06.

Patrick Chung Wong has, in turn, noted that, in a world of fragile media with limited space to store increasing quantities of data, the atomic domain of DNA might permit us to preserve our cultural heritage against the threat of planetary disasters (including thermonuclear warfare and astrophysical barrage). Wong has illustrated this hypothesis by encoding the lyrics to “It’s a Small World (After All),” implanting this song, as a genetic plasmid, inside the chromosome of an extremophile called Deinococcus radiodurans — a germ able to survive, without mutation, in even the most lethal of biomes, including the vacuum of outer space.⁶ Such “genetic writing” shows the degree to which geneticists have now become poets in the medium of life, storing extensive libraries of data, like microdots for retrieval, inside the genomes of immortal microbes.