© SHANNON MAY
In the late 1970s, a bizarre theory began making its way around the scientific community. DNA sequencing pioneer Frederick Sanger of the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology and his colleagues had just published their landmark paper on the genome of virus Phi X174 (or φX174), a well-studied bacteriophage found in E. coli.1 That genome, some said in the excitement that followed, contained a message from aliens.
In what they termed a “preliminary effort. . . to investigate whether or not phage φX174 DNA carries a message from an advanced society,” Japanese researchers Hiromitsu Yokoo and Tairo Oshima explored some of the reasons extraterrestrials might choose to communicate with humans via a DNA code.2 DNA is durable, the authors noted in their 1979 article, ...
