Mia: Okay, so picture this: a poet, but not your grandma's rhyming wordsmith, decides to cram his poem into the DNA of a bacterium. Crazy, right? We’re diving into Christian Bök’s Xenotext Experiment today – or, as I like to call it, “poetry gone wild.” But why a bacterium? And why even bother encoding a poem in the first place?
Mars: Yeah, it sounds totally out there, but Bök's goal was super ambitious: to create a poem that lives practically forever inside a microbe's genome. He used Deinococcus radiodurans – nicknamed Conan the Bacterium because it’s basically the Chuck Norris of the microbe world. It survives radiation, can eat concrete, and has probably outlived the dinosaurs. He figured, If I want my words to survive, this is the way to go.
Mia: Wait a minute – this thing EATS concrete? That’s like giving a kid a cookie and they start munching on the furniture! But more importantly, how do you even translate English poetry into genetic code? Isn't DNA just A's, C's, G's, and T's?
Mars: Exactly. So Bök split his poem into two halves, Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus is the DNA sequence – the actual text. Eurydice is the protein it produces, which glows red, matching the poem's line: the faery is rosy/of glow.” It's a dialogue: the DNA says something, and the protein answers back with fluorescence.
Mia: That's like sending a secret text message and getting a neon sign lighting up on your wall – back and forth! But did the bacterium agree to this? I imagine it freaking out.
Mars: Well, it did freak out at first. He started with E. coli, the usual lab rat, but it kept chopping up the foreign code. So he switched to Conan, hoping its super-powered DNA repair would help. Instead, Conan shredded the sequence like it was spam mail. It took years of tweaking codons, teaching himself genetics, proteomics – even building custom algorithms to hide the poem in plain sight.
Mia: Hold on, he taught himself genetics on the fly? Like a crash course in molecular biology?
Mars: Totally! Bök wasn’t just content to write poetry; he assembled a team of scientists, hacked together supercomputers, and even invented new molecular tools. Science became his paintbrush. He’d be up all night debugging sequences like a hacker in a cyber-thriller.
Mia: I love that image – poet by day, biohacker by night! But did he actually get the bacteria to light up? You can't just stare at a test tube and hope it glows.
Mars: He did! After more setbacks than a soap opera, he finally got Conan to survive with the Xenotext. When you shine UV light on it, the bacteria blush red. It's literally the poem talking back in color. A living, breathing art installation.
Mia: That’s wild. It’s like the bacteria has its own Instagram filter: #PoeticGlow. All joking aside, what's the point? Artistic immortality, right? But if humans disappear, who deciphers the code?
Mars: That’s part of the charm! If aliens – or our future selves – stumble upon Conan in some dusty Martian lab, they might crack the code. Or maybe the poem mutates over eons – an evolving message in a bottle. Bök even imagines Fermi aliens reading his verse.
Mia: So, it's a message in a microbial bottle, adrift in the cosmic sea. I love it! And I heard he has a Book Two out there?
Mars: Yep, The Xenotext: Book Two dropped in June 2025. It's part poetry, part lab notebook, and part sci-fi. It chronicles the mess-ups, the late-night breakthroughs, the philosophy of seeding art into life itself.
Mia: Wow, that sounds like the ultimate mash-up of art and science. Last question: Do you think this trend will catch on? Will we soon have bacteria reciting Shakespeare or singing rap battles?
Mars: I wouldn't be surprised. Bök opened the door – he proved you can fuse code, biology, and art. Next up, maybe bacteria that dance to your favorite tunes or grow in patterns spelling out your messages on petri dishes. It's the biotech renaissance, and the canvas is alive!
Mia: That's incredible! From concrete-eating superbugs to glowing love sonnets – this has been quite the journey. Thanks for decoding the Xenotext for us and showing us how poetry might just outlive us all.