The first is a project by Pak Chung Wong (a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Library), in which he and his team enciphered the lyrics to "It's A Small World After All" as a plasmid of DNA and successfully implanted it in Deinococcus radiodurans.
[4] The second is the speculation, put forth by Paul Davies (a professor for SETI at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology in Sydney) and others that there may be messages already encoded in DNA that are extraterrestrial in origin.
The third is the work of pioneering bioartist Eduardo Kac, who enciphered a sentence from the Biblical story of Genesis into a strand of DNA, implanted it into E. coli, and subjected the microbe to large doses of radiation, thereby introducing "edits" to the text.
Bök further hopes that the microbe will then translate the RNA-poem into a protein that reflects the full nucleotide sequence and exists as a protein-poem.
[6] Determining the makeup of this substitution cipher — such that the two poems could be written simultaneously — proved to be very difficult, as there are "7 trillion, 905 billion, 853 million, 580 thousand, 6 hundred and 25 (7,905,853,580,625) ways to pair up all of the letters in the alphabet so that they mutually refer to each other".
It took Bök four years to find a suitable cipher and complete the two poems, which he dubbed "Orpheus" and "Eurydice", taking inspiration from the ancient legend.
[7] Thus, after nine years of research and conceptual trial and error, Bök finally set to work on making his experiment a reality.
Then, he sent his specifications to a gene design and synthesis company, DNA 2.0, which manufactured his DNA-poem in the form of a plasmid and sent it back to IBI.
[8] In early April 2011, Bök exhibited a model of the protein, constructed out of MolyMod components, at the Bury Art Gallery in Manchester.
Dr. Sui Huang — Bök's partner at IBI after Dr. Stuart Kaufman retired — was unsure why exactly the protein-poem was being destroyed, but hypothesized that issues had arisen due to the repetitive nature of the DNA sequence — that is, the bacterium might have mistaken the DNA-poem for a virus and attacked it.
In 2013, Bök announced that he was collaborating with a lab at the University of Wyoming to implant the DNA-poem into the true target bacterium, the extremophile D.
[9] Wanting to release something tangible for the public, Bök published The Xenotext: Book I, a "demonic grimoire" that "[provides] a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations.