{"id":1821,"date":"2011-02-06T14:08:38","date_gmt":"2011-02-06T22:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=1821"},"modified":"2011-02-06T14:08:38","modified_gmt":"2011-02-06T22:08:38","slug":"nuclear-proetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=1821","title":{"rendered":"Nuclear Proetry*"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember this guy<\/a>? The dude who’s reprogramming the Deinococcus<\/em> genotype<\/a> with a free-verse poem in nucleotides, which in turn code for a protein that decompiles into another<\/em> poem that replies to the first?<\/p>\n

He and I, we’ve been in touch. And among the latest tidbits I am authorized to reveal is the fact that he’s added a fluorescent marker to the sequence, so that microbes containing his art will glow red. And that said poems (which together form a rumination and a rejoinder on the futility of life, poet and germ in conversation) also make reference to something that is rosy of glow<\/em>. I have seen these poems. I have seen the DNA and amino-acid sequences that code them. I have even seen something approaching the poem in its native form, which I am permitted to show you\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2026 and I am increasingly blown away by the amount of recursion and self-reference this dude can pack into a measly 192 codons. (Also, I am increasingly pissed-off by the fact that Christian B\u00f6k can do all this stuff armed with a PhD in bloody English<\/em>\u2014 whereas I, with all my degrees in biology, couldn’t get a single readable genetic sequence out of two years of effort. If there is a moral here, I refuse to acknowledge it.)<\/p>\n

I am further tickled to report that one of Christian’s favourite movies is John Carpenter’s The Thing<\/em>, and that he is a fan of my own fanfician homage to that movie. (Which yes, as some of you have noticed, got a Black Quill Award (Editor’s Choice, Best Dark Scribble<\/a><\/em>) over at Dark Scribe<\/a><\/em>, as well as coming first in the Reader’s Choice<\/a> poll over at Clarkesworld<\/a>,<\/em> and being a current finalist for a best-short-fiction BSFA Award<\/a>. I was waiting to roll these announcements in with a couple of others, but Tor.com is running silent on one front and I bet none of you have heard of the Mir <\/em>award on the other, so what the hell.)<\/p>\n

And yes: Christian B\u00f6k’s monstrous microbial poem will be making an appearance in State of Grace<\/em>. A shame my protagonist will have become too schizophrenic by then to properly appreciate it.<\/p>\n

\n

*Not a typo.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember this guy? The dude who’s reprogramming the Deinococcus genotype with a free-verse poem in nucleotides, which in turn code for a protein that decompiles into another poem that replies to the first? He and I, we’ve been in touch. And among the latest tidbits I am authorized to reveal is the fact that he’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dumbspeech","category-ink-on-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1821"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1830,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions\/1830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}