Wednesday, May 01, 2013

DNA at 60


DNA at 60: Still Much to Learn

On the diamond jubilee of the double helix, we should admit that we don't fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level

DNA

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Yikrazuul
This week's diamond jubilee of the discovery of DNA's molecular structure rightly celebrates how Francis Crick, James Watson and their collaborators launched the 'genomic age' by revealing how hereditary information is encoded in the double helix. Yet the conventional narrative — in which their 1953 Nature paper led inexorably to the Human Genome Project and the dawn of personalized medicine — is as misleading as the popular narrative of gene function itself, in which the DNA sequence is translated into proteins and ultimately into an organism's observable characteristics, or phenotype./.../

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