Although it is very similar to a natural bacterium from which it was largely copied, the creators put distinctive strings of DNA into its genome to prove that it is not a natural object. These strings spell out, in code, a Web site address, the names of the researchers, and apt quotations, such as Richard Feynman’s “What I cannot build, I cannot understand.”
这个被昵称为“辛西娅（Synthia，意为‘人造人’）”的细菌拥有复制和制造蛋白质的能力。不管用何种定义，这都是一个活生生的东西。虽然这个细菌的绝大部分结构都是复制自另一个天然细菌，但创造者向其基因组中嵌入了一组特别的DNA序列来证明它不是一个自然产物。把这些基因序列转译成字符编码之后就是几位研究者的名字，还有一些诸如理查德·费曼所说的“只有我理解不了的东西，没有我造不出来的东西”之类的名言。