The Gene: An Intimate History

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

genotype + environment + triggers + chance = phenotype

Life may be chemistry, but it’s a special circumstance of chemistry. Organisms exist not because of reactions that are possible, but because of reactions that are barely possible. Too much reactivity and we would spontaneously combust. Too little, and we would turn cold and die.

Check out this quote.

A worm was thus constructed from two kinds of inputs—“intrinsic” inputs from genes, and “extrinsic” inputs from cell-cell interactions. Jokingly, Brenner called it the “British model” versus the “American model.” The British way, Brenner wrote, “is for cells to do their own thing and not to talk to their neighbors very much. Ancestry is what counts, and once a cell is born in a certain place it will stay there and develop according to rigid rules. The American way is quite the opposite. Ancestry does not count. . . . What counts is the interactions with its neighbors. It frequently exchanges information with its fellow cells and often has to move to accomplish its goals and find its proper place.”

It is not so simple anymore. Sadly.

“It is not what you have,” as a certain Brazilian samba instructor once told me, “it is what you do with it.”

:-)

Plasmids and enzymes shuttled between UCSF and Stanford, up and down Highway 101, on a Volkswagen Beetle driven by a research assistant from Boyer’s lab.

Beetle. :D

Sydney Brenner later joked that the sequencing of the human genome would perhaps ultimately be limited not by cost or technology, but only by the severe monotony of its labor. Perhaps, he speculated, genome sequencing should be doled out as a punishment to criminals and convicts—1 million bases for robbery, 2 million for homicide, 10 million for murder.