“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life” – what a fitting sentiment to accompany the birth of a new organism. It’s a quotation from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and came as part and parcel with the creation of the first synthetic cell in 2010. Synthia – as it became known – was constructed by the scientist Craig Venter, who assembled its genetic code in a computer, and wheedled it into the chassis of an eviscerated cell, whereupon it became alive. The quotation, along with two others also encrypted in DNA, was buried in its genome.
Life itself is encrypted. DNA is the code – a set of instructions on how to build an organism. The work of cracking the genetic code in the 1960s was to understand the encryption of life. It did just that, as we now understand not just how genes work in living things, but how the rusting codes in our genomes betray our evolutionary history. Genes that were once vital are no longer, but leave coded shadows in our DNA.
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