Yep, there’s a rosetta stone encoded in the watermark sequences, find it and you can decipher the whole thing. All 64 codons are in the rosetta stone sequence but only about 51 can be deduced by their use in other watermark sequences, about 13 codons are unused.

Encoded in the watermarks is a new DNA code for writing words, sentences and numbers. In addition to the new code there is a web address to send emails to if you can successfully decode the new code, the names of 46 authors and other key contributors and three quotations: “TO LIVE, TO ERR, TO FALL, TO TRIUMPH, TO RECREATE LIFE OUT OF LIFE.” – JAMES JOYCE; “SEE THINGS NOT AS THEY ARE, BUT AS THEY MIGHT BE.”-A quote from the book, “American Prometheus”; “WHAT I CANNOT BUILD, I CANNOT UNDERSTAND.” – RICHARD FEYNMAN

Wonderful. There’s no doubt that this genome has plenty of Easter Eggs hidden in it. Very curious to know what these are.

But what’s the code? ASCII, with A=0, C=1, G=2, T=3? E.g., the LETTER ‘A’ is 0×41 (hex) in ASCII, thus the LETTER ‘A’ would be coded in DNA as

ASCII ‘A’ = 0×41 = binary 1000 0001 = quaternary 2001 = GAAC using DNA

The choice of code is philosophically and practically interesting: it would be quite tempting to choose a binary code that is a lot more efficient than DNA itself, which is inefficient by

DNA inefficiency: log2(4*4*4/20)/3 = 0.56 bits/nucleotide

(only 20 amino acids for 64 possible codons from 3 nucleotides). Using 8-bit ASCII to encode capital letters with a space and a few punctuation marks [A-Z <space> , . -] is quite a bit (ha-ha) more inefficient than DNA itself,

8-bit-ASCII-using-DNA inefficiency: log2(256/30)/4 = 0.77 bits/nucleotide

Anyone bold enough to create synthetic life should be bold enough to use a more efficient coding strategy than does nature itself. Perhaps something sophisticated as a Huffman code or better?

On the other hand, using good old 8-bit ASCII would allow synthetic life researchers from around the world to easily code their names and favorite literary quotations in the language of their choice using UTF-8, just the way all computers and web browsers do (עברית العبرية हिन्दी). What did Venter use?

Also, I’m curious if the choice of James Joyce, aside from being perfect, was motivated at all by Murray Gell-Mann’s source for the word quark, along with a desire put these accomplishments on the same scale.

Great post Carl. This is a wonderful example of what R.A. Fisher had to say about the futility of any “intelligent designer”:

If we imagine, then, some extra-natural agency endeavouring to influence the organic evolution of mammals and birds by the production, on millions of different occasions, of this single mutation, we can recognise that its efforts were futile and inoperative.

Engineering a microbe is in this way remarkably similar to raising a child. Are microbes equally thankless?