The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [25]
In the dogma’s scheme of how life unfolds, DNA perches loftily on top, followed by RNA. RNA is the short-lived Xerox copy of the DNA. As such, it is the physical template encoding the amino acid sequence that makes up a protein’s backbone. The Primacy of DNA diagram provides the logic for the Age of Genetic Determinism. Because the character of a living organism is defined by the nature of its proteins and its proteins are encoded in the DNA, then by logic, DNA would represent the “first cause,” or primary determinant of an organism’s traits.
The Human Genome Project
After DNA achieved superstar status, the remaining challenge was to create a catalog of all the genetic stars in the human firmament. Enter the Human Genome Project, a global, scientific effort begun in the late 1980s to create a catalog of all the genes present in humans.
From the outset, the Human Genome Project was a massively ambitious one. Conventional thought held that the body needed one gene to provide the blueprint for each of the 100,000 plus different proteins that make up our bodies. Add to that at least 20,000 regulatory genes, which orchestrate the activity of the protein-encoding genes. Scientists concluded that the human genome would contain a minimum of 120,000 genes located within the twenty-three pairs of human chromosomes.
But that wasn’t the whole story. A cosmic joke was unfolding, one of those jokes that periodically unsettle scientists convinced they have discovered the secrets of the universe. Consider the impact of Nicolaus Copernicus’ discovery published in 1543 that the Earth was not the center of the universe, as was thought by the scientist-theologians of the day. The fact that the Earth actually revolved around the sun and that the sun itself was not the center of the universe undermined the teachings of the Church. Copernicus’ paradigm-busting discoveries launched the modern, scientific revolution by challenging the presumed “infallibility” of the Church. Science eventually displaced the Church as Western civilization’s source of wisdom for understanding the mysteries of the universe.
Geneticists experienced a comparable shock when, contrary to their expectations of over 120,000 genes, they found that the entire human genome consists of approximately 25,000 genes. (Pennisi 2003a and 2003b; Pearson 2003; Goodman 2003) More than eighty percent of the presumed and required DNA does not exist! The missing genes are proving to be more troublesome than the missing eighteen minutes of the Nixon tapes. The one-gene, one-protein concept was a fundamental tenet of genetic determinism. Now that the Human Genome Project has toppled the one-gene for one-protein concept, our current theories of how life works have to be scrapped. No longer is it possible to believe that genetic engineers can, with relative ease, fix all our biological dilemmas. There are simply not enough genes to account for the complexity of human life or of human disease.
The Central Dogma. The dogma, also referred to as the Primacy of DNA, defines the flow of information in biological organisms. As indicated by the arrows, the flow is only in one direction, from DNA to RNA and then to protein. The DNA represents the cell’s long-term memory, passed from generation to generation. RNA, an unstable copy of the DNA molecule, is the active memory that is used by the cell as a physical template in synthesizing proteins. Proteins are the molecular building blocks that provide for the cell’s structure and behavior. DNA is implicated as the “source” that controls the character of the cell’s proteins, hence the concept of DNA’s primacy that literally means “first cause.”
I may sound like Chicken Little shouting that the genetics sky is falling. However, you don’t have to take my word for it. Chicken Big is saying the same thing. In a commentary on the surprising results of the Human Genome Project, David Baltimore, one of the world’s preeminent geneticists and a Nobel Prize winner, addressed the issue of human complexity