From the President of the IJJF
Almost exactly three years ago, at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute issued a challenge. As a mathematical biologist working on the possibilities of encoding information in strings of DNA, Nick hid a single Bitcoin in a string of DNA and he challenged the scientific community to find the coin: the reward was the Bitcoin itself, then worth $200. Just one week before the three-year deadline expired, Sander Wuyts, an Antwerp bio-engineering student decrypted the DNA and downloaded the Bitcoin, now worth $10.000.
But that was not all: Sander also found a drawing of James Joyce by the Antwerp artist Bruneau, which turned out to have been taken from the Antwerp James Joyce Center’s website at his own university. Nick Goldman had put it there as an extra, in tribute to his father’s work: Arnold Goldman is, among many other things, the author of The Joyce Paradox and, more recently, of a number of essays in Joyce Studies Annual.
From Antwerp by a commodious vicus of recirculation, through art and genetics, to Antwerp. See you all at the Symposium in June. In Antwerp.