LIKE a lot of graffiti, it is unintelligible to the majority of people.
Unlike most graffiti, the white paint daubed on the streets of Cambridge is a complex molecular formula which forms one of the four constituent parts of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.
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Even more inexplicably, the artist has written “Phospholipase”, an unrelated enzyme, over the top of the formula. The better class of street art was discovered outside the Cavendish Laboratory where James Watson and Francis Crick unravelled DNA in 1953. It has left police baffled and academics irritated that the culprit chose to use such a contracted version of the formula.
While resembling an undergraduate prank, it happened a month before students return for the new year. So suspicion has fallen upon postgraduates, who have returned early. The university has long had a problem with graffiti. Last week a man was arrested after scrawling his own name on the station wall.
But some in the Cambridge science fraternity believe that the culprit has been only marginally more clever, as the specialised nature of the scrawls means the field of suspects is narrow.
“The graffiti is of a molecule called guanine. There is a picture of it (the molecule) on the chemistry department web page,” said Jonathan Goodman, a lecturer in the chemistry department.
“It is one of the structures, or bases, which make up DNA; one of the four which Watson and Crick realised could fit together to form DNA in 1953 in the Old Cavendish.
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“Phospholipase C is an enzyme which many people are studying.”
Alan Dawson, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, added: “It is a really nice bit of standard first or second-year biochemistry but what it is doing on a Cambridge road is a bit of a mystery, particularly as it is so abbreviated.”
Last month police in Cambridge said they would operate a “zero tolerance” approach to graffiti. A spokeswoman for Cambridgeshire police said: “The graffiti may be very clever but it is criminal damage and someone will have to clean it off.”