This statement is a reflection by artist Anna Dumitriu on her residency with biochemist Robert K. Neely at the University of Birmingham, which led to the creation of The Chemistry of Biology: An Alchemy of DNA , a sculptural and bio-digital installation that premiered at Birmingham Open Media in October 2017. Their project explored the chemical nature of DNA, the enigmatic “instruction book of life” through new super-resolution laser imaging technologies using fluorescent molecules, enabling them to physically observe a region of DNA containing a scarless CRISPR edit to a bacterial genome, building on an earlier project, Make Do and Mend .