Object of Interest: The Twice-Forbidden Fruit | The New Yorker

An artist and a Harvard lab plan to encode all of Wikipedia into the DNA of a four-thousand-year-old strain of apple.

Save this story Save this story Last year, Joe Davis, the artist in residence at George Church’s genetics lab, at Harvard Medical School, received an unmarked package containing roots and leaves from a four-thousand-year-old strain of apple. The contents in the box represented the closest thing that Davis could find, after years of searching, to the forbidden fruit that grew in the Garden of Eden. He 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

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