting artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Art, Science & Technology, got the idea for microbial time capsules in the early 2000s after completing a book of experimental poetry (1). It was such a big commercial hit that he felt he had the artistic license to do something truly weird.
Bök came across an article in a computer science journal in which computer scientist Pak Chung Wong at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, along with his colleagues, had contemplated a data-preservation problem of apocalyptic magnitude (2). What would happen to our cultural and scientific legacy if nuclear war or a natural disaster wipes out all of our information-storing infrastructure?
Wong was looking to outlast natural disasters, citing practical concerns about national security. Bök took it a step further, initiating a project meant to outlast both humans and the planet while transmitting a sense of humanity and its customs, something like the Voyager spacecraft’s famous golden record purports to do for alien life.
Without adequate maintenance, all manmade information storage devices—hard drives, silicon chips, stone tablets, Palmyra—would be destroyed over time. Wong and his colleagues proposed a longer-lasting solution: store the information in the genome of an extremophile bacterium that can survive inhospitable …
