Randall Munroe, the polymath behind popular webcomic XKCD, is here with a reality check for everyone (myself emphatically included) guilty of trumping up the biotech revolution.
You know the rhetoric—DNA is just the alphabet of life, genes are just words, and now that we’ve figured out the language it’s time to start writing the next great biological novel! Or, if zeroes and ones are more your speed: “DNA is the source code.” So says Munroe’s stand-in for the slightly smug technophile who is sure “biology is largely solved” and that we can just read and rewrite it like any other coding language. Not so fast.
For folks who, like me, are coding neophytes, let’s elaborate a bit on the point about optimization; let’s go back to the literature metaphors. Think of DNA as a constantly edited manuscript. The vast majority of evolution is limited to working from the same document it started with. It can add to it, cross things out, rearrange the pieces, scribble notes in the margins, but there is no “undo” button. (To be fair, every now and then, mutation will introduce bits of totally fresh material—but it’s a total crapshoot. Like a cat periodically trotting across the keyboard.)
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