Deja vu all over again
May. 20th, 2010 12:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoCraig Venter and his team have apparently created a synthetic life form. That is, they constructed a DNA sequence from scratch, rather than splicing ones found in nature, and grew it up from there.
That's fairly epochal just by itself, but this section of the story had me giggling:
"Dr Venter's team developed a new code based on the four letters of the genetic code, G, T, C and A, that allowed them to draw on the whole alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks to write the watermarks. Anyone who cracks the code is invited to email an address written into the DNA." {emph. added}
Why is that so funny, you ask?
Well, long ago and far away, I read, "We'll Return, After This Message," a science fiction story written in 1989 by John Walker, one of the co-founders of Autodesk.
I leave it to you to read Walker's story, and see the similarity in the premises.
That's fairly epochal just by itself, but this section of the story had me giggling:
"Dr Venter's team developed a new code based on the four letters of the genetic code, G, T, C and A, that allowed them to draw on the whole alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks to write the watermarks. Anyone who cracks the code is invited to email an address written into the DNA." {emph. added}
Why is that so funny, you ask?
Well, long ago and far away, I read, "We'll Return, After This Message," a science fiction story written in 1989 by John Walker, one of the co-founders of Autodesk.
I leave it to you to read Walker's story, and see the similarity in the premises.
