Bök first conceived of “The Xenotext” after reading a scientific article by Pak Chung Wong at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington and another by Arizona-based astrobiologist Paul Davies. Wong encoded the lyrics to Disney’s It’s a Small World After All into bacteria. Davies speculated that if extraterrestrial civilizations wanted to make contact with other worlds, they would send highly adaptable self-replicating bio-probes—something akin to a bacterium or virus—that could carry messages and survive the destructive environment of outer space.
In October, Bök, 46, professor of creative writing at the University of Calgary, got word from a California lab that his DNA concoction had caused a test organism to fluoresce, signifying that it was responding to his gene sequence. It had done so on a few prior attempts, but when the scientists examined the results, they discovered the organism was cutting off part of the protein string. “That was bad news for me,” says Bök, because it meant his creation was being destroyed. “Instead of having created the first microbial writer, I had effectively created the first microbial critic.” Now, at last, the organism created a properly folded protein that survived in its cell and could be interpreted as the first bacterial attempt at composing verse.
