Glory, mystery of the genome

Glory, mystery of the genome

Photo by Elia Pellegrini on Unsplash

Originally published 6 March 2001

The sequenc­ing of the human genome is an epic mile­stone in human intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry. You will hear it com­pared to the build­ing of the atom­ic bomb, or putting a man on the moon. It is more, much more.

It is an end and a beginning.

It is the end of the reign of the gods. No one knows yet what is beginning.

I have just fin­ished read­ing Ani­ta Dia­man­t’s The Red Tent, a beau­ti­ful retelling of the bib­li­cal sto­ry of Jacob and his wives and chil­dren from the point of view of Jacob’s only daugh­ter, Dinah. The nov­el vivid­ly evokes the peo­ple of 4,000 years ago — farm­ers, herds­men, city builders — who invent­ed the sto­ries by which we in the West­ern world have pret­ty much mea­sured our lives ever since.

The gods are every­where in Dia­man­t’s sto­ry. In every tree and stream. In moon, sun, and stars. In men­stru­al blood and spin­dle. In the waters that nour­ish the plant­ed seed and the drought that with­ers the nan­ny goat’s teats. Dinah learns the sto­ries of the gods in the wom­an’s tent — the red tent — as they are told and retold by her moth­er and aunts.

Jacob and his clan live in con­stant nego­ti­a­tion with the gods, through prayer and sac­ri­fice. Behind the world of their dai­ly lives is a shad­ow world of spir­its with human faces, or semi-human faces, who act with human will­ful­ness, rais­ing up and strik­ing down, impos­ing out­ra­geous demands, bestow­ing blessings.

Of course, by Jacob’s time the gods were already old. They were born in the minds of our ear­li­est human ances­tors, who, find­ing them­selves in an uncer­tain world, cre­at­ed a mea­sure of order by imag­in­ing unseen spir­its with human features.

Even as our new mil­len­ni­um begins, the gods still haunt our imag­i­na­tions, invest­ing the world with pre­sumed con­scious­ness and will. Polls show that 80 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe in mir­a­cles; near­ly three-quar­ters believe in angels.

And now, in oppo­si­tion to the gods, we have the genome.

A dou­ble helix, as long as your arm, tucked into every cell in your body. A sequence of 3 bil­lion chem­i­cal “let­ters” (mol­e­cules called nucleotides) — A, G, C, T — that code three-by-three for amino acids that link togeth­er and fold into the pro­teins that make our bod­ies (and minds) work. Print out the sequence of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts and it would fill a dozen sets of the Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­ni­ca; it is now avail­able at a mouse click on the Inter­net. That sequence of just four kinds of mol­e­cules caus­es to hap­pen, in a mar­velous and still uncer­tain way, the “mir­a­cle” of the new­born babe: the tiny per­fect fin­gers and toes, the lash­es, the wisps of hair, the bawl of life.

All that DNA, packed into those tens of tril­lions of cells, is not sta­t­ic. Pro­tein-based “motors” crawl along the strands of DNA, tran­scrib­ing the code into sin­gle-strand RNA mol­e­cules, which in turn pro­vide the tem­plates for build­ing the pro­teins that build and main­tain our bod­ies. Oth­er pro­teins help pack DNA neat­ly into the nuclei of cells and main­tain the tidy chro­mo­some struc­tures. Still oth­er pro­tein-based “motors” are busi­ly at work unty­ing knots that form in DNA as it is unpacked in the nucle­us and copied dur­ing cell divi­sion. Oth­ers are in charge of qual­i­ty con­trol, check­ing for accu­ra­cy and repair­ing errors.

Work­ing, spin­ning, cease­less­ly weav­ing, wind­ing, unwind­ing, patch­ing, repair­ing — each cell is like a bustling fac­to­ry of a thou­sand work­ers. Tril­lions of cells hum­ming with the busi­ness of life.

Not gods, but biochemistry.

But make no mis­take: The mys­tery of life is not less­ened by the sequenc­ing of the genome. If any­thing, it is deep­ened. What we have dis­cov­ered is not a shad­ow world of human­like spir­its, which are, after all, rather famil­iar and com­fort­ing, but rather an elu­sive and enig­mat­ic fire that burns in the very stuff of cre­ation. The fire does not have a human face, but it ani­mates the plan­et and per­haps the universe.

How will we come to terms with this new knowl­edge? In Dia­man­t’s The Red Tent, Jacob decides to return to the land of his ances­tors, from which he has lived (and mar­ried) in exile. His wives are fear­ful. Zil­pah says to the oth­er women: “All of [our] named gods abide here. This is the place where we are known, where we know how to serve. It will be death to leave. I know it.”

And Bil­hah answers: “Every place has its holy names, its trees and high places. There will be gods where we go.”

We are no less fear­ful than Jacob’s wives of leav­ing the famil­iar, and no less aware of an essen­tial mys­tery that abides in the world. What­ev­er Mys­tery we meet in the land of the genome will not greet us with a human face; it will not act will­ful­ly, but it can­not fail to inspire awe and rev­er­ence, fear and trem­bling, thanks­giv­ing and praise.

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