Art meets Genetics

A while back I wrote a post about biohacking and Eduardo Kac (the guy who genetically engineered a GFP bunny). This week there's another "art meets genetics" type story in Wired entitled DNA Dose Seeds Living Tombstones.

A concise description of what it's all about can be found on Georg Tremmel's profile at NESTA (a UK funding body):

Georg Tremmel, along with colleague Shiho Fukuhara, plans to grow trees containing the genetic identity of humans. Their innovative coding method allows the encryption of human DNA within a tree's DNA without affecting the resulting tree. It would mean a person’s DNA could live on, with the tree, as a memorial for life, or ‘transgenic tombstone’.

More quotes from that profile:

“Life is DNA. If you can pass your DNA into a tree, you will live on within the tree.”

and, appallingly:

“Implanting grandmother Smith's DNA into an apple tree brings a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘Granny Smith’!”

Georg and Shiho have founded a company / art venture called Biopresence that will create these trees for around $35,000 a pop, according to Wired. The "innovative coding method" referred to comes from Joe Davis, another artist interested in art meeting science:

[in the 1980s] Davis led a quasi-covert operation that recorded the vaginal contractions of ballerinas with the Boston Ballet and other women, then translated this impetus of human conception into text, music, phonetic speech and ultimately into radio signals, which were beamed from MIT's Millstone radar to Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti, and two other nearby star systems.

I kid you not. Incidentally, the piece in the Scientific American that I got that paragraph from is some of the worst writing in a science magazine I've ever seen.

Anyway, Joe Davis' "DNA Manifold" idea is to harness the awesome power of codon redundancy; in theory and to an extent you can change the nucleotide composition of a gene without affecting the protein that it encodes. By assigning specific binary strings to specific codons you could shuffle around nucleotides to encode arbitrary data without changing the string of amino acids produced by a gene. So if Biopresence do that, it'll means the tree will remain unchanged, right? Some people might mention "codon bias" and "unpredictable consequences" at this point, but hey, shut up, spoilsports.

I'm also not sure exactly what "the essence of a human being" is, in genetic terms. It's that information that'll be encoded in the trees (the blurb at NESTA says something about "a person's DNA living on" but there's obviously considerably more human DNA - even just the bits with a known purpose - than there is space in a cherry blossom's coding regions). Whatever this essence is, it can be extracted from skin cells for less than $35,000.

But anyway, talking about the science of it is besides the point. Biopresence is an art project - at least I hope it is. The whole point of it is to stimulate discussion and to fire the imagination.

It's still all impractical, metaphysical guff, though.