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Well, it's a great honor to be invited to
speak to such esteemed
and prestigious hackers as yourselves.
I'm a hacker too, but I hacked DNA.
So
I call this talk forbidden fruit.
Yeah, I work at Harvard
Medical School in Boston and
MIT Biology in Cambridge.
There's a big field called bio
art, and many bio artists
consider me a tool of the state
because I fetishize
molecular biology and
dangerous biotechnology.
But I was at.
I was co-opted.
They used my
one
of my artworks as a poster for their
conference in Winnipeg earlier this
month, and they use terms
like
the
toxic life toxicity,
sociopolitical
ecological landscape, ethical
relationships, bio political
and
cultural
biotechnology poisoning,
infiltration of biotechnology.
So there is fetishizing.
Something.
There's concerns
about
new
industrial biology tailored to produce
pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals
and the like, but but also
a lot of this.
A lot
of this concern is centered on crops
introduced into the food
supply.
Now
we we've been told what we should
and should not eat since we've been
very small.
I'm sure.
And in the laboratory,
in the laboratory, we have restrictions
we're not supposed to eat, drink,
smoke.
It's it's a kind of
molecular biology is itself a kind
of dietary regime.
But aversion to selected foods
is nothing new.
It's actually the hallmark of human
civilization, dietary restrictions.
We we avoid
foods that we consider sacred
and profane.
But some of us,
some of us are genetically
predisposed to
to
dietary restrictions because of severe
allergies or because we lack certain
enzymes.
The desaturated sugar in milk
is one of them. If you're not of European
ancestry, usually you can't
digest lactose.
Celiac disease is another example
a combination of two proteins present
in wheat, barley and rye.
Cause
an autoimmune disorder in
people who are allergic to
gluten needed foods.
Seafood allergies make up
the.
Including scaly fish are the most common,
potentially life threatening allergies,
at least in the United States.
Peanut allergies, on the other hand,
only affect 0.4
to 0.6 percent
of the population.
And recent studies
suggest that
the
huge response to peanut allergies
in all of the measures that we've taken
to avoid peanut allergies
are actually mass psychogenic
illness.
Bulimia nervosa
and and
anorexia nervosa are
are clinically diagnosed pathologies,
they're eating disorders, but
but they
come
from
body image.
And so we wonder,
you know,
where this notion of desirable body
image comes from?
The ideal,
uh,
self-image is constructed by whom.
And so
maybe,
maybe we should consider.
Maybe we should consider Surgeon
General's health warnings on
Vogue and GQ
to that.
Like if you read this magazine, you may
end up with an eating disorder.
On the other hand,
obesity, even though it's not officially
disease, a disease, it's considered
a serious public health problem.
It's connected with
type two
diabetes, sleep
apnea, heart disease, osteoarthritis,
high blood pressure, high blood
cholesterol and certain types of cancer.
But there are
eating disorders
that aren't
caused by allergies or
lack of enzymes.
They're caused by psychological
conditions that are really paralyzing
fear of
of certain foods
and lecturer phobia is fear of chicken.
Um, a Sarah
phobia is fear of sour tasting
stuff.
Um,
allium phobia
is fear of garlic.
Um, Majka phobia his
fear of mushrooms.
A phobia not to
be confused
with vegetarianism is fear
of meat.
And this one, I'm not even going to try
to pronounce it's fear
of stuff that sticks to the roof of your
mouth like peanut butter and marshmallow.
If people really
are,
people really have problems with this
stuff now.
Guma phobia is fear of flavor.
You can only eat plain rice and
plain pasta.
And in this one
is fear of chopsticks.
There is, in fact, a fear of vegetables.
What kind of phobia?
There's fear of fish
phobia, this fear of cooking.
You can only carry out.
There's
us dry Connor phobia.
That's fear of shellfish.
That's my original picture.
And there's
fear of swallowing.
There's fear of hot
foods, thermo
phobia and.
And, of course,
this fear of fast
foods.
But this is not OK,
this is not so far.
Fear of fast foods has not been
clinically diagnosed as psychopaths, a
logical disorder.
We are, however, concerned about mass
produced foods, chemical preservatives,
pesticides, vegetable oils, trans fats,
MSG, high fructose corn sirup
and refined white sugar.
Yes, in
from a global perspective, we consider
very vegetarianism as a religious
practice,
but
often in the western world that can
instead be described as a culturally
inspired eating disorder.
They're good.
We also have to consider
starvation culturally inspired.
Hunger is a culturally inspired
eating disorder
right now.
And historically, in
places like Palestine and
Syria, hunger is
going on right now in Darfur,
in central Africa.
Sign of
the times in Cambridge,
Massachusetts,
where where
Harvard is and where MIT is,
all
of the regular grocery stores most of
them were, Johnny's food masters
were bought out by a very famous
organic food
chain. And this
famous organic food chain
is an extremely
lucrative multinational industry
with skillful marketing practices
and management strategies and
powerful political lobby.
Um, actually, even though
we don't generally realize
it,
it is possible now to
learn
how to run a multinational
corporation and still go to heaven.
I was just in heaven
was just
one of the targets of the multinational
organic food lobby is Bacillus
Turing against us,
which comes the name comes from Turing
Year Germany, and
it's Bacillus that was discovered there
some time
ago.
Uh, genes from this bacteria are
given to crops
and bugs don't eat them.
Um, now
they've been implicated.
They've been implicated in.
The death of monarch butterflies,
but see insecticides kill
monarch butterflies, too.
And if you don't use BTY vegetables,
then
you have to pour a lot of nasty stuff
in the soil
and the the
studies that linked genetically
modified corn with rats were retracted
at the beginning of this month.
There haven't been there's no evidence to
show that the beetle genes
in corn is dangerous to anybody,
rats or human beings.
And for that reason,
organic farmers use
Bacillus turned against us.
It's one of their
these little donuts.
These are these are like compressed
BT spores of the
the bacteria and
and it's one of the
one of the one of
the
weapons that organic farmers have
against pests.
They, uh,
they
put one of these donuts in the water and
then they spread all over the vegetables
and bugs. Don't eat the organic
vegetables because bacillus
turned gases in organic bacteria
and I guess and
and you can wash your
organic vegetables, but you can't.
There's no way that you can get
all of the bacteria off of your organic
vegetables. And the fact is, ladies and
gentlemen, you eat more
bacillus turning against its genes,
eating organic vegetables than you do
eating. Monsanto corn
I know you don't want to hear this,
but I don't think
that I don't
think
Monsanto
is
is a sweet company corporation.
You know, efforts for robust crops
resistant to pests, disease and climate
change, notwithstanding world
agribusinesses answering some pretty
serious, accurate accusations about
shortsighted profit driven
practices such as risky
international monoculture and world
agribusiness and food crops.
The propriety of range
of the genes of rainforest species
and in some cases, human populations.
All of these things are highly
questionable and deserve criticism.
But just for contrast,
let's take a look
at the
really dangerous poisons
that are available in your local organic
grocery store.
Don't ever,
don't
ever let your broccoli turn
yellow in the refrigerator because
those are the seed bearing
seed pods flowering seed pods
of broccoli.
They produce
cyanide and inducing
glycosides called glucosinolates.
And these
these turn into cyanide in your
stomach and in
digestive juices. Convert that into
tyrosine, which
interferes with iodine transport.
And so they're called goiter Janick.
That mean that is, they can cause Goias.
But it's not just broccoli,
it's it's cabbage.
And.
Turnips and
don't ever, ever
put raw Lima beans on your salad.
There is
a
side cyanogen, a glucose side called
Line Amarin
that
that has the same problem and
other line were in containing vegetables
include
cassava root
bamboo sprouts.
And sweet potatoes,
this is the side of Cyanogen, a
good side structure.
I love Hollander, I learned to like
Hollander in Germany.
But
but
elderberries, of course, are
also extremely poisonous unless you cook
them.
In the organic grocery store, there are
these long rows of
dry goods that you
can buy in bulk.
Right?
Like lima beans, kidney
beans, navy beans.
Well, let me tell you.
Five, as few
as five
organic, raw organic
kidney beans can kill
you. So in those
bins, in those bins,
there's enough in the organic grocery
store. If you were to feed them to people
raw, you could kill the whole city.
That's the stuff I tell hemagglutinin.
And of course,
we've all heard about killer tomatoes,
green tomatoes. In fact, the whole tomato
plant, except for the ripe red fruit,
contained two mateen,
which is another
toxic glycol alkaloid.
People have actually consumed
enough green tomatoes to die,
and the
symptoms include
vomiting,
diarrhea, increased heart rate with
subsequent slowing of same
respiratory problems.
Cardiac rhythm is cardiac
arrest and death.
They also contain green tomatoes
and green potatoes also contain
atropine and other dangerous
alkaloid.
Yeah.
The big green
and sprouting potato potatoes contain
substances called so Lenin and
Chow canning these these
substances are not destroyed by cooking,
and there are found in other plants that
are members of the nightshade family,
including paprika, eggplant,
peppers.
You scared yet?
Watch out for parsnips.
The skin of parsnips,
especially the where the plant has been
damaged or bruised, contain
substances
called for
a cormorants in these calls,
phyto photo dermatitis there's an
example
of
if you just when you peel your
always peel your parsnips
and your carrots, but don't stick
your hands in the peels.
Now, mushrooms.
A single commonly
available button
mushroom white button mushroom contains
about 300 mg, or what,
three tenths of a gram of
a protein, which is a member of a family
of toxins
of
volatile carcinogens
and rocket fuels called hydrazine.
We use Hydrazine Zone Space Shuttle to
push it around.
All mushrooms contain this.
Only 30 percent of
of
of these hydrazine are destroyed by
cooking.
So if you decide to eat
mushrooms, don't eat them raw and
don't
eat a whole lot of them.
Stocky,
Stocky is associated with
stocky mushroom dirt, dermatitis,
flagellate mushroom dermatitis, mushroom
workers disease and Chiotakis induced
taxidermy.
These
these
are from
eating raw or undercooked.
Chalky and kid
symptoms can appear after about
48 hours after eating raw
brush turkey and can last
for about 10 days.
It is a toxic and not an allergic
reaction, and it's believed to be
the result of the presence of
a starch like polysaccharide called
Linton in.
But one of the more
interesting aspects of Shikaki mushrooms
is that they naturally produce
formaldehyde.
Formaldehyde.
This formaldehyde is destroyed by
cooking.
And apple seeds
and pear seeds and plant it
contain small amounts of
substance called amygdala in which is
another cyanide
containing cyanide inducing substance.
If you make applesauce, don't grind up
your apple, causing your applesauce.
One cup of apple seeds
as an amount equal
to one cup of apple seeds is known to
mean to cause death.
Have you ever wondered why you've never
seen a cashew shell?
The reason why you've never seen the
cashew show is that they're burned in
the field where they pick the cashews,
and if you stand downwind from the fire,
you can die.
Cashews are in the family
of plants that include poison ivy,
poison oak and poison sumac.
And they have
this really nasty substance in the
cashew seed itself, this cashew shell.
It's like this honeycomb stuff
that contains this nasty liquid
called you written all in
and it is so they
are soaked, washed, steamed,
boiled, broiled all these processes
to take away the original
from this
from cashew shells.
And if you are allergic to Poison
Ivy and you happen somehow to eat
raw cashew,
well, you can die.
Mangoes are another plant in the same
family and poison oak, poison sumac,
poison oak, and actually a few
weeks ago in Cambridge, I know someone
who got dermatitis from mango peels.
Mango fruit is good, but the mango peels
are toxic.
And the
toxin in alfalfa sprouts is especially
insidious, it's called convening.
It's an amino acid and
it's an amino acid that's very much like
an amino acid that we use
that
that's in the so-called universal genetic
code. That amino acid is arginine.
And what happens is the body incorporates
Caernarvon gene in the place of arginine.
And so you make all these aberrant,
structurally unusual proteins,
and it causes an autoimmune disorder
in human beings similar to
lupus.
OK.
And if you if you
if you juice yourself off of sprouts,
you concentrate the caravanning,
don't juice your alfalfa sprouts,
even lettuce.
See, even lettuce
contains toxins.
Flavanols
it if
they contain, let's see natural phenolic
glycosides to protect
it against pests.
They're found in many plants.
If you eat a really huge amount of
lettuce and some lettuce, farm
workers in California actually consumed
enough lettuce to get sick.
So if you eat a whole field of lettuce,
you probably
will get sick.
Now.
Have I convinced you
hungry?
There are alternatives.
Plato, I
mean, little kids eat Plato, but Plato
contains Borax, which in Europe
is on a restricted
list in the United States, it's like
permitted somehow,
but it's
not good to eat.
You shouldn't eat Plato.
And there is
a psychopathology.
There is a psychopathology that is fear
of all food.
It's and it's not to be confused with
anorexia.
It's called ciba phobia.
Fear of food.
But now
the most dangerous,
at least, Mythically,
the most poisonous
fruit food
of all is
the tree of knowledge.
So if you
find yourself around a tree of knowledge,
you shouldn't eat, drink, smoke, or
it's not just
the tree of knowledge per se.
It's the tree of knowledge of good and
evil.
It's the forbidden fruit.
It's it's
knowledge of
the best
and the most genius abominable
parts of the human soul.
This is the poison
and
this
battle,
this terrible battle between wisdom
and knowledge that we've undertaken for
throughout human history that's still
going on. We're chopping each other to
pieces over it right now as I speak.
This, of course, has left us
less than divine.
I jump in here
myself.
But this story
is much older than Judeo Christianity,
the snake in the tree.
Uh uh.
Inara,
the Babylonian fertility goddess
Ishtar of Babylon,
Sumerian in Anna.
It stars the namesake of Easter,
which is why we have Easter eggs and
Easter bunnies and flowers
and other fertility symbols.
She planted a tree guarded
by snakes in the tree, contain the
tablets of destiny and
and.
And a female demon
called Lilith that
during the Babylonian exile was
incorporated into Judaic
scripture.
Lilith and
she was Michelangelo included
her notice The Serpent in the Sistine
has
memories, and she's
Lilith,
the
Norse dramatic
egg
gristle, the tree of the
Tree of Life was also guarded by a
serpent.
So
I
work in at Harvard Medical School,
where
this small part of Boston, where
in the short period between 98
and 2003, over 35000
articles and 2000 journals
by 200000 authors
originated in this group of buildings.
It's knowledge.
So
George Church, the director of my
laboratory at Harvard,
came to me one day and tapped me on the
shoulder and he said, Joe,
your name came up at faculty meeting.
We want to know why there is not a lot of
art at Harvard Medical School.
We know you have a lot of art over it.
MIT Biology.
What are you going to do about this?
So we have this big
atrium that was originally supposed
to be a Japanese garden, but they ran out
of money and
instead we had these ugly green picnic
tables.
So I had this notion that this
since this is such a center of knowledge
that I could get, there's not enough
light or water, whatever
the conditions are right to actually grow
anything there. But I could put the
genetic signature
of the Tree of Knowledge.
I knew that one of the domestic apples,
Golden Delicious, had been sequenced
and that I could put on one side.
I could put binary code that relates
to DNA triplets.
On the other side, I could put Digital
Digital Number that corresponds to its
position in the code.
But looking into it,
I found that
it had
recently been shown
that
an Apple, a wild apple, a die
cut.
Excuse me,
I deployed Apple
from meaning that there's only two copies
of its DNA
from
mountains. A mountain range in Central
Asia is truly
the ancestor of all domestic apples,
and this has only recently been shown to
be the case.
It's called malice of BCI.
It's resistant to diseases that all
of the domestic apples are susceptible
to. It has a much wider
genetic diversity than all of the
seven hundred and fifty seventy
five thousand varieties of apples
that exist in the
world. Domestic apples because
we remove genetic diversity when we
domesticate plants,
so
we expect to find genes, we're
sequencing this apple now.
I got tissue.
And seeds,
um, it's
it's expected, we expect, since it's a
smaller genome than domestic apples,
which have many copies of DNA and not
just to, we expect
it to be between 500 and 750
mega bases, which is 750 million
rungs of the ladder of DNA.
That's small.
It's much smaller than the human genome
and very small for a plant.
Anyway, so with
my colleague Yoav Mishra
at
Harvard Medical School, we use liquid
nitrogen and extracted
DNA
from this ancient apple.
We used we used
a
kind of Betty Crocker cake mix called
the cage and DNA easy.
You know, we also extracted RNA.
And so
this is
like the most
closely
guarded secret in paradise,
right?
One of the first things we did was.
This is a
home. This is a hacker machine.
This is a machine that takes
DNA strands of double stranded
DNA and sticks one end
of it to a vinyl covered slide.
And then we use water to tension to pull
the to
pull the DNA straight.
So
here you are looking
a little.
You're like some of the few
human beings have looked so deeply
at this secret.
But it occurred to me that seven hundred
and fifty thousand, you know, it's a
hundred and eighty seven thousand stones
in that atrium aren't enough
stones to
to contain the genome
of the apple legibly.
So we could only put parts of the
on all these stones.
And so I did this pilot project.
I took
the gene for Rubisco,
which is which I've worked with in the
past. It's the most abundant protein
on Earth. All living things are made of
protein, everything.
And if you break down all
living things into piles, discrete
piles of proteins, then
one of those piles would be really big.
And it's this one where you lose one
size. This phosphate carboxylic sodje
oxygenase, which is called rubisco for
short.
It's it's an Eden protein.
It's part of the Calvin cycle of
photosynthesis.
And when it appeared
it. What it does is it takes inorganic
carbon from atmosphere,
mixes it with sunlight
and makes food.
And even though
we humans, Homo sapiens, we don't make
rubisco all of the complex carbon
that we are created from that
we are made of was
at one time or another made by this
protein rubisco.
And so when it
appeared on the barren, the
once barren Earth, then came
all the
verdant gardens,
right?
And so I wanted
this to.
To be part of the legacy
I would leave
on the
stones and.
So I
mounted an exhibition in at
the South Dakota School of
Mines and Technology in
Rapid City, South Dakota, and I actually
it took me five days with help and I
stamped ten thousand stones with the
gene for
Rubisco.
I figured it's going to take me like many
months to stamp all the stones in the
atrium.
But
these stones are now part of the
permanent collection
of the
of the School of
Mines in Rapid City.
They installed it on
a concrete plant outside their
chemical
and biological engineering building.
So meanwhile,
with the help of my colleagues,
I established an international consortium
now consisting of over 35
investigators and more than a dozen
institutions worldwide.
And we are sequencing the genome and
the transcriptome of this,
this ancient apple.
And there's plant pathology.
The link the apple is of such ancient
lineage. It will this this data will
answer.
These data will answer questions
in evolutionary biology.
The raw sequencing data
comes
from Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
Richard Sandburg's lab and
usedto Weinberg is also one of the
principles
we're
using aluminum machines.
I see next generation
DNA sequencing machines, and
this
technology is
coming of age.
A few years ago, it cost billion,
a billion dollars to sequence the human
genome. We now can sequence the
human genome for $1000.
The same is true with DNA synthesis.
These are some of our first data.
This is the
day
run
on a drill,
another close look at the ancient secret.
So meanwhile,
Karolinska Institute is building this
giant new building called Biomedical.
Which is going to house five different
departments as part of one of the largest
construction projects in Western Europe,
and
they commissioned sculpture.
We're going to do. We're going to plant
some of these trees, but not just
the mouse. Obviously, I'm about to
explain and
I design these paper models, which I
brought along with me tonight and I
should have at the podium, but I don't
have the
that will be cast.
The skin will be cast in bronze and
in the flesh will be plates of
stainless steel with the laser carved
texts and the DNA
in the inside of the peel.
Actually, I'm
going there for both art and science
in about a week.
Brigham Young University in Provo,
Utah, is doing the assembly
happen?
Yeah, Brigham Young University in Provo,
Utah. It's doing the assembly of the
genome. So like getting the raw
sequence data is is
only a small part of the problem.
The real hack is
how to put it together in
continuous pieces,
and this is
a real
specialty of bioinformatics.
And Brigham Young happens to be one of
the most one of the centers of this
because of their fascination with
genealogy.
Speaking of tool of the state,
the
United States Department of Agriculture,
more than a dozen members of the United
States Department of Agriculture are
members of our consortium.
They don't have the money to sequence
DNA sequence a genome.
They actually supplied
the tissue,
and they held a special meeting in
September about our
project,
which I attended with my colleague
Mike Chow.
This is the
the specimen in the tree, Melissa Basia,
where our tissues come, comes
from.
And of course, I was tempted.
And I
tasted it
and didn't
get any smarter.
OK, many of you probably don't really
know about my background in
art and
molecular
biology.
My first for like
several decades, I've been
working, developing, exploring ways
to incorporate the human
intellectual legacy in
in the
vast, timeless,
deep time terrestrial biome.
My first such project really stemmed from
projects in the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence, where I
used algorithms previously
used to transmit messages to aliens
to incorporate a
graphic icon
in the DNA of
E. coli. And there's
this sequence.
You know, later projects
covered in the journal Nature.
It's really interesting story when
we. So OK, who
knows what the genetic code is?
Anybody know the genetic code is.
Show me some hands.
Genetic code.
Yeah.
For those of you who don't.
There are four different bases in DNA
four rungs of the ladder and
and DNA. The language of
genetics is written in three letter words
Triplets of these letters
of these rungs of ladder, they're only
because they're four triplets.
That mean because there are four bases
there. They're only 64 possible
triplets, and these
64 triplets correspond to 20
amino acids in only 20.
And in 1957, we knew
this structure of DNA.
But we didn't know the connectors
which triplet went to which of the 20
amino acids in
this guy,
George W. Beatle, who was at
Caltech in Pasadena, was winning the
Nobel Prize that year and
an expatriate German physicist
later to become the father of virology
study of viruses and would
later on in the 60s win his own know.But
Nobel Prize Max Tilbrook
decided and his pals at Caltech decided
to play a trick on George
Beatle and George went
on to become the president of the
University of Chicago.
So they sent him a telegram
15 seconds.
OK, I'm good bye.
They sent him a telegram with two hundred
and twenty four letters A's B's
C's and D's with one x, which was
the X and Max's name.
It was a clue
and it decoded in
English.
See, what they
discovered blew them away.
There's no chemical or structural
connection between the amino acid
and the DNA triplet that represents
that amino acid.
The DNA triplet has as much to do with
the amino acid as the word red
has to do with the phenomena of
perception
or
whatever of the color itself.
And
what that means is that DNA
that the genetic code operates by the
rules, by the laws of natural
language.
And that's crazy.
Like we go to the edge of the universe,
you know, and we find our own cerebral
cortex imprinted on the wall.
We get to the we get to the limits
of knowledge and we find our own language
reflected there.
And science wax poetic.
They had arguments for a couple of years
about whether or not there were
spaces between the words they called
it comma and comma free code.
Max Tilbrook thought there were spaces
between the words George thought there
weren't. The 224
letter Telegram had a space code
on it said, Break this code or get back
to Nobel Prize.
It took George a couple of days
with
one of his grad students.
He broke the code and he sent a telegram
back to Max Dale Brooke in Pasadena, and
it said, Yeah, I got your message just
fine. Also in code, but with no space.
Got your message just fine.
If we could do the final step because the
genetic code wasn't figured out for
another decade or so.
The places, the matches.
So George and his pals in
Pasadena raced to put together
a response before the end of the Nobel
Prize ceremonies, and they put together
one hundred and seventy four toothpicks
of four different colors, and
the airfreight officer delivered it to
George when he was delivering his formal
address after the award ceremonies.
And damn if he didn't decoded at the
podium and it said,
I am the riddle of life.
No, me and you will know yourself
and that friends is the edict
of Apollo Adelphi.
Know yourself and you will know the
secrets of the universe and the secrets
of the gods.
Unfortunately, George and Max
couldn't synthesize DNA.
It wasn't possible to conveniently
synthesize DNA until the 1980s.
And so in the 1980s and early
1990s, a synthesized
riddle of life at Free University in
Berlin
and
sequenced it. There we go.
It was the I am the riddle of life
molecule, and
in my next projects had to do with
the
I had a girlfriend when I was a young man
who illustrated a children's story about
the spoiled child who could find no
happiness until she met a mouse
that had a map of the world in its ear.
And so I this
was at the time, the most significant
advance in cartography since jihadists.
Mercator it's the Kobe image of the Milky
Way. It's the first time we were ever
able to image the
our own
galactic cores looking through the
intergalactic.
Clouds and
DNA is based four zero one two
three. There are four bases there, four
consecutive sizes.
And so you, you represent them.
We represent them all the time
as base for.
So you can convert a binary
because this this picture was made with
CCD imagers in liquid helium
filled doers in a quiet orbit, and it was
spit out data.
Binary data that we
massaged to get this image for the human
sensorium.
But if we
make the
data
directly into DNA, then you
end up with long repeats of the same
nucleotides
see, and that the repeated
electromechanical torsion on the molecule
causes it to twist and curl.
And so all the machinery and cells can
operate on it and you can't sequence
it. And so this
was my first
one of my first DNA hacks.
It was how to write
language into DNA with
that was that had parity with the
original data, but that was biochemically
and and biologically friendly
of the 64 code.
Three of them are stop codons.
These three and I used those
informational statements.
And because of that, I was able to put in
desk drawers like file
file cabinets or so.
Each one of these yellow
sequences is a unique
sequence for an enzyme to come,
cut the DNA
just
there.
So if
I had a mistake and said this is
because this was back in the 90s
and synthesis wasn't as efficient as it
is now, then I
could just pull out that desk drawer, fix
it, put it back
together.
But I had a problem,
and that is
why I
ended up with
the biologically useless piece of DNA
that that
the cell the
organism would tend to rearrange
or eliminate
in within generations.
Now they call me
the father of BioPort because I made the
first recombinant artwork.
But the real
father of biotech with this guy, Edward
Steichen, he he had an exhibition
of his Delphine IEMs
at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art
in 1936.
He used his asthma medication and
muted, denies his opinions and made
them grow giant and bright blue brighter
than any other phenoms.
You can still buy them from burpee seeds.
It's not as if there weren't
horticultural shows or flower
shows all over the world.
It was just. This was the first time that
such a manipulation was treated in a
formal way as a work of art.
Now, bio artists are still
really
stuck on the idea
of
bizarre and Garrus mutations.
They want to make, you know, green
bunnies and
verification.
But see,
I'm interested
in a different kind of manipulation I'm
interested in
and
more ecologically friendly and more
environmentally compatible
form of genetic manipulation than
any of the genetic manipulations of
the past, including all of those of
molecular biology.
I just mentioned it's like Borgias story
about a map of the world that coincides
with itself.
I just mentioned that there were 20
amino acids and 64
places to represent them.
64 triplets to play.
So some of these are redundant.
And so this is basically you
can change this.
One of the redundant codes is still in
general, not all the time, but in general
end up with the same protein.
But those instances where you cannot
take those into account.
This is called silent code,
so
I could write binary numbers under a gene
without changing the output of the gene
or changing the size of the gene.
It was a way to like, write a song
underneath another song,
but it wasn't very efficient.
I ended up having to use a lot of DNA
to write
relatively small volumes information,
and then I got Scarlet Fever
and OsnabrÃ¼ck at the Media Arts
Festival, drinking somebodys beer
in it.
I mean, I had strep throat before
you get that from the same organism
Streptococcus the Streptococcus.
But symptomology
of scarlet fever comes if you have to be
lucky enough not only to be infected
with Streptococcus, but to be.
Infected with Streptococcus that is sick
itself, that's infected with the virus
called T12
and and
that's how you get there.
But anyway, I didn't have health
insurance. I was in Germany,
so I was really sick and I
got on the train for Essen.
And my friends in Essen
finally got me tetracycline by pretending
to be me, and I pretended to be
them and I got it.
But before that happened, I was delirious
and I couldn't stop thinking about math
and DNA.
And
I know five,
right?
So
yes,
I couldn't stop thinking about matching
DNA,
and I came up with a way
to put not just one layer of information
under a gene, but many, many layers of
information like babushka dolls.
And that worked because there every
DNA
triplet
can be represented by three unique
numbers.
One number is the DNA itself
is zero zero zero zero one
one, the silent
code redundant code on binary
number in this case, 11
and the and the base 20 number
that corresponds with the amino acid
that is translated to.
And so then I made this mathematical
genetic code and it let me
write it.
Let me write three layers of information.
Under.
So there's OK.
Every DNA molecule bus
has three pages of information
available.
The DNA itself is one of the numbers.
The protein it's translated to is one of
the numbers and then there's the
redundant codons.
That's the silent code.
But instead,
instead of writing code in
the I wrote a map of
a hypothetical but very precisely
foreign DNA molecule in
the open spaces part.
And it also has three
pages of information available now.
It's even more efficient than real world
DNA because I could use those
code on set. I couldn't use in a
biological context to hold information.
And and so
the so then I wrote the map
of the third molecule and put
input data and so on and so forth,
and
so
and so on and so forth.
And my first, I called it, did a
manifolds, and my first
project was to
put the
writings of this guy.
Heraclitus Heraclitus
was the greatest scientific study of his
age, he wrote of great work, called on
nature that all his contemporaries, you
know, like, raved about,
but it's been totally lost.
One of the laws about mathematics
triangles is named after
Heraclitus, but all of his work
in mathematics has been lost.
Only 11 pages of fragments
of the work pericarditis remains.
And one of them because I was stuck on
Delfi, says
the lords, whose oracles are
adelphia, which is neither to conceal
nor to reveal, but rather to signify.
And so it wrote those into the genes of
a fly for the white eyes.
It's a natural but rare mutation
in fruit flies.
This is George Church wearing the riddle
of life.
Yeah, about a year ago,
he wrote.
He put the first full length book
in DNA and actually Michael
Venus, the first genetic artwork
cited in science and was the first time
art journal a journal in art got
cited in science.
Yeah.
And so we
were. The data of the
of the mouse genome was coming
in, and so
I got together with my
old time collaborator Danah Boyd and
one of my colleagues from Church Lab
Madeline Price Ball, who had
been making shrunk Wikipedia's four third
world applications to give versions
of Wikipedia to the Third World to kids
who couldn't get online.
So we have a
between a 100 megabyte and 350
megabytes. At 350 megabytes, it's
the
top 50000 pages, almost
50 percent of the most visited pages in
Wikipedia.
And I guess my time is running
out,
but I guess
you can figure out what I'm
going to do, and
I
want to make apples
to tempt the devil.
We get to name this Apple
and
George Church church in Latin is
ecclesia, and Malus
means evil. It's a pun in Latin
and the reason apples get the name evil,
it's lost.
But this last
side
so malice ecclesia will be the name of
the wicked fired
Apple. And
and
when I got to Hamburg today,
the hotel room that gave me was
six
six six.
And.
Thank you very much, ladies and
gentlemen.
Okay.
Just to hear.
You're just really perfectly on
time.
That was great.
I think we don't have really a lot of
time for
Q&A. I can maybe ask some,
some single question I have right now
is just is there enough redundancy
in the DNA?
It's just so did.
It's still an apple?
It's still the information for the Apple
Plus the 50000 articles of
Wikipedia.
No change in phenotype.
So Apple tastes like an apple.
So it's it's just kind of biological.
What's this thing called?
Why you hide data and images?
It's just a bit like that.
So you just use the unused
portion of the information.
Yeah.
You can read it well in the
other way as well, but it's both things
in the same thing. That information?
Yeah. So I don't want
to give you a quick question, but
I think you'll
kind of I think thanks to
what's great having you here.
OK.