It all
began on a quiet Thursday afternoon, October 13th, 2022. Out of the blue,
Marcello Barbieri wrote to ask for my opinion on a curious list — fifty
biological codes, each hyperlinked to papers, websites, and forum discussions.
Some entries fit perfectly into Barbieri’s concept of organic or neural codes;
others, less so. Still, the list had something intriguing about it — a map of
hidden meanings in biology waiting to be explored.
At first
glance, it was clear that just having a list of names wasn’t enough. To make
sense of it all, I decided to bring order and structure. I opened a new Word
document, created a table, and began describing each code in broader terms
while trying to classify them meaningfully.
Soon, I
realized my own archive was full of references to codes that had never been
formally catalogued. I began the real treasure hunt — digging into decades of
literature, looking for traces of biological codes scattered across articles
and reviews. Many were hard to locate or prove as “codes” in the theoretical
sense, but the search itself felt like uncovering fossils of forgotten
concepts.
Marcello
suggested a sharper focus: limit the search to papers that included the word
“code” in the title and were clearly related to biology. That criterion, though
restrictive, gave the project direction. Surprisingly, this “title-only”
strategy didn’t reveal many new codes but instead confirmed and deepened what
we already knew. Traditional “snowballing” through citations led mostly in
circles.
Still, I
couldn’t shake the feeling that the literature hid many more codes. I turned to
PubMed and Google Scholar — again restricting my search to titles and combining
“code” with different biological terms. The first results were overwhelming:
tens of thousands of papers about the genetic code dominated, followed by even
more on medical ICD codes. The noise was immense, but slowly, real patterns
began to emerge.
Over the
following months, the list grew steadily. Each new term revealed another layer
of biology’s symbolic dimension. Marcello was thrilled — as was I — to see how
many distinct codes had gone unnoticed for so long.
Since we
published the list on the Code Biology website, researchers from all over have
reached out with suggestions, corrections, and entirely new examples. Every
contribution — even a single code — adds value to this ever-evolving catalogue
of biological meaning.
Today, the
list has grown to nearly 280 biological codes — likely just the tip of the
iceberg. Our next challenge is scale. Manual searching is no longer
sustainable, so we’re exploring ways to automate code discovery — not just in
scientific publications but across biological databases themselves.
The project
remains open and collaborative. If you’re a researcher, data scientist, or AI
enthusiast interested in uncovering the hidden “codes of life,” we’d love for
you to join us. The language of biology is still being written — one code at a
time.
Robert
Prinz, December 2025