A Message to Us, From Our Genome.

• Author: Sahtouris, Elisabet

The Human Genome Project's completion was greeted by a flurry of media commentary. Although Science and Nature both made original reports available, few of us have the time or expertise to sort through firsthand information. Unfortunately, the media reports often presented difficulties in interpretation. They ranged from accounts of scientists' dismay that our gene count was little higher than that of yeasts, worms and mice, along with confusing talk of "junk," "detritus" and "parasites" in much of our DNA, to a few opinions that the awesome complexity of our DNA indicated the hand of God at work.

What then are we, the public, to believe? And whatever we choose to believe between these extremes, how will it affect our voices with respect to the lucrative new opportunities such projects open up for the genetic "engineering" of our selves and our potential clones and "designer babies"?

Genomic Evolution as an Internet

Perhaps the key comments on the results came directly from Celera, the private team completing the project and reporting in Science, February 16, 2001 that

Taken together the new findings show the human genome to be far more than a mere sequence of biological code written on a twisted strand of DNA. It is a dynamic and vibrant ecosystem of its own, reminiscent of the thriving world of tiny Whos that Dr. Seuss' elephant, Horton, discovered on a speck of dust... In one of the bigger surprises to come Out of the new analysis, some of the "junk" DNA scattered throughout the genome that scientists had written off as genetic detritus apparently plays an important role after all....

What does it mean to discover that our genome is a "dynamic and vibrant ecosystem?" To answer that question, to grok our DNA, we need to go back in evolution to complex systems evolved by archeobacteria billions of years ago, when they alone held title to Earth. We need to understand that their amazing lifestyle diversity was rooted in their ability to trade DNA freely among themselves.

To this day, every bacterium around the planet can trade bits of DNA with any other it can contact, and as microbiologist Lynn Margulis puts it, they do so with all the fervor of traders on the floor of a stock exchange. We have, in fact, been stymied by their ability to alter their genomes in response to our anti-bacterial warfare.

This DNA information exchange begun in ancient times may well be seen as the original Internet. The important thing to understand is that DNA...