Aftershocks of the human
genome announcement rippled through San Francisco all weekend as the annual meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science brought thousands of thinkers here to
mull the surprising fact that humans have only a few more genes than mice.
But to my mind, the most memorable moment in these last few weeks of genetic astonishments
came during an interview with computer scientist Gene Myers at the Maryland headquarters
of Celera Genomics, just a few days before the genome maps were made public.
I reached Rockville exhausted from overnight travel and bug-eyed from poring over the maps
that I had been given in advance. In return I promised to keep the findings hush-hush
while I spent several days interviewing the mapmakers about their findings.
Celera was a frenzy of activity when I arrived. Television crews were shooting interviews.
Phones were ringing off the hook. Myers, pressed for time, grabbed a salad from the
company cafeteria and managed a few mouthfuls in between sound bites. Celera spokeswoman
Heather Kowalski popped in and out of the room where Myers and I met, but paid us little
mind, her nose glued to the pager that inundated her with messages and e-mails.
I mention all this because it is in such settings that people like me--your eyes and
ears--are supposed to plumb the mysteries of our time. In this case, everyone who had seen
the map realized that our gene deficit raised enormous questions: If we had roughly the
same gene count as mammals that never flew across country on the red eye, or took notes on
a steno pad, what interplay of inanimate molecules could possibly explain our complex and
curious selves?
Of course, even obnoxious types like me find it tough to barge in and broach such issues
in the first breath, but as I kept asking questions and Myers slowly finished his salad,
we gradually warmed up to the mystery of how this incredible genetic code came into being.
"We're deliciously complex at the molecular level," Myers said, gesturing with
his fork. "We don't understand ourselves yet, which is cool. There's still a
metaphysical, magical element."
Myers was the guy who put together Celera's genome map. Celera's sequencing machines had
broken the 3 billion chemical letters in a strand of DNA into millions of fragments, each
a few hundred letters each. His software put the fragments back in order just days before
Celera and the leaders of the Human Genome Project shared a stage with former President
Clinton, last June, to say that they knew the sequence of the genome from end to end. Talk
about deadline pressure!
Now, with the pressure off, this former University of Arizona professor waxed
philosophical on the code his team had cracked. "What really astounds me is the
architecture of life," he said. "The system is extremely complex. It's like it
was designed."
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