transducing the genome

[...]... recognize the structure of the hormone They read the message, process the information, and pass on their own signal to other molecules within the cell These molecules do the same, and eventually this network of signals results in cell growth division The growth hormone molecule has thereby told the cells to grow and divide All the molecules of life can be thought of as information carriers The implications... likely to spread to other parts of the body (metastasize) often could not be distinguished from one that was not They often looked the same under a microscope and had the same markers The Argonne team took a deeper look They broke open tumor cells and surveyed their molecular components More precisely, they surveyed their full complement of proteins Proteins are the workhorses of the cell They provide cell... and other chemical entities These are the molecules of life and the subject of countless research studies They can be understood in terms of their physical structures and their chemical properties However, they can also be understood in terms of the information that they convey What kind of molecular messages are being sent within us? Who is the sender and receiver and what is being said? Genes are the. .. planets in the sky The Andersons figured that $350 million over a five-year period would be re- 6 TRANSDUCING THE GENOME quired to make their dream a reality Their appeal reached the halls of the U.S Congress, where Senator Alan Cranston of California lent his support for what could have been the world’s first biomedical research initiative to come close to matching the size and scale of the U.S Apollo... replicate the sound of the voice entering the receiver, but noise tends to enter the system Ma Bell, the principal U.S telephone company throughout most of the twentieth century, had an interest in the advancement of phone service and in determining the relative costs of phone calls that could vary in duration, distance, and message content It was within the phone company’s research 18 TRANSDUCING THE GENOME. .. long before the physical nature of genes was finally determined in the 1950s At the core of the molecular network of every living organism is a genome, a repository of heritable information that is typically distributed throughout all the cells of the organism “They are law code and executive power—or to use another simile, they are architect’s plan and builder’s code in one,” explained the renowned... INTRODUCTION the California Institute of Technology In the chapters that follow I examine the forces, people, and ideas that have been propelling the search for human genes, shaping the genomics industry, and creating a dramatically new understanding of life I also examine the human genome itself, the forces that have shaped it, and what it may reveal about ourselves The Human Genome Project and other sequencing... this are profound The pattern of pro- INFORMATION AND LIFE 17 teins that a cell produces is not just information about the cell; it is a message from the cell Proteins communicate among themselves and with other molecules within the cell Those on the cell surface and those secreted by the cell are messages sent to other cells The Argonne group intercepted some of this information when they broke open... And why should they? The Argonne group certainly hadn’t cured cancer They hadn’t even classified real human tumors Instead, they used cultured cells derived from tumors and they used only a small number of samples, rather than larger and more statistically meaningful quantities They hadn’t shown that the categories in which they sorted their tumor cell samples were particularly meaningful They hadn’t... nucleic acids, which relay the messages to proteins, which convey signals throughout the organism A complete set of genes, the genome, carries instructions, or a blueprint, for the development and function of an entire organism As information it does not really matter how the gene is encoded, so long as the message can be received and decoded There is redundancy in the genetic code; the same gene may be .