Science and Culture: Could a bacterium successfully shepherd a message through the apocalypse?

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.

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.