Greek doctor and philosopher Hippocrates once mused that “life is short, and art is long.” Now, a poet and an engineer have taken that sentiment into the genetic code of one of the toughest organisms on Earth.
Christian Bök, a Canadian poet known for experimental works, and Lydia Contreras, a chemical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, have literally embedded a poem into the DNA of Deinococcus radiodurans, a microbe so resilient it’s nicknamed “Conan the Bacterium.” This extremophile can survive intense radiation, deep freezes, and the vacuum of space. In favorable, low-stress conditions, D. radiodurans could theoretically persist geological timescales, making it virtually immortal by human standards.
Also, when the microbe “reads” the poem, the bacterium responds by producing a protein that encodes a second, complementary poem—and glows red while doing it.
A Living Library, 25 Years in the Making
The project is part of Bök’s decades-long endeavor, The Xenotext, which explores the idea of poetry as a biological artifact. His latest book, The Xenotext: Book 2, is the culmination of 25 years of research, trial, and error.
“We’ve made very few things that could outlast the sun,” Bök said. “This artifact is a gesture, a way of showing that we could conceivably build technology that might preserve messages over the lifespan of Earth, hardening our cultural heritage against planetary disasters that could wipe out our civilization.”
In 2015, The Xenotext: Book 1 debuted with a poem encoded in a fragile bacterium, but Bök’s real target was D. radiodurans—a microbe tough enough to survive conditions lethal to almost all other life.
Bök contacted Contreras, whose lab had deep expertise with D. radiodurans.
“The synthetic use of this really robust organism to merge the borders of language—genetic language and the English language—is philosophically very exciting,” Contreras said.
Orpheus and Eurydice in Living Form
The encoded poem is called “Orpheus,” opening with the line “Any style/of life is prim.” When triggered, the microbe translates this sequence of DNA into a chain of amino acids. Also, each amino acid corresponds to a letter, spelling out a second poem, “Eurydice,” which begins, “The faery/ is rosy of glow.”
Bök created a “mutually bijective cipher,” where each letter in one poem has a fixed partner in the other—an intricate literary and genetic pairing that took four years to compose.
The glowing red protein that results is a molecular expression of the poem’s imagery, as if the verse itself were alive and luminous.
More Than Art
While the project carries an undeniable artistic touch, it hints at far-reaching practical applications. The durability of D. radiodurans means it could store data for eons—outlasting any human-made archive.
“What this ultimately comes down to is how do we store information that will forever survive,” Contreras said. “How do we keep it and guard it? Living organisms are the ultimate storers of information.”
Such work dovetails with emerging ideas for biological data storage, from archiving digital records in DNA to embedding messages for future civilizations—or even extraterrestrial life.
For Bök, the achievement is both scientific and poetic. Just like Orpheus and Eurydice, it crosses the lines between life and art, language and biology, mortality and permanence, and tries to bring something back.
