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.
