The apple genome can be thought of as a seven-hundred-and-fifty-million-letter book, made of the four letters of DNA: a, t, c, and g. Ecclesia translates to “church”-an homage, Davis said, to George Church.) The project should stretch his already considerable ambitions. 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.ĭavis has titled the apple project “Malus ecclesia.” ( Malus, the genus name for all apples, means both “bad, evil” and “apple tree” in Latin. 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.ĭavis, who is sixty-three, stands on an aluminum peg leg fitted with a rubber stopper that was meant, originally, for a laboratory flask. 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. 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.
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