Preserving a Sense of Wonder in DNA

Not long ago, Joe Davis, the “artist-scientist” in George Church’s genetics lab at Harvard Medical School, was in Brittany, France. The region is known for thousand-year-old salterns that produce fleur de sel, or flower of salt—salt that forms as seawater evaporates. Davis was there sampling these brightly colored ponds with a microscope, and found in the shallow waters an abundance of diverse halophiles, organisms that can grow in and tolerate saline conditions. “I wondered what happens to these organisms,” he said. “The salt is evaporating, the water’s gone. The organisms aren’t just going to disappear. Where are they?”

Back in the United States, Davis procured a range of artisanal salts and sterilized them. The wizened 69-year-old, with a Gandalf-like demeanor and a do-it-yourself ethos, wants to preserve information for eternity. In 1986, he was the first to demonstrate that information could be stored in genes. Ones and zeros of digital information are mapped onto sequences of the four nucleic acids of DNA, synthesized, and inserted into cells. Scientists retrieve the DNA, sequence it, and with the proper index, read its coded instructions. Davis is encoding the top 50,000 Wikipedia pages into an apple gene, creating a perpetual tree of knowledge. Working with scientists at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto for the most abundant protein on Earth, critical to photosynthesis, to nearby stars.