Star Trek creator’s signature goes into a replicating bacterial cell

Star Trek creator’s signature goes into a replicating bacterial cell

Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s Producer’s signature, has reached a milestone that none ventured into before – becoming theDNA code itself.

In the year 1965, Roddenberry had signed a contract with Lucille Ball’s Desilu Productions for financing Star Trek. 30 years after the sci-fi legend’s death, on November 30, that signature was turned into an NFT and subsequently implanted into the DNA code of a living bacteria cell.

Roddenberry Entertainment has described it as the first-ever “Living Eco-NFT” and a “true intersection” of science with science fiction. The DNA code is set to replicate and grow with the resulting division of the organism’s cells.

The firm wrote that as long as the bacteria remain living, the cell can potentially “double at a rate creating over a billion copies” of the Eco-NFT “overnight.”

The same is being exhibited as an art piece at Art Basel 2021 in Miami, titled as “El Primero”, which is Spanish for “The First.”

Rational Vaccines’ CEO and Emmy-winning Director Agustin Fernandez has collaborated on the piece, stating that storing information in DNA represents an entirely new category of possibility when it comes to data archiving.

Fernandez added that it provides for “sustainable, environmentally-friendly storage”, having exponentially larger capacities than anything the current market can offer.

The NFTs are live on the Solana blockchain (SOL), supported by Metaplex Studios.

Interim CEO of Metaplex Studios, Stephen Hess, has said that the Solana blockchain would provide “an extremely energy-efficient platform” where NFT creators can build on.

Dr Paul Predki has been the main person responsible for encoding the NFT’s digital data into the DNA sequence and storing the DNA in a self-replicating bacterial cell.

Star Trek is not a stranger to NFT collectibles. In July 2020, Star Trek’s fans had bought 125,000 NFT trading cards that had featured “Captain Kirk” William Shatner on the WAX Blockchain. 

Again in June 2020, Shatner had spoken about NFTs in an interview with Cointelegraph Magazine where he had said that “the revolution is coming” and that it wasn’t merely in the streets but in the ether. 

Shatner had remarked that it was “a revolution of knowledge.”