3.THE BIOTECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION – LIFE AS COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY
The completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 provided us for the very first time with insight into what a programmer might call ‘life's machine code’: in other words, the deepest software program layers behind our lives. I found this hugely interesting. But it was not until a few years later, when on holiday I read the book A Life Decoded (2008) by J. Craig Venter, that my interest turned into profound fascination. It must be said that Venter is not just anybody. Deploying revolutionary technologies, this scientist made the greatest contribution to accelerating the decoding of the human genome. What's more, it was his own genome he decoded.
He is also a serial entrepreneur and has given some amazing talks on how we can now accomplish the most incredible things using genes: creating a reproductive virus from pure chemicals; changing a living bacterium from one species to another by replacing its DNA, while it is still alive; etc.
DNA contains the code for creating proteins, which then create everything else in the body. Interestingly, there is a staggering similarity between the DNA of different species. For instance, human DNA is approximately 50% identical to that of a banana (!) and 96% identical to that of a chimpanzee. The individual genetic differences between people are due to pretty minimal differences in our genetic structures.
The work on decoding the genome triggered a revolution in the field of ...
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