When I was still commuting into Newcastle by train, I was drawn into a lengthy debate with geneticists from the Centre for Life who regularly used the same service.
(slide talking) … making angels I was never sure what kind of spaces such things would occupy.
They told me that a sizeable segment of the genome is inactive, it does not perform a task, it seems to achieve nothing.
However, in their account, these ‘non-coding’ elements were not simply the junk-like residue of past DNA activity.
Rather, their inertness could well be the reason we have an active biological code at all.
On the principle that you can’t have a signal without ‘noise’, junk DNA may be what holds the message in place.
This story prompted a video, trainslidingtalk (first shown in Extraordinary Renditions, Baltic, 2013) and an essay, The train starts – it stops – it starts again (published in Christine Borland’s catalogue I Say Nothing, 2018).
My encounter with these scientists was, like all my stories, just another engagement with the aloof materiality of museums.
