Joe Davis spent most of his early life in the American Deep South. He joined MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies as a Research Fellow and was appointed Lecturer in Architecture.
He created the first genetically-engineered work of art and organised the most powerful radar signals for extraterrestrial intelligence ever transmitted.
He joined the laboratory of Alexander Rich at MIT where he has founded new fields in art and biology.
His “DNA programming languages” for inserting poetic texts and graphics into living organisms are cited in scientific literature.
Davis transmitted the gene for the most abundant protein on Earth from Arecibo Radar in Puerto Rico to three sun-like stars.
In 2010, he joined the laboratory of George Church at Harvard where he is designated “Artist Scientist”.
He also organised an international consortium to sequence the genome of the ancestor of all domestic apples and later, to contain a version of Wikipedia in that same genome.