My Dream of the Double Helix

‘Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner thought that the task of ‘cracking’ the genetic code would take generations but in truth they hit upon the basic principle almost immediately… What if each amino acid was coded by a three-base sequence? Then there are sixty-four possible variants – of four times four times four. They tried this, and found that lo!, what was logically the simplest solution is in fact what nature has chosen to do…’ Ian Wilmut, The Second Creation: The Age of Biological Control, by the scientists who cloned Dolly, Headline, 2001

‘Thus the general plan of living things seemed almost obvious. Each gene determines a particular protein.’ Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989

‘Have not all souls thought/ For many ages, that our bodies wrought/ Of air, and fire, and other elements?/ And now they think of new ingredients…’ John Donne, 1571/2-1631, An Anatomy of the World, The Second Anniversarie

‘One reason that many of us take DNA personally - more so than say, discoveries of superconductors, cold fusion or dark matter - is because it constitutes the enigmatic core around which much of our behaviour, desires, fears, as well as our health, revolve.’ BBC News, 2003

‘The whole process seemed so utterly mysterious that one hardly knew how to begin thinking about it.’ Francis Crick, Co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, What Mad Pursuit, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989

‘… in the last 50 years DNA has ended up in some pretty ropey design manifestations… most DNA designs are such literal depictions of the double helix that they reduce the sublime to the cliché. Aside from numerous DNA sculptures…how about a double helix tie or boxer shorts? Or a left-spiraling DNA bracelet? The hyperbole accompanying some of the more banal creations is often better than the object itself. A necktie with a giant silk-screened DNA molecule has the accompanying text: "Helix, schmelix, what I'd like to do is meet whatever has DNA this big. And it's replicating. Yikes!" A quick search on the internet reveals many design businesses that incorporate the word DNA in their company title. And those that use the double helix as part of the company logo quite frequently get their DNA in an awkward - and incorrect - twist. Like a corkscrew, DNA twists to the right. But sinister twisting DNA appears in the most predictable (i.e. non-scientific) places as well as the most unlikely (an edition of James Watson's book The Double Helix).’ Denna Jones, Curator, TwoTen Gallery and Contemporary Initiatives, Wellcome Trust, 2003

‘Francis Crick lived in this house in Cambridge, now marked by a golden helix.’ BBC Science online

‘Towards multidimensional genome annotation - Our information about the gene content of organisms continues to grow as more genomes are sequenced and gene products are characterized. Sequence-based annotation efforts have led to a list of cellular components, which can be thought of as a one-dimensional annotation. With growing information about component interactions, facilitated by the advancement of various high-throughput technologies, systemic, or two-dimensional, annotations can be generated. Knowledge about the physical arrangement of chromosomes will lead to a three-dimensional spatial annotation of the genome and a fourth dimension of annotation will arise from the study of changes in genome sequences that occur during adaptive evolution. Here we discuss all four levels of genome annotation, with specific emphasis on two-dimensional annotation methods.’ Abstract, Nature Reviews, Genetics 7, 2006

MY DREAM OF THE DOUBLE HELIX

The Moon was a single silver word
written in the black mouth of night,

sky’s opening blue vowel -
pared beyond musical light

to her chalky white bone,
pocked, unbeating heart;

cold molecules and tarnished gas -
to her brilliant round skull, stone

skeleton that is the stark idea of her;
the shining milky-blue sky-cocoon

that is the socketed thought of her –
her poem is written as a single word.

But trees flutter embroidery of leaves -
sewn by a single thirsting skinny thread;

green eyes flagged, scribbling on open blue,
until yellow and orange, red syllables ignite -

in ragged poems aflame, whispering of death
and life subsumed by one season; snowflaking

down from kneeling evangelist branches -
showering earth with burning scarlet stars;

trunks bend, articulating the human torso,
limbs still morphed to earth in illustration,

their golden rings sounding another year,
resin crying arboreal tear interpretations.


Flowers took me in their thin green arms,
open almond palms - cheek to invisibly

veined petal cheek - reading sugared breath,
love poetry for bees; sweet floral dictionary

for translating summer light into shining nectar -
gold sundust of pollen; ultimately spelling honey.

I touched their plugged green necks -
and through my open pink star palms,

the low sound of humming earth wired,
that is like a beatless, deep, slow heart.

And my own heart was like a morning rose,
opening from my chest on muscular hinges,

responsive to light, shifting moods, sundial
creeps of brilliance and shadow - raised up,

the leaves of my hands showed the skeleton
of a star - a Milky Way at every finger tip –

and now I saw, also sketches of paw and claw,
incipient fur under shorn skin, bonded hoof -

recognising the vertebrate and non-vertebrate
white bone and black exoskeleton, water-bone

of mother-of-pearl shell; my spine itching
with a tail, my shoulder blade nubs aching -

I was a bundle of prints - animal and plant
ghosts; loose, shifting, but all rooted to me,

trailing shapes like a Gothic bride; a veil
of bird and mammal chimeras, dim hopes

of a sea urchin for eyes - one day seeing in me;
my human shape was just a mannequin of stars.

And this rose of my heart became a red light -
clarifying like plasma from blood, scarlet cells;

for the sight of my black eyes reading the world -
seeking to the heart of words, beyond letter, active

symbol, to sound, space where notes silently carry
music; pulling back again to the moving life prints,

temporal place of poem skeletons, language of flesh -
before being blinds her scaffold, hangs it with animals

and flowers, four billion years of experimentation,
art of diversity. And the writing, continuous script,

was dancing - hearing that music in the darkness,
translated into spirals, fairground shapes; notation

culled from the birth of a universe, chemistry of life -
the whole world written in twisting silver spirals, still

writing – in attraction - loving, parting, replicating -
poems that are never still, connected to one another;

verses in one work, over and over, entitled Evolution;
for robin and man, leaf or worm, however elaborate,

whatever organic style, peacock or sparrow equal -
they spoke only a single communal word: Creation.