Blog task 2 : Summary on Christian Bök's work with DNA,The Xenotext Works

Christian Bok

Christian Bök was born on August 10, 1966 in Toronto, Canada. He is an experimental Canadian poet. He graduated from Carleton University, he also earned a Ph.D in English from York University, and that is when he became interested in many Canadian poetry writers. Christian Bök got many awards and prizes for his poems. He lives in Alberta and works as a professor of English at the University of Calgary.

The Xenotext project is about creating an example of living poetry. Bök spent more than 9 years and lots of money for the lab work.The way he decided to do that is by encoding a poem into a sequence of DNA in order to implant it into the bacterium called deinococcus radiodurans. This bacterium is one of the most radioresistant organisms known, it can survive, cold, heat, dehydration, vacuum, and acid. Thus, the poem will exist many years even after the explosion of the sun. 

Christian Bök received a confirmation from the laboratory at the University of Calgary that the E.coli caused by gene X-P13 does cause the bacterium to write its own poem. Then, his next step that Bok is planing to do is how to implant the gene X-P13 into the targeted organism Deinococcus radiodurans.