Poet Plans to Inscribe His Works into the DNA of a Bacterium

Poet Christian Bök plans to alter the DNA of a particular species of bacteria so that it reflects an encoded version of his poetry:

Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race. But it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem.[...]

Bök will create a code that links letters of the alphabet with genetic nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, aka ACGT). Each triplet of nucleotides will correspond to a letter so that, say, ACT represents the letter a, AGT represents the letter b, and so on.

Link via Marginal Revolution | Image: US Department of Energy

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The idea has served its purpose here...whether he is successful or not, its drawn attention to him :) Great marketing idea

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I agree with Markus74, do you know of any instance of artificially freezing genetic mutation? It's one of the natures most efficient ways of diversifying life.

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I have to agree with Markus74.
In addition, bacterias are prokaryotes, which means they have a higher mutation rate anyway (their DNA istn't tucked safely away in a cell core).
But then again: It's art, it doesn't have to work.

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This won't work! The bacteria's natural mutation rate will soon make the genomically integrated poem unreadable. As the integrated sequence stretches have no biological function, the bacteria might also lose it completely after a few cell cycles.