4 ms·

You've got the right idea. The "poem" ("any style of life / is prim...") is encoded as a DNA sequence. This DNA codes for a protein, whose amino acids can be re

You've got the right idea. The "poem" ("any style of life / is prim...") is encoded as a DNA sequence. This DNA codes for a protein, whose amino acids can be read as English text as well ("the faery is rosy / of glow..."), and which causes the bacterium to glow red. Watts mentions this work in his book Echopraxia as follows: "The sequence spells a message and codes for a protein. The protein fluoresces and contains a response. It’s not contamination or lateral transfer. It’s a poem." There's a more verbose explanation in this interview of Bök: https://maisonneuve.org/article/2011/06/1/sls-interviews-christian-bok/ https://maisonneuve.org/article/2011/06/1/sls-interviews-chr...

dekhn 1y ago
I honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process. I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?). Ultimately, I see this more like an incomplete quine, or something similar but not identical to a quine.
- flobosg 1y ago
  > I honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process. I can't recall if Bök gave details about his methodology, but my guess is that he brute-forced ciphers until he found a suitable one. And he’s quite good at constraint-based (Oulipo) poetry. > I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?). The designed protein (Protein 13) is not fluorescent. He’s expressing it as a Protein 13-mCherry[1] fusion construct. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCherry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCherry

dekhn 1y ago

I honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process. I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?). Ultimately, I see this more like an incomplete quine, or something similar but not identical to a quine.

flobosg 1y ago
> I honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process. I can't recall if Bök gave details about his methodology, but my guess is that he brute-forced ciphers until he found a suitable one. And he’s quite good at constraint-based (Oulipo) poetry. > I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?). The designed protein (Protein 13) is not fluorescent. He’s expressing it as a Protein 13-mCherry[1] fusion construct. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCherry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCherry