Op-Ed: Human DNA, the Ultimate Spot for Secret Messages (Are Some There Now?)

June 28, 2007

In Douglas Adams’s science fiction classic, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” there is a character by the name of Slartibartfast, who designed the fjords of Norway and left his signature in a glacier. I was reminded of Slartibartfast recently as I was trying to grasp the implications of the feat of a team of Japanese geneticists who announced that they had taught relativity to a bacterium, sort of. (New York Times)