Put this one in the Strange New World file: is it possible to use junk DNA as a repository for secret messages? The idea cropped up in science fiction some time ago, but as of now, it's also reality.
Japanese researchers at Keio University, led by Masaru Tomita, recently wrote the sequence "E=mc2 1905" into the genome of a bacterium. The idea is as simple as the execution is complex: your four choices are C, G, A, and T; regard these as base keys in a translation code; type away. As long as a suitable reading mechanism exists that knows the translation code, the bacterium has just been turned into a communication device. Or, more precisely, its natural code-bearing potential has been hijacked to carry a secondary level of "meaning."
All of us are repositories of huge numbers of terabytes worth of junk DNA anyway, just waiting to be turned to advantage. Or perhaps, as the article speculates, our junk DNA already has been turned to this purpose: perhaps the search for communication from alien species should be proceeding inward rather than outward. We might be partly their autographed handiwork, the way Bach wrote his name into his cantatas on occasion. Maybe the stuff that doesn't code for any proteins is carrying greetings, along with instructions on how to manipulate the physical world around us effectively, once we reach the point of being able to recognize and decode the message . . .
Question: science or fantasy? And, more generally: is this the beginning of the merging point between biology and technology? How long before the distinction between organism and machine becomes irrelevant . . . or is it already?
