Davis' living artwork won't be as revelatory as the biblical tree, though. The bacteria can only hold a few thousand words, while Wikipedia has roughly 2.5 billion; it will take a large grove to hold the entire database. You probably also won't get to take a bite, since there are tough US regulations on genetically modified plants. Even so, it should be an impressive feat if everything goes as planned -- and it could serve as a proof of concept for other, more practical uses of genes as storage systems.

[Image credit: Sami Keinanen, Flickr]