The Magic Gene
Recently, around 2000AD, Science completed the mapping of the Human Genome. The pharmaceutical companies were very disappointed – they’d held the view that when the genes were counted, they’d have the chance to create medicines for individuals, but that was based on there being way more than 100,000 genes that make a human – there isn’t. There are a little over 23,500 of them.
That may sound like a lot but it isn’t, not for something as complex and intricately intertwined as the mechanisms of the human body. There’s not a lot of difference between a mouse and a human and we even share a lot of the same genes.
So there’s a bit of a mystery about the human genome. It just isn’t complex enough, the genes get turned on and off instead of being relatively set at conception as was first thought and very small differences in the pattern can produce vastly different effects. Even identical gene sets (identical twins) can have radically different outcomes.
I’ve mentioned before about how most people think of DNA as the brains of the cell, but it simply isn’t so. As we’ve learned more about the workings of a cell, it has become apparent the cell is a response system – something tells it what to do & it performs a task.
And now we have a gene issue as well. Genes simply don’t seem able to produce the interwoven complexities of a human. And we see the same gene in different people and even different animals performing different functions, or, as it is termed, being ‘expressed’ differently.
Are genes magic? Do they have an ability to do different things based on their own decisions? Dawson Church brings together a wide range of information that says, rather emphatically, No.
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