James Joyce in the Genome

James Joyce has been encoded into a synthetic cell!

This isn't the first time Joyce and science have overlapped - in one of my favourite examples, Murray Gell-Mann, one of the physicists who proposed the quark model of elementary particles, named his discovery after a line from Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!".

Recently, the scientists who produced a synthetic cell inserted a Joyce quotation into their genome. The experiment was to copy the code of a natural microbe, and inserting the synthetic genome sequence into a host cell, which would then replicate the synthetic code in each subsequent division. To test this, the scientists placed what they call "watermarks" into the cell - areas of programmed code that do not affect the cell's function, but can be tested for to see if the synthetic genome sequence really did replicate. One such watermark was "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!".

The full quotation, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(Ch. 4) reads: "Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!"

One of my favourite parts about this article on the synthetic genome is that it describes how Joyce's quotation is slowly changing - with each cell division, tiny DNA slippages cause mutations in the cell's genome sequence, including the watermarks. While these small mutations have not affected the function of the cells, they have forever altered Joyce's words. The author of the article states that soon, the quotation will not even be recognizable. I like to think that Joyce would appreciate this homage more than any which carved his words in stone, or set them in indelible ink. Joyce himself described errors as "portals of discovery" and in this case, when read through the scientific progress of this new synthetic cell, this remains true. Joyce's texts are hardly static as it is, and I believe that he would like to see his words further altered as more people play with them, interpret them, and use them in their own ways.

Thanks to Cole for alerting me to this story.