On the New Alphabet of Life
A recent Biopolitical Times post highlighted a landmark discovery: the expansion of life’s alphabet. To the puny assortment of A, T, G, and C—the nucleotides that are the “rungs” on DNA’s ladder, and whose varying sequences are the basis for life as we know it—scientists in California have now created two new synthetic nucleotides: X and Y. This is great news for synbio Scrabble fans, who, in addition to tag, cat, and Gattaca, can now spell tax and gay.
As a writer, and also as a fan of Darwin’s endless forms most beautiful—the phrase, the theory, the forms themselves—I was curious about the addition of the new letters. The four existing nucleotides were good enough to spell out plane trees, Dimetrodons, coral reefs, Tasmanian tigers, rainbow trout, and us—the endless forms evolved over aeons, some vanished, some vanishing at human speed—so why add more? What new forms will we evolve on purpose, to accompany those evolved by the wisdom of time and accident? Why complicate so simple a beginning?
As Pete Shanks notes, Dr. Floyd Romesburg, the Scripps Institute scientist who led the work, explained his project with a metaphor:
If you have a language that has a certain number of letters, you want to add letters so you can write more words and tell more stories.
Among writers, the second person is not without controversy. It is the plaid-jacketed salesman of narrative, throwing its arm around the reader to tell her what she knows and what she wants, and it often produces recoil where it aims at intimacy. So it is for me: it may be that new nucleotides = new amino acids = new organisms, but it does not follow that new letters = new words = new stories. I know lots of writers, but none of us have been thinking, “If only there were thirty letters in the alphabet, then I could finish my novel, The Story of Jimβθ!” Newness depends on thinking and imagination, operating on and in the language we have received, an evolved and evolving thing, created by everyone but by no one in particular, and comprehensible because shared. From so simple a beginning, we get endless forms, some more beautiful than others; but the stories are legible and meaningful because they spring from a common alphabet.
But to have a story, and to be one, are not the same. George W. Bush can have a story, and so can Lassie, or a tapeworm. But none of these creatures is a story, something designed deliberately and in molecular detail by a single creator, written into existence, letter by letter, word by word. So when Romesburg writes “you can write more words and tell more stories,” that assumes that it is okay to design new creatures in the first place. Turning Romesburg’s rhetorical you to a literal one, I would ask, If a new story is a new creature, then what stories do you want to tell? We have no cultural limit on stories, on their complexity or intricacy: will there be any limits on the stories told with the new letters, or on their ability to replicate, or on the ability of the designed creatures to interact with the evolved?
We live in an ecosystem of persuasion. Our words permeate the world and change the world. Until not that long ago, “life writing” was a genre, and “rewriting nature” a metaphor. It is not that humans haven’t directed the evolution of organisms through agriculture and domestication, or tried, at least, to direct our own; it’s that only recently have we been able to literally rewrite the code of life. We live among metaphors, even as the old metaphors collapse, and under the flag of one patented, invented word after another (Synthorx, Editas), our story is being revised.
George Estreich received his M.F.A. in poetry from Cornell University. His first book, a collection of poems entitled Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body, won the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books. His memoir about raising a daughter with Down syndrome, The Shape of the Eye, was published in SMU Press’ Medical Humanities Series. Praised by Abraham Verghese as “a poignant, beautifully written, and intensely moving memoir,” The Shape of the Eye was awarded the 2012 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Estreich lives in Oregon with his family.
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