More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The broken gene, known as GULO, codes for an enzyme that is responsible for a key step in the manufacture of vitamin C. Somewhere in the ancestors of primates, the GULO gene suffered a mutation, rendering it inoperable, and then random mutation continued, littering the gene with tiny errors. As if to mock the uselessness of pieces of DNA like this, scientists call them pseudogenes.
We can still easily recognize the GULO gene in the human genome. It’s there, and the vast majority of the code is the same as in other animals, but there are a few key parts that have been mutated. It’s as if you removed the spark plug from a car. It’s still a car. You can easily see that it is still a car. In fact, you would have to look very carefully to find anything wrong with it at all. But it cannot function as a car, not even slightly.
Nice but slightly inaccurate description of a pseudogene.
These statements seem so obvious that we often forget how paradoxical they are. Shouldn’t young people, with their whole lives ahead of them, be more careful when operating the deadliest machine most of them will ever come in contact with? And shouldn’t old people, with such precious little time left, want to get places quickly?
Add to these dangers the very good chance that a pandemic could strike at any point. Humans now exist in such density that infectious diseases spread like wildfire. When we add to this the ease of global travel, a doomsday scenario is not hard to imagine.
Quite prescient!
In 2012, the massive genome-exploring project called ENCODE made a big splash by claiming that up to 80 percent of the human genome was functional. This claim has been soundly refuted, owing partially to methodological concerns but mostly to researchers’ unscientific criteria for declaring a part of the genome functional. This has led many scientists to revisit and defend the use of the term junk to describe nonfunctional DNA.
