2023 marks the 70th anniversary of Watson and Crick’s Nobel prize-winning discovery of DNA. Since then, we continue to discover astounding features in this dense information storage device. Allow me to illustrate DNA’s capabilities with a made-up story about the discovery of an electronic tablet (DNA) in a deserted alien spaceship.
The find of an alien space tablet generated great global excitement. The world’s best linguists cooperated to decipher its strange symbols. The more they studied the tablet, the more amazed they grew. In a review meeting, one professor reported that sentences had to be read from right to left as in Hebrew. Another disagreed and said that they should be read from left to right as in English. Further study indicated that they were both right. One of the team had been studying what appeared to be an instruction manual for servicing the ship’s propulsion system. He discovered that, typically, the same set of characters (or symbols) had to be read from left to right to obtain one instruction, and then from right to left to obtain another instruction. Each character string appeared to have two meanings.
A few weeks later, another professor, an expert in cryptology, came rushing into the staffroom, his face flushed with excitement. He discovered that some parts of the same instruction manual could be read using different languages. He later explained that it was a bit like having a book where you began by reading in English to get the first half of the story, and then you started again at the first page and read the same words in French to get the second half of the story.
In addition, one of the languages had words with just three letters; but by starting at a different letter, completely different sentences with different meanings were obtained. By forming the three-letter words starting at position 1 (picture, left), the sentence’s message specified a fuel mixture. By forming the words starting at position 2, it was an instruction for dealing with a potentially damaging engine vibration. By forming the words starting at position 3, a warning spelled out against running the engines too fast before they reached their optimum operating temperature. Reading this same set of characters backwards provided information needed to reboot the engine’s computer.
As the project director remarked, there was an astonishing level of data compression, where a lot of information was packed into a short string of characters. One set of characters appeared to contain up to 12 different instructions, depending on how it was read.
Six months later, there was another remarkable discovery. Looking for a quiet place to work, one of the researchers took the tablet into what appeared to be the spaceship’s kitchen. There, she noticed some of the characters had been ‘greyed out’ and were hardly visible (right). Reading the black characters only, she found a recipe for an item on a lunch menu. The document seemed to be ‘context dependent’, meaning that it altered itself to provide the information needed to perform specific tasks in a particular place. This was confirmed when the researcher took the tablet into what appeared to be a navigation office. At once the text changed, and other characters became greyed out. The resulting readable text was discovered to be part of a procedure for plotting a course through a distant solar system.
Our story might seem fantastical to the reader, but the human genome is very much like this. DNA is read forwards and backwards, and different instructions often overlap, even in reverse. Just as the text displayed by the alien’s tablet altered automatically according to which room it was in, so genes (DNA instructions) automatically switch on or off, causing plants and animals to change and adapt to different environments. Our alien language analogy is only a dim reflection of the amazing complexity of the language of DNA, and the information system in cells is actually far more sophisticated than this.
We’ve never observed a book on how to write books write itself. Life has only ever come from life. Clearly the astounding mind of God is displayed within this microscopic marvel of chemical engineering. Remember now thy Creator!
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