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friend who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology mentioned a guy who religiously dropped by, each Friday afternoon, to borrow her video camera. He'd told her that he was an artist, and he was playing Englebert Humperdinck to E. Coli bacteria and filming the results.

"E. coli? The bacteria that grow in excrement and spoiled hamburgers?" I asked, moderately horrified.

"The very ones," she replied.

I begged her for his phone number. Perhaps he had discovered something really important; instead of just being of the opinion that one's loved one has lousy taste in music, there could exist an impartial gold standard in taste, or scatological standard, as it were. Before you yell at your teen-ager to turn that radio dial, let the microorganisms arbitrate.

I didn't expect to stumble on the clue to immortality at the same time, though.

A few days later, Adam Zaretsky invited me over to the lab where he works under the aegis of Joe Davis, a pioneering bioartist at MIT.

Zaretsky has a cherubic countenance. For some reason, he wore layers of jackets. He calls himself a "fringe artist," working at the border separating transgenics and the popular imagination. As biology becomes a more malleable discipline, he explained, artists are starting to use the tools of science, computers, and DNA to make biological art, such as Eduardo Kac's controversial social commentary made manifest in the glowing green florescence of Alba the bunny, or the pig wings and organ meat that Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr grew in petri dishes at Massachusetts General Hospital's tissue-engineering lab.

Tissue Culture Art

Zaretsky has been playing a variety of music to E. coli at MIT, subjecting the bacteria to musical vibrations for 5-6 day, 48-hour stints to establish the vibrations' influence on antibiotic production. He is testing Englebert Humperdinck's Greatest Hits, using acoustic vibro-transducers from Acouve Laboratory in Tokyo.

Zaretsky is actually using the relatively innocuous K-12 strain of E. Coli that produces an antibiotic that is found naturally in a third of all humans' intestinal flora, not the deadly strains resulting from ugly meat processing shortcuts.

He showed me some paramecium jumping to the beat of Hindi hip hop (Patel Mix). "Perhaps every fermentation vat in the pharmaceutical industry will have its own entertainment system," he mused.

Zaretsky's bio-artwork is motivated by his own set of ethical quandaries prompted by past history. Biology has been used for aesthetic purposes before, of course, to horrifying consequence. "We slide into eugenics," Zaretzky commented. "We haven't always shown the best of taste. Not that artists have always shown better taste, but they have shown obscure taste. If we start engineering for enhanced humans, then somebody has to engineer for 'punk' humans, for plaid humans. What I'm realizing," he says soberly, "is that we are coming close to genetically altering human beings according to popular fads."

"The worst thing, looking forward to genetically altered humans," Zaretsky concludes, "is that kids will grow to adolescence, look at their parents, and ask 'what were you thinking'?"

Zaretsky says that the effects of working with music and microorganisms has influenced him to wash his hands more frequently and furiously than ever.

Wriggle Room

The Japanese believe that playing music during fermentation, or sound ripening, improves the taste of tofu and sake.

There are about 2,000 varieties of rotifera. Known since the invention of the microscope, wheel animalcules, they have an interesting trait; certain classes are only female and reproduce by parthenogenesis.

Another rotifer peculiarity is that they can enter into a state of suspended animation induced by desiccation called cryptobiosis. In dry conditions, they can self-vitrify, turn their insides to glasslike sugars, and last for decades, if not centuries.

Currently, there is no effective method for preserving human tissue for later medical use, and donated organs must be used immediately to avoid deterioration. Perhaps some biological trigger inspired by the lowly rotifer may reveal the secret long-term preservation of human cells, tissues, and organs for transplantation. The ability to store and ship tissue samples would be critical to producing eventual "tissue labs on a chip" for drug discovery purposes. Or, to grow new tissues for artificial organs in vitro, could we stimulate cells with music? Or even, can we find genes that are responsive to music that accelerates cell growth in nonmammalian systems and then transfect these genes into mammalian cells to do the same?

Jabez Hogg, author of the 1854 book, The Microscope: Its History, Construction and Application, marveled at this peculiar talent of rotifers. Portions of the 1885 letter he sent to the London Times are excerpted below.

Crank It Up

The secrets of E.coli's musical mysteries remain classified as of this writing, but the view from his microscope was unsettling enough. Zaretsky placed a droplet of swamp water on a slide containing rotifers, multicelled critters that look like elongated pears with baggy guts and long, curled, scorpionlike tails. He turned the microscope to 100x magnification. I focused on two rotifers. Little rotors of whirring cilia in front and back propelled them along in their search for algae-eating bacteria.

Zaretsky rigged up the speaker and cranked up Red Hot Chili Pepper's Scar Tissue for the rotifers. (This may have been the first recorded scientific use of Napster files.)

The effect of the music was dramatic. The rotifers on the slide contracted and curled their tails in tightly. The rotifer on the left of my field of vision in the microscope threw up. The one on the right evacuated its guts and imploded. Not much different, really, from the mosh pit at a real Chili Pepper's concert.

Zaretsky sighed, "We killed them. Perhaps there is a chance the light did it."

The effect of the Lounge Lizard's Harlem Nocturne on the next slide of rotifers was more benign. They bunched together and sort of waggled. "It looks like they are cuddling over here. One is coming on to the other. Are you sure they are not dancing?" commented Zaretsky.

Was Zaretsky anthropomorphizing? "We are all biological organisms that respond to vibrations," Zaretsky says. "I don't make a distinction between cells, flies, and humans. We are constantly biota-morphising our own behavior and then thinking that this is what makes us peculiarly human. We are the new kids on the block, not them."

He E-mailed me further accounts of rotifer trials. "I did play Igor Stravinsky's The Rites of Spring: A little scrunching for the short blasts of wind instruments. Some hiding of external rotary feeders from the bassoon and kettle drums. The kettle drums in conjunction with wind power chords in particular cause burrowing and suspense-filled nervous activity. Some apparent flopping randomly and holding of each other during the heights of the strings."

I recounted the tale of the rotifers to a tissue-engineering scientist at Harvard the next day. He was amused. "Ever heard of complexity theory?" he asked. "Maybe it was a bifurcation. A little bit of a perturbation to an open system perhaps sent them over the edge of chaos."

A week later I received an E-mail containing a QuickTime movie. (Which you can watch, too.) I opened it to hear pop artist Englebert Humperdinck crooning, "On the day that you were born the angels got together, and decided to create a dream come true." The film was a bit grainy, but there on my screen was a rotifer, undulating gracefully to the Humperdinck Effect.