When Craig Venter, the scientist-businessman whose Maryland laboratory recently "created" artificial life, decided to "watermark" the DNA sequence he had artificially inserted into a living bacterium cell, it was to James Joyce that he turned.
Besides humorously including an e-mail address in the DNA sequence, the geneticists spliced a famous quotation from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!"
However, I suspect that if we are to begin to grasp the implications of Mr Venter's enterprise - what it says about our socio-cultural form of life - it is not to the high literature penned by Joyce that we should turn but to the middle-brow science fiction of the Italian writer Primo Levi (1919-1987).
Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, would have probably personally identified with the bacterium's watermark. It is not just that he never hid his concentration camp number. He wrote, of Paul Celan's renowned poem about the camps, Death Fugue: "I wear it inside me like a graft."
Importantly, however, the link goes beyond autobiography. Years after the war, Levi published a story called Man's Friend.
The protagonist is a tapeworm, the patterned arrangement of whose cells is deciphered, fortuitously, by a professor of Assyriology, who demonstrates a rhyming scheme out of the "mosaics". The more evolved mosaics display a notion of sin and, indeed, they read like a psalm of contrition addressed to the "righteous anger" of the "master" - the human being hosting the worm.
The master of the most eloquent tapeworm turns out to be "an obscure bank clerk in Dempster (Illinois)", utterly indifferent to the worm's supplications.
For Levi, the tragi-comic idea of a literary graft onto the tissue of a life that can hardly bear it, frames a mythic vision that embraces the Book of Job and the scientific exploration of atomic structure, the cutting satires of Swift and the moral philosophy of the Latin poet Lucretius (who wrote of an atomistic Nature, believed the gods were indifferent to human affairs, and denied the existence of an afterlife).
In terms of literary achievement, Levi remains justly best known for his work, crossing the genres of autobiography and fiction, on the death camps. Because of his writing against Fascism, he has often been paired with George Orwell. But it seems to me that the time has come to re-read Levi's science fiction stories, in English published posthumously as The Sixth Day.
The stories were published between 1966 and 1971, when Levi could have had no real inkling of how the communications revolution would completely transform biology. Indeed, it was only some years after Levi's death that Mr Venter was able to show his fellow scientists that decoding the human genome was less about chemistry and more about harnessing vast computational power.
But the Sixth Day stories, which all treat some aspect of human beings taking over God's work, do not attempt to predict the future. They attempt, instead, to delineate the boundaries within which any possible future must lie. In this attempt, Levi got three fundamental things right.
First, he shows that in our age, science is not incarnated by the scientist as eccentric experimenter, periodically blowing up his attic, or evil nationalist genius. The true representative is the scientist-entrepreneur, out to make the first trillion dollars from Nature's chemical codes.
Levi's conception no doubt rose out of his own experience as a chemist working with paint - for a period in a business partnership, later working for industry. His stories presuppose a society in which science is a trade, plying not just mechanical inventions but also filling the market with scientific games and harnessing the energies of biology.
His story, Full Employment, in which bees and dragonflies are almost contracted to carry out work for humans, is not that far from Mr Venter's vision of getting synthetic algae to generate energy and clean up oceans.
Second, Levi captures the spirit of "the hacker ethic" - the passion and curiosity that drives aficionados to crack programmes and devices and adapt them for their own, insufficiently thought-out uses.
Levi's Victor Frankenstein is Gilberto, "a child of the century. He's thirty-four, a good employee... He doesn't drink, he doesn't smoke, and cultivates a single passion: that of tormenting inanimate matter."
No Prometheus, Gilberto enthusiastically hacks an illegal "Mimer" to duplicate his wife and then, when trouble brews between his two identical wives, he duplicates himself and sends the new happy couple out into the world. Duplication is child's play for him and so, it seems, is dealing with the consequences.
Finally, there is the influence of Lucretius. Levi is a fan and does not provide a critical perspective. But since Lucretius has been such an influence, if only indirectly, of media-prominent scientists in our day, Levi's stories help make discernible the mythical thinking that make Lucretius plausible.
We do not need to share Levi's bleak outlook to find him illuminating about our spectacles and predicaments. If this century continues to highlight the importance of the late 19th-century's concern with the dignity of work, thanks to Levi we can see the urgency - in an age where the production of knowledge blurs the boundaries between work and play - of fostering the dignity of play.
Levi casts a clinical eye on the destructive myths of a society for which the injunction "Play hard!" is paradoxically both an imperative and a licence.
And for those of us keenly aware of the role of chance in life and death, but sceptical about the idea that a Roman poet should have already explained it all, Levi poetically indicates the mysteries and foibles that an alternative explanation would have to address.
ranierfsadni@europe.com