The Human Genome Project

A man went to church for confession and confessed the most absurd of sins. The priest who had spent most of the morning listening to the vile nature of humans was irritated at this man before him. The man sensing the priest’s discomfort said to him “Father, you may be irritated with me but just like I need you, you also need me otherwise whose confession will you hear?” going a step further he said, “God also needs me like I need him, otherwise who will pray to him?” Yes, God needs us humans otherwise who will admire his creation? 

A cell is tiny, about one tenth of a millimeter in size and can only be seen through a microscope and inside this cell is a nucleus which houses the DNA, so how did we decode that DNA is the seed of life? It has been a long journey from theories to discoveries to finally identifying and mapping the sequence of close to 3 billion base pairs of the human genome. 

The Human Genome Project, initiated in 1990 and completed in 2003, unraveled the sequence of nearly three billion base pairs in human DNA. On June 20, 2000, then U.S. President Bill Clinton remarked, "Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind." Perhaps the creator was watching with a smile on his face and proud of his creation. 

The Earliest Theories of Heredity 

We now go on a journey to understand how we were able to decode the gene as a unit of heredity. The word code has its origins in the Latin word caudex, or the sheets of material made from the pith of trees which were used for writing, and what did God use to write the code of life? It has been an amazing journey for science considering the many limitations that scientists are bound by because of ethics involving human life but not only that, a wrong mutation could create havoc and possibly destroy life on earth. Then there is the bad side to any history and science has had its share which you will read about in this fascinating journey to hunt down the DNA. 

 

Long before scientists understood genes, ancient scholars speculated on how traits were passed down. Around 460 BC, the Greek physician Hippocrates proposed that male semen contained a detailed blueprint of the body. He imagined it as a catalog of traits, transferring a pre-written design to the offspring, while the female simply provided the nurturing space. 

However, the philosopher Aristotle challenged this idea. In his work Generation of Animals, he argued that heredity was more complex. He observed that children sometimes inherited traits from grandparents, that physical disabilities did not always pass to offspring, and that male and female reproductive roles were not as one-sided as Hippocrates suggested. Aristotle theorized that both male and female contributed to the formation of life—men providing "instructions" and women supplying the raw material. 

The Medieval Church and the Preformation Theory 

Since the time of Aristotle, it was accepted that sperm was central for reproduction but there also came variations and additions to this theory and the leading one was preformation. Preformation means that a child is already available in a shrunken form in the semen and all it needed was a womb to grow. The medieval church believed that all of humanity originated from Adam which means that we were all encased, a human chain, and this went well with the theory of preformation. The original sin means that it was not just Adam who was tempted to eat the forbidden fruit but that each one of us were part of the original sin, that we all bit into the forbidden fruit and we are born of sin. The preformation theory was a simple solution to a complex problem of creation and since religious beliefs were high, preformation was regarded to be on the lines of creation as described in Genesis. To think outside preformation would mean that there were two entities, the male and female and there exists a common code to understand these two different entities and create a life form. Alternate theories were complex and instead the thinking at that time was preformation and variations to it, but this would all change with time.