Literary Immortality Through DNA Coding: An Investigation
Although J. Craig Venter and his team of scientists are the first to be sent an unhappy letter from a writer’s estate for enscribing lines of literature into a synthetic genome using DNA coding (they inscribed a synthetic goat parasite with James Joyce’s line “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life” and caught the ire of the notoriously protective Joyce estate, which D. T. Max wrote about in the magazine), they are not the first scientists to embrace literary-genetic fusions. To distinguish a synthetic genome from a natural one, scientists must use “watermarks” on their creations, and literature, for all the evident reasons, is a popular choice. On the whole, we approve of anything that gives literature new life (quite literally in this case), but Venter’s troubles have us worried: could other literary-minded scientists be inviting legal action? “We thought it fell under fair use,” Venter told a crowd recently at SXSW, but copyright in the age of digital (and genetic) reproduction, as we are all learning from the ongoing Google-books saga, is a tricky business. We did an Internet search to see if we could find any precedents, and here are the results:
- In 1999, the artist Eduardo Kac encoded the beginning of the Bible into a strand of DNA and implanted it into a microbe, which he then subjected to ultraviolet irradiation to cause mutations in the text as the microbe reproduced and multiplied. Kac used the King James version, which falls under public domain. His use is therefore legal, albeit potentially offensive to religious conservatives.
- In 2002, Pak Chung Wong and his team of scientists encoded the lyrics of one of the most performed songs on earth, “It’s a Small World (After All),” into the genome of one of the toughest bacteria on earth, Deinoccocus radiodurans. Walt Disney’s songwriters wrote the song as a soundtrack for a cruise attraction benefiting UNICEF at the 1964 World’s Fair. UNICEF asked Disney not to copyright the lyrics or tune. Disney respected the request, giving the song not only “to the children of the world” but to electronic keyboards, ice cream trucks, and bacteria everywhere.
- In 2003, scientists at Icon Genetics enciphered a line from Virgil’s “Georgics,” “Nec vero terrae ferre omnes omnia possunt” (“Neither can every soil bear every fruit”), into a small flowering plant. It’s a good thing they quoted the original Latin, which falls under public domain. The line reproduces itself during normal plant reproduction. Imagine the legal fees had they used the excellent recent translation by David Ferry.
I also e-mailed a writer currently in the process of rendering his work immortal via synthetic DNA coding. Christian Book is an avant-garde Canadian poet famous for such formal experiments as writing a book with only one vowel in each chapter and making artists’ books from Rubik’s cubes. Completely aware of the Book/book irony and also aware that his name is synonymous with the Bible, Book writes under the pseudonym Christian Bök. Bök wants to encipher his poem “The Xenotext” into a gene which, when implanted into the genome of Deinoccocus radiodurans, will cause the bacterium to produce a protein in response that will then encipher another poem, different but no less meaningful. Bök told me that he’s figured out the biochemistry for his project and is performing test-runs on E. coli. Provided all goes to plan, “The Xenotext” will survive long after our extinction. I asked Bök’s opinion on the Joyce estate’s letter to the geneticists.
“I don’t think that there’s any language in any legislation that directly addresses concerns about republishing work in the medium of DNA,” he replied. “Patents, of course, can protect specific genetic sequences—and as a poet, my current project ‘The Xenotext’ is probably protected under copyright, no matter what ‘form’ the ‘poem’ might take. The cease-and-desist from the Joyce estate seems spurious to me, contravening the spirit of fair use in the arts and sciences.”
We’ll be paying close attention to see how this case turns out: if all goes well, Joyce’s words should continue to mutate in peace for a very long time.
(”DNA,” by Mark Cummins.)
