Team:HZAU-China/Humanities/semiotics

Rediscovering iGEM in the Context of Runic Alphabets

Li Fuyao, College of Economics and Management, HZAU

1. Motivation

Symbols compose of our ideological world. Some are necessities of our daily life, such as characters---symbols of meaning, bills---symbols of money, musical notes---symbols of sound, [1]etc. Symbols are what we give them meaning to, but many things can also be given new meaning back if put into the context of a certain symbol system.

The Elder Futhark is the oldest form of runic language in the Nordic area, it is both a lost language and a mature symbol system with 24 characters. [2]Archaeologists of Scandinavia would be familiar with them, for ancient Norse wrote their tablets and stones under this symbol system. [3]After the second world war, few spoke of runes in the western world for their link to the Nazis' abusive use of them to design their infamous logo. [4]Nowadays, among the more serious study of this language is the Futhark journal, which is dedicated to the study of runic symbols, glyph, linguistic and archaeology;[5] however, with the "New Age" movement,[6] runes has been somewhat revived and become a pop culture among a certain group of westerners, its meanings are no longer a privilege, though much of what they preach still lack sufficient support from the scientific side, and only immeasurable empirical evidence exist. Sadly no one speaks of it in serious places today, so this part is attached to our project as a recreational reading.

Figure 1: The Elder Futhark. Source:http://www.sunnyway.com/runes/meanings.html

Runic language was employed by the ancient Nordic people to write scripts of law, rules, epitaphs, and things of great significance and weight.[7] Though the symbol system was invented by them and given meaning to by them in the first place, they nonetheless believed that using it would bestow new meaning back upon the words they are writing. I found this act interesting, and experimented it on various other places, starting from iGEM, initials of the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition, curious as to what new meaning it possibly speaks of it that I hadn't realized.

2. Method

The method is fairly simple, just find the four letters equivalent of I, G, E, M in the Elder Futhark, which are Isa, Gebo, Ehwaz, Mannaz. I find these four letters describe the properties of iGEM competition perfectly.

Starting from Isa. Isa means ice, winter, immobility, isolation, but also the same ice that have the possibilities of life hidden under it. Gebo in shape makes one think of the X chromosome, and in meaning it roughly means exchange, a gift given and harmony, sometimes between different genders. Ehwaz stands for horse and loyalty, in the sense a horse is loyal and bonded to his master. Also movement, vehicle, dual advancement. Mannaz stands for mankind, humanity, community, and all their indications. These are the basic meanings of these four runes. For more information on the whole set of meanings of each rune, see reference[8].

We find that the four letters perfectly describes the development process of iGEM. If read from left to right as is done by us, we obtain the following sets of interpretation:

2.1 iGEM History

The four letters tell the history of iGEM, and reveals its goal.

i, Isa At the beginning there is ice, under which the tiny spark of synthetic biology dwelled. It symbolised for the general starting environment of iGEM, and implied the would-be continued frozen state or slow development should synthetic biologists insist on working isolated and alone.

G,Gebo Then exchange happened. Biobricks were shared, and Registry was built, teams were formed and were exchanging biobricks. Gebo stands for the iGEM philosophy, standardization and exchange.

E,Ehwaz And it was advancing quickly, the scale of iGEM was expanding.

M,Mannaz Ultimately, iGEM will become a big community, where men from many walks of life will be involved.

 

Figure 2. iGEM history, read from left to right

2.2 iGEM Contents

The four letters tell the history of iGEM, and reveals its goal.

i, Isa Isa, "ice", stands for the frozen state and possibilities that life could be. Since it's place is at the beginning and an underlying chronological order is always possible in interpretations like this, it's a starting point. Again, it could also be interpreted as the static evolutionary state of organisms before human intervention.

G,Gebo Gebo, "(the exchange) of gift", describes the cut-and-paste method iGEMers employ, and symbolises for the exchange of genes between organisms. It's a perfect translation, there isn't another letter in the whole futhark that can describe the deeds of bio-engineers better.

E,Ehwaz Ehwaz, "the horse", is the hopeful result iGEMers strive to achieve, the new biobrick, part, organism. Ehwaz means binding without sacrifice, a mutual advancement.[9] "Horse", its original meaning, symbolises for the donor organism; ``it's master'', is the chassis. Combining dualities, iGEMers hope they can work in harmony, and move along together as a new entity. Also, I found no other letter can better describes the property of the engineered organism like Ehwaz.

M,Mannaz Mannaz, "mankind", symbolises the social and ethical concerns of iGEM. It indicates that iGEM puts its deeds into the context of humanity. It does not want to be ``the blind scientist'', and it cares about the welfare of human, society, and it can be seen from the increasing collaboration of scientists and artists, social scientists, designers, etc, such as the aesthetic workshop iGEM initiated in 2010.[10] Or another example, a project launched in Hastings Center, 2009, to explore bio-ethical issues on synthetic biology, which "was carried out by an interdisciplinary working group including synthetic biologists, philosophers, social scientists, public policy experts, and theologians." [11]

3. A Peep into iGEM's Hidden Nature, or Future

Bindrune means combining two or more runes together to form a new rune.Bindrunes give rise to new meanings to the new entity formed, such as its hidden traits, its aspiration, its goal, etc. These are possible because in the crossings of lines, new runes may occur. To make a bindrune, you try to combine two runes together by trying out various ways to "ligate" them. And two runes can make more than one bindrune depending on the way you ligate them. I'm not a rune master, but trying out sometimes is fascinating.

We've all seen one or two examples of bindrunes in our daily life: the logo of the Bluetooth is the bindrune of Hagalaz and Berkana according to wikipedia,[12] but personally I think it is Gebo and Berkana, which makes more sense. It doesn't use the elder futhark, but another set of runic alphabets with some slight mutation in form, and that's not what we're going to discuss here.

I tried to make a bindrune of iGEM to see what was the results. And to my astonishment, I found the simplest and most elegant form of the potential bindrunes to be an already existed rune, and none other but Mannaz! Can bindrunes even work like this? Pitifully there are no rune teachers anywhere around here in China to ask.

The bind rune should reveal not only the contents already shown by the four letters, but is supposed to reveal more. In the case of iGEM, it's "M", Mannaz, mankind. The rune Mannaz is composed of two Isa, one Gebo, one Ehwaz, and one Uruz, one Dagaz.

Mannaz as the combination of the four contents, who'd have thought! I mean, could it be just an accident? Human kind? What does it ultimately have to do with human kind other than a small branch called "human practice"? But then again, synthetic biology, especially the iGEM synthetic biologists, do seem to adopt a very humanistic attitude, and synthetic biology is ultimately made by human and made for human.

The new runes, Uruz, "ox", and Dagaz, "day", respectively symbolises for life force and breakthrough.[13]

So far for the interpretation; I don't want to make any silly prophets by drawing a close-ended conclusion. I have lain the materials, the rest are for the reader to synthesize.

4. A Comprehensive Description of Our Project.

The front pattern of our team uniform is composed of the four letters of iGEM, and by drawing them with a bit of mutation in shape, we get a pattern that also describes our project well.In our project we designed rewirable circuits, it's a system that consists of three parts, the input device, the information processing device, and the output device. In the input device we used the recombinase system, in the processing device the main idea is rewiring the gene regulatory relationship of network motifs, and in the output device we utilised different fluorescence to see if the rewiring is successful.

Figure 3. iGEM, Elder Futhark, and our project. (And thanks to our team artist Liu Chang for producing!)

Input Device, G "G" is designed to be the input device, drawn as a recombinase. The right side of the enzyme is a natural shape of Kenaz, symbolise the torch, the creative fire, the catalysis of change, it connects the touching point that is at the center of "E" and "M".

Processing Device, E,M "E" and "M" are looked at together, for the processing device will need at least two parts to be. They are designed to be the shape of two four-node network motifs drawn in Uri Alon's book Systems Biology. In our project, our team members noticed the similar structures between motifs, and utilised this similarity to design our rewirable circuits. Notice that the Kenaz shape in the recombinase is at the center of the two motifs, it means that it's the recombinase that catalyze for the transition from one motif to another.

Output Device, I "I" is drawn to be the output device, we draw it to be a shape of bottle that contain the bacterium. Different colors of fluorescence will show different state of the processing device.

We didn't use the shape of Gebo, letter G, in this pattern. Instead we substituted it with C, Kenaz, which is more fit in shape, and fits in better with our project specifically.

4. Discussions

Of course, this method is quite clumsy and flawed if you look at it that way. But it's fun, isn't it? Besides, I happened to notice that the Campus Magazine of Art and Literature of MIT is called Runes.[14] Oh, how curious.

We also made a careful comparison to make sure the result is not a strain interpretation or far-fetched, that no other four letters could better describe iGEM as these four could. So, although we cannot prove it's right, we can't prove it wrong, either.

But what if iGEM changes its name to International Synthetic Biology Competition? Then its initials would be iSB, with Isa, Sowilo, Berkana, and I wonder what that would be. If so, many iGEM-unique features and flavors would be lost. Other combinations may yield other meanings, but we do think that the name iGEM is the best name for this endeavor we've all been taking on, for the moment we count it as a word, we are assigning meaning to it.

Have fun!

Reference

[1] Semiotics.http://www.semioticsigns.com/

[2] What is runology and where does it stand today? Michael P. Barnes. http://www.khm.uio.no/english/research/publications/7th-symposium-preprints/barnes.pdf

[3]The first writing: Script invention as history and process[M]. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

[4]Levenda P. Unholy alliance: A history of Nazi involvement with the occult[M]. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002.

[5]The Futhark Journal. http://www.futhark-journal.com/about/

[6]Heelas P. The new age movement[M]. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

[7]Thorsson E. Futhark: A Handbook of Rune Magic[M]. Weiser Books, 2012.

[8]Rune Introduction. http://www.sunnyway.com/runes/meanings.html

[9] Runic Physics. Robert Blumetti. http://www.vrilology.org/runic_physics.htm

[10]Synthetic Aesthetic, neww and event. http://www.syntheticaesthetics.org/news-events

[11]Ethical Issues in Synthetic Biology, Project launched in January 2009, The Hastings Center, http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Research/Archive.aspx?id=1548

[12]Bindrune. wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bind_rune

[13]Rune Introduction. http://www.sunnyway.com/runes/meanings.html

[14]Rune, MIT's Art and Literature Journal.http://runemag.mit.edu/