Asimov Press’ New Book, Written in DNA

Pre-orders are open for the first commercially-available book to be encoded in DNA and sold in both mediums.

Our second book is now available for pre-order. Asimov Press’ latest anthology features nine essays and three works of science fiction. Embracing the book’s technology theme, we did something very special: With the help of three companies — CATALOG, Imagene, and Plasmidsaurus — we’ve encoded a complete copy of the book into DNA, thus merging bits with atoms.

This is the first commercially-available book to be written in DNA and sold in both mediums; as physical books and nucleic acids. We are deeply grateful to those who helped make it possible.

CATALOG, a DNA computing company, synthesized and assembled millions of nucleotides of DNA into thousands of individual strands in their Boston laboratories. That DNA was then shipped to France, where Imagene, a company specializing in robust and room-temperature storage solutions, packaged the molecules into laser-sealed, stainless steel capsules. Each capsule was sealed under an inert atmosphere — meaning there is no oxygen or moisture inside the capsule — preserving the DNA inside for tens of thousands of years. And finally, Plasmidsaurus “read” the DNA book at their headquarters in California and submitted the final sequence to the internet for everyone to enjoy. You can check out the book’s DNA sequence at CATALOG’s website, or by scanning the QR code at the bottom of this article.

Printing the books also would not have been possible without support from our partners: Asimov, Astera Institute and Stripe.

We’ve made 1,000 DNA capsules in total. Each capsule comes with a custom-designed display stand and a printed copy of the book. Pre-orders are open today and orders will ship in February. Our first book sold out, and we are not planning to do additional print runs. If you need any help with your order, would like to request international shipping, or plan to order more than ten copies, please email editors@asimov.com. We’ll do our best to help!

There are three pre-order options:

1. Book #2 (Printed book only; $25) — Link to Pre-Order

2. Book #2 with DNA capsule ($60) — Link to Pre-Order

3. Book #1 and #2 Bundle (~25 copies available; $30) — Link to Pre-Order

Ours is not the first book to be written in DNA. That honor belongs to George Church and his book, Regenesis, which he co-authored with Ed Regis and published in 2012. Church’s Harvard laboratory used binary code to preserve the book (including images and formatting), before converting that binary code into physical DNA.

Shortly after, a group of Cambridge scientists encoded Shakespeare’s entire collection of 154 sonnets — as well as an audio file of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech — into DNA. In 2022, CATALOG (our partner on this project) encoded eight of Shakespeare’s tragedies, comprising more than 200,000 words of text, into a single test tube. They also built and tested methods to search that DNA — a sort of biological “Ctrl + F” command.

We are thrilled to have our anthology join these visionary projects as the first commercially-available book to be encoded in DNA and sold in both mediums.

This anthology was designed, once again, by Everything Studio in Brooklyn and printed by Shapco in Minneapolis. The book includes eight pages of full-color photographs, with additional images throughout. Each book is printed on 80lb Cougar Opaque Natural Smooth Text paper, with smythe-sewn soft cover bindings. The DNA sequence ribboning the cover represents part of the ATP synthase gene, which encodes a protein that makes energy molecules for cells. The announcement video was made by the brilliant Jason Carman and his team at S3 in San Francisco. All of our publishing is made possible by Asimov.

The articles within explain extant and emerging technologies and imagine future ones. Rhea Purohit’s essay chronicles legal battles over the ability to patent life (a development central to the biotech industry), whereas Alex Telford’s explains how the lab mouse — a biomedical mainstay that has supported researchers in developing polio and meningitis vaccines, organ transplants, GLP-1 drugs, and gene therapies — first came to be.

Speculative fiction by Richard Ngo and Abhishaike Mahajan imagine everything from AIs that fabricate their own computer chips using carbon nanotubes to virtual cells that can simulate biophysical phenomena. And that’s just a preview …

Thank you, as always, for reading and supporting Asimov Press.

Xander Balwit & Niko McCarty

The Editors