Björn over at 5¢ense points to a brief report, that the godlike J Craig Venter was slapped with a cease-and-desist by the estate of James Joyce, for daring to encode a Joyce quote in the DNA of the microbe Venter built.
“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”
What an utter prat that estate surely is.
Better yet, as I learned from a more detailed report of the debacle ...
The synthetic DNA also included a quote from physicist Richard Feynman, “What I cannot build, I cannot understand.”
That prompted a note from Caltech, the school where Feyman [sic] taught for decades. They sent Venter a photo of the blackboard1 on which Feynman composed the quote – and it showed that he actually wrote, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
“We agreed what was on the Internet was wrong,” said Venter. “So we’re going back to change the genetic code to correct it.”
And excise the Joyce, presumably.
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