The signature of Star Trek founder Gene Roddenberry was converted into an NFT and placed in the DNA of a living bacterium cell. Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek: The Original Series premiered in 1966. Since then, Star Trek has become one of the world’s most recognizable Science Fiction franchises.
Star Trek’s success story began with a financial deal between Roddenberry and Desilu Productions. Roddenberry’s signature has now been transformed into an NFT, unveiled during Miami’s Art Basel 2021. “El Primero” – Spanish for “The First” – is the work’s title.
It wouldn’t be a Gene Roddenberry NFT without a sci-fi twist, of course. To produce the first “Living Eco-NFT,” the NFT was encoded into the DNA of a bacteria. This also implies that the NFT spreads when the bacterium repeats itself.
The concept of utilizing DNA for digital data storage goes back to 1959, but its actual use has been restricted thus far. Scientists could encode 16 GB of data from the English Wikipedia onto synthetic DNA in 2019.
Visitors at the World Economic Forum’s annual Davos summit in 2015 were given DNA tubes with the encoded private key for one Bitcoin. A Belgian Ph.D. student decoded the key and recovered the Bitcoin three years later.
El Primero was developed by Roddenberry Entertainment in collaboration with Rational Vaccines, Inc., the CEO of which, Agustin Fernandez, stated:
Storing information in DNA represents a whole new category of possibility when it comes to data archiving. It provides sustainable, environmentally-friendly storage with exponentially larger capacities than anything the market currently has to offer, as evidenced by the billions of copies of our Eco-NFT in such a small amount of bacteria.
Trevor Roth, COO of Roddenberry Entertainment, also touched on the futuristic relationship between Roddenberry’s work and technology:
Going where no one has gone before is part of Roddenberry Entertainment’s DNA. To be able to responsibly do so, in such a unique fashion, during the year of Gene’s Centennial celebration, is beyond exciting. Like Star Trek, it speaks to the world around us, acknowledging today’s constant convergence of life and technology.
