Object of Interest: The Twice-Forbidden Fruit : The New Yorker
well he amused and intrigued me, not sure whether its art?
e plans to use synthetic biology to insert a DNA-encoded version of Wikipedia into the apple and create a living, literal tree of knowledge.
Davis, who is sixty-three, stands on an aluminum peg leg fitted with a rubber stopper that was meant, originally, for a laboratory flask. When you talk to people who have met him, you end up hearing versions of the same stories: that he put clock parts in an incubator for twenty-five years to see if, like life, they would self-assemble; that, in 1986, he was the first to insert art into the genome of a living organism; that he lost his right leg below the knee when he “kissed an alligator”; that he is reëngineering silkworms to spin gold; and that he won a Rockefeller grant for designing, in his home state of Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina, a hundred-and-six-foot-tall steel tower that captured lightning strikes and hurled them back, in protest, at the sky.
Davis has titled the apple project “Malus ecclesia.” (Malus, the genus name for all apples, means both “bad, evil” and “apple tree” in Latin. Ecclesia translates to “church”—an homage, Davis said, to George Church.)
Davis, who is sixty-three, stands on an aluminum peg leg fitted with a rubber stopper that was meant, originally, for a laboratory flask. When you talk to people who have met him, you end up hearing versions of the same stories: that he put clock parts in an incubator for twenty-five years to see if, like life, they would self-assemble; that, in 1986, he was the first to insert art into the genome of a living organism; that he lost his right leg below the knee when he “kissed an alligator”; that he is reëngineering silkworms to spin gold; and that he won a Rockefeller grant for designing, in his home state of Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina, a hundred-and-six-foot-tall steel tower that captured lightning strikes and hurled them back, in protest, at the sky.
Davis has titled the apple project “Malus ecclesia.” (Malus, the genus name for all apples, means both “bad, evil” and “apple tree” in Latin. Ecclesia translates to “church”—an homage, Davis said, to George Church.)
well he amused and intrigued me, not sure whether its art?
