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Of Genes and Genomes
Author(s) -
BOTSTEIN DAVID
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
annals of the new york academy of sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.712
H-Index - 248
eISSN - 1749-6632
pISSN - 0077-8923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1999.tb08531.x
Subject(s) - citation , annals , library science , classics , computer science , history
Nancy Wexler’s presentation gives a clear impression of what motivates researchers to find out what genes do, especially in humans. I’ll give you the nuts and bolts of how we learn about genes, how we get and interpret information about our genes, and how the requisite technology led to the Human Genome Project. My view (and I think, now, the general view) is that the Project was the only possible response to the kind of advances in biology that Joseph Goldstein presents in this volume. And I will address my remarks so that they can be appreciated by professors and those that are not—always a difficult task. I will try to boil the subject down to its essence. FIGURE 1 shows you all that you really need to know about DNA: that it is an information carrier and it makes decisions. DNA contains the instructions for which proteins are to be made and the amino acid sequence of these proteins; in other words, it encodes the information that is required to make the proteins. Proteins do the work in biology; to a first approximation—and everything I say here is a first approximation—proteins do everything. There is, of course, a genetic code. It was figured out in the 1960s, and it tells how the sequence of letters in the DNA language (the so-called “bases,” or “nucleotide bases”) is translated into the sequence of amino acids in the proteins. The big insight of our time, arising out of the breaking of the genetic code, is that all living organisms use the same code. This fact makes it possible to express human genes in other