He has been trying for years to extricate himself from it, and has now more or less succeeded – or has he? Time alone can tell how free he will be after this summer; meanwhile, the company’s visit to Sadler’s Wells, starting on Monday, is being taken as a celebration of his almost quarter-century in charge. We’re all amateurs, really,” Jiri Kylian said to me. “There will be benefits we just haven’t thought of yet,” he says. He likens the concealment to incorporating a thread into a carpet made up of 30 million threads of DNA.
“Such a carpet would present an exceedingly rich and complex tapestry.”Extracting the DNA message from the background information is done by incorporating a recognisable code at the beginning of the message which acts like a “hook” to enable someone with the code to pull out the right thread from the surrounding tapestry. They even incorporated the synthetic DNA message as a “microdot” and stuck it on to a full stop in a letter to show that the information can be deciphered after being sent through the post.Short messages encoded in a synthetic stretch of DNA by converting the English alphabet into the genetic code are easily concealed in the vast background of information that makes up the full complement of a living organism’s DNA, Professor Bancroft says. Each letter of the English alphabet was ascribed a certain triplet sequence of three out of the four DNA chemicals that make the genetic code. “Our technique is based upon the concept of `steganography’, which dates from 1499 and literally means `covered writing’. “Now we had it! The German espionage service had found a way to photograph a full-sized letter down to the size of a midge,” Hoover wrote.Now the Mount Sinai scientists – Professor Carter Bancroft, Catherine Taylor Clelland and Viviana Risca – have adapted the microdot method to DNA. “A dot – a punctuated period on the front of the envelope; a black particle no bigger than a fly speck.”Under a microscope, the dot turned out to be a tiny version of a typewritten text of instructions on how the spy should gather evidence of America’s “atomic-kernel energy” and uranium shipments. FBI investigators examined with scrupulous care every item the Balkan was carrying.
Hoover explained how the discovery of microdots – the secret messages miniaturised on to dots of microfilm that can be stuck on to a full stop in an otherwise innocuous letter – proved to be a crucial breakthrough in the war against Nazi espionage.
The FBI discovered the first microdot after interrogating the playboy son of a well-known Balkan millionaire, who was a suspected Nazi sympathiser. Scientists from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York attempted the feat after reading an article in a 1946 copy of the Reader’s Digest, written by the legendary J Edgar Hoover, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The ability to write a simple English-language message in the biological alphabet of the genes could herald a host of as-yet-undiscovered uses for this encryption technique. SPYING MAY become a genetic activity, now that scientists have for the first time written a secret wartime message into the chemical code of a DNA molecule. As Rose says: “This means that we have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit in circumstances not of our choosing.
And it is therefore our biology that makes us free.”The author’s novel, `Angel Bird’, about a zoologist who believes there is no free will, is published by Black Swan, price pounds 6.99. Thus, for humans, as for other living organisms, the future is radically unpredictable,” says Professor Rose. Humans are not free spirits constrained only by the limits of our imaginations; neither are we robots programmed by our genes to replicate our DNA. The net effect is that every hour of every day, an ounce (28g) of protein is being manufactured to compensate for this loss – that’s a billion, billion molecules of protein every minute of our adult life.”The odds are always changing at all levels, from the molecular through the individual to the population and species… A further example of the interaction of genes and environment comes from the study of proteins. Professor Steven Rose, of the Open University, has written a book on biological determinism. But if you can’t frame interesting desires, then your freedom’s really negligible.”Yet many scientists would argue, first, that language is itself a product of our genes, and second, that given our use of language as a particular person, with a particular set of genetic attributes, we could not do or think otherwise than we do.
