> I honestly can't tell if this is truly clever, like in the way a skilled poet can combine vocabulary and meter constraints to generate wonderful phrases (Kubla Khan poem being a nice example), or just a mechanical process.
I can't recall if Bök gave details about his methodology, but my guess is that he brute-forced ciphers until he found a suitable one. And he’s quite good at constraint-based (Oulipo) poetry.
> I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?).
The designed protein (Protein 13) is not fluorescent. He’s expressing it as a Protein 13-mCherry[1] fusion construct.
I can't recall if Bök gave details about his methodology, but my guess is that he brute-forced ciphers until he found a suitable one. And he’s quite good at constraint-based (Oulipo) poetry.
> I am also confused how he managed to engineer and predict the folding and functionality of a fluorescent protein (presumably by borrowing a known sequence?).
The designed protein (Protein 13) is not fluorescent. He’s expressing it as a Protein 13-mCherry[1] fusion construct.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCherry