Not an Inkling: There’s more to life than DNA
Jerry Coyne, 27 April 2000
As I write, machines around the world are chewing up human chromosomes and spitting out the raw DNA sequence at an astounding rate of 5 billion bases a year. The four nucleotides that make up the sequence of DNA – adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine – are represented by their initial letters, A, G, C, T. If we take each of these as equivalent to a letter of the alphabet, the machines are producing text roughly as long as 18 copies of The Origin of Species a day. By the time you read this, the project will be nearly done, though it may take another year to align the bits of sequence and fill in the gaps.