We Call DNA a Language. Is It?
By Luke Shors,
Neo.Life
| 12. 10. 2020
Fifty years before we solved it, long before its information began filling scientific headlines and pharmaceutical shelves, and even before we understood the basic fact that DNA is a double helix, the human genome was being framed as a type of language. In 1952, the physicist Edwin Schrödinger turned an eye towards biology. He was already famous for his work in quantum mechanics, including postulating his famous eponymous cat, which sat alone in a box, both alive and dead, until you looked inside the box to see if it was one or the other. He was influential in biology as well, postulating that there must be a code script contained in DNA bases connected by covalent bonds that was capable of transmitting heredity information.
From the very beginning of our nearly 75-year love affair with this gooey substance, DNA was discussed as a language. And if DNA was the language, then the genome was the book—not just a container, but a manual. DNA began to be called the language of life, and many thought if we could read it...
Related Articles
By Fyodor Urnov, Time | 08.12.2024
After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides...
By Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 08.12.2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos...
By Gemma Conroy, Nature | 06.27.2024
Image by Robina Weermeijer from Unsplash
A molecular-editing tool that’s small enough to be delivered to the brain shuts down the production of proteins that cause prion diseases, a rare but deadly group of neurodegenerative disorders.
The system — known...
By Staff, AP-NORC | 07.12.2024
Image by Dr. Jayesh Amin from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by-SA 3.0
Most adults support protecting access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a type of fertility treatment where eggs are combined with sperm outside the body in a...