For some reason it occurred to me that these two things should go together (while reading about Schroedinger’s brilliant notion about “the stuff of the gene” being some kind of aperiodic crystal). Anyway, while searching for stuff on this topic, I came across this great bit: Craig Venter’s synthetic bacterium contains coded “watermarks” in its DNA. One of these watermarks actually contains a Webpage, complete with a link. Others include quotations by James Joyce and Richard Feynman.

It sounds like science fiction, doesn’t it? Seriously cool–and slightly creepy. Imagine this kind of thing being introduced into humans via gene therapy!

I also found this paper on using cryptanalytic techniques to predict introns and exons. Sadly, that was all I could find. Perhaps it is not a fruitful avenue of research. Or perhaps it is just new and/or obscure. Time will tell.