Is There a Message Hidden in Our DNA?

Posted on October 10, 2026

If an intelligent civilization wanted to leave a message that could survive for hundreds of millions of years, where would it put it? Stone erodes. Metal corrodes. But DNA copies itself from one generation to the next.

That question led me somewhere rather far from my usual work in neurology, into genomics, bioinformatics and biology. In 1974, astronomers used the Arecibo radio telescope to transmit a message into space. It consisted of 1,679 binary digits, ones and zeros that could be arranged into a picture containing mathematics, chemistry, a representation of a human being and our solar system.

I asked the reverse question: If an intelligent message had ever been left for us, could it be hidden in our DNA?

Most DNA changes gradually over evolutionary time. But there are extraordinary stretches called ultraconserved elements that have remained virtually unchanged for hundreds of millions of years across very different species.

If someone wanted information written in DNA to survive geological time, these would be among the most logical places to put it.

I did not approach the question assuming that such a message existed. The scientific question was whether an unusual idea that has circulated for decades could be tested rigorously enough to produce a meaningful answer.

So I searched thousands of ultraconserved DNA sequences, including the 481 canonical human ultraconserved elements, for the kinds of patterns an intelligent sender might reasonably use.

The search looked for recognizable text, mathematical constants such as pi, prime numbers and other number sequences, pictures, repeating patterns, periodicity and more general forms of mathematical order. Every simple way of converting the four DNA letters, A, C, G and T, into binary information was tested.

Before trusting the method, I deliberately planted artificial messages into DNA sequences to make sure the analysis could find them.

It could.

Then I ran the same tests on the real DNA.

The result was negative.

No test designed to detect a deliberate message passed the statistical threshold (meaning it returned negative findings). The one pattern that initially looked somewhat picture-like had a much more ordinary explanation: it reflected the familiar three-letter rhythm of protein-coding DNA.

Importantly, this was not simply “we looked and found nothing.” The analysis measured what it was capable of finding. It could reliably detect a short written message, about 25 digits of a mathematical constant, or even a simple picture approximately the size of a small digital icon.

Nothing comparable was present.

That is actually the part of the study I find most interesting.

Science should be willing to ask unusual questions, but it must also be willing to accept a negative answer. A negative result becomes meaningful when we can say exactly what we looked for, how we looked for it, and what our methods were capable of detecting.

The manuscript, “No Evidence of an Embedded Message in Human Ultraconserved DNA: A Bounded Computational Search with Stated Detection Limits,” has been submitted for peer review. I will provide an update after the publication process is complete.

And now I will turn the question around:

If you wanted to leave a message that would still be readable 100 million years from now, where would you put it?

Miguel (Mike) Pappolla

Medical Director @ St. Michael’s Neurology and Pain Medicine | MD

Conceptual illustration linking the 1974 Arecibo message, one of humanity’s best-known attempts to encode information for an extraterrestrial intelligence, with DNA, nature’s long-term information storage system. The study asked whether similarly recognizable information could be detected within ultraconserved regions of the human genome that have remained nearly unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.

Image credit and licensing: Composite illustration created for this post using AI-assisted image generation. The Arecibo message illustration is adapted from work by Arne Nordmann (norro), licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The DNA double-helix image is from the National Human Genome Research Institute, NIH, and is in the public domain. This composite is shared under CC BY-SA 3.0. Changes include composition, scaling, labeling, and integration of the two source images.

#Genomics #Astrobiology #SETI #Bioinformatics #DNA #ScientificMethod #OpenScience