Christina On
Dr. Vrabel
9 Biotech
16 April 2016
Cracking the Code of Life NOVA illustrated the race to decode the three billion letters found in the message sent from one generation to the next, DNA. The Human Genome Project, an international community fights to be the first to make a scientific breakthrough against Celera, a private company. The government allows the information discovered free to the public’s use, giving Celera a seemingly unfair advantage towards first place in the race. In addition, it seems that Celera may have more valid data, as they have randomly chosen 20 volunteers of all ethnicities while the government has a male and female from Buffalo. In the business perspective of companies, while the government has free data, Celera chooses to compile all of their research and sell it to pharmaceutical companies and universities.
In the nucleus of every cell, cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine are the four base pairs encrypted in DNA. These letters are the form for a human being. DNA corresponds with our heredity, but only one percent of our genes are important.…show more content… An example that highlights this is Tay Sachs disease, in which one letter can cause almost all children diagnosed with it die earlier than the age of seven. The purpose of a protein is to dissolve fat in the brain. Now that the gene is different, the error creates a problem and the protein does not function as it normally would. Fat builds up, swells the brain strangling and crushing an infant’s DNA. It seems like a very unlikely possibility because the disease is very rare and the baby must receive the gene from both
