The Language of the Genes. Steve Jones

of the production process, but this segment of the genetic alphabet is snipped out of the message before the protein is assembled. This seems an odd way to go about things, but it is the one which evolution has come up with.

      The general picture began to emerge as soon as the mappers began work. In the year 2000 – almost exactly a century after the rediscovery of Mendel’s rules – their labours were, in effect, complete and the whole human gene sequence was laid out in all its tedium before a less than startled world. Three thousand million letters (or, as now it appears, slightly more) is a lot. For accuracy, each section had to be sequenced ten times or more and even at a thousand DNA bases a second (which is what the machinery pumps out) that was not easy. Sixteen centres, in France, Japan, Germany, China, Britain and the United States combined to do the job. Most were funded by governments or charities, with the notorious exception of the Celera Genomics company (their motto: ‘Discovery Can’t Wait!’), whose head defected from a government programme. Advances in technology reduced the original estimate of three billion dollars by ten times which, for a project – described by President Clinton as the most wondrous map ever produced – with far more scientific weight than the Moon landings, was a remarkable bargain. For much of the time, the private and public sectors were at daggers drawn (vividly illustrated by Celera’s description of the director of one public laboratory behaving as if he had been bitten by a rabid dog).