Creation (30 page)

7
. At this point, universal entropy will be at its maximum, and the universe will have reached so-called heat death. But you can relax for now, as this will not happen for many trillions of years.

8
. The gasses of Miller's experiment were probably not the ones present in the early earth: it's now thought that carbon dioxide flooded the skies, and nitrogen was also present. That's a side issue here; we will never know the early earth's exact composition.

1
. The frequently quoted stat that genetically all humans are 99.9 percent similar is of relevance here. That means that if we compare two individuals' DNA, they differ by only one letter in a thousand. But if you factor in the three billion letters of code in a human's genome, three million individual letters are different (and don't include all manner of different, larger variations within our codes). That is a lot of variables to play with, and goes a long way to explain why we are all unique, even identical twins. Your precise genome sequence has never existed before and will never exist in another person. Humankind is in the 99.9 percent, but you are encrypted in the wealth of the remainder.

2
. A more detailed description of this key process is described in part II, as scientists are beginning to subvert and redesign this process to create new, unnatural proteins.

3
. Obviously, egg-laying reptiles came hundreds of millions of years before the evolution of any birds, let alone
Gallus gallus domesticus
, the humble chicken.

4
. For example, the sentence “But DNA copied from RNA was riddled with errors” is translated into Icelandic by Google Translate as “En DNA afrita frá RNA var riddled með villa,” and back into English as “But DNA copy of RNA was riddled with errors,” which is inelegant but pretty close.

Repeating this experiment with Czech results in “Ale DNA zkopírován z RNA byla proÅ¡pikovaná chybami” and then “But RNA copied from DNA was riddled with errors”—exactly the opposite of the original meaning.

5
. RNA uses uracil as a replacement for thymidine, which differs only by the presence of a small cluster of atoms called a methyl group, also used as the diacritic tag in DNA methylation.

6
. For example, the transporter of oxygen around our bodies, and what makes blood red, is called hemoglobin, which is assembled from four units of protein parts called globin, around an atom of iron.

7
. This is a portmanteau of
ribo
- for RNA and -
zyme
from enzyme—proteins that catalyze biological reactions. It is annoyingly similar to the word
ribosome
, which itself has ribozymelike properties—that is, RNA with function.

8
. In 2003, researchers at the University of Plymouth in England tested this idea in a very small-scale experiment. Six macaques were left with typewriters for a month, and produced five pages consisting mostly of the letter
s
. However, they also destroyed the typewriters by urinating and pushing feces into the keyboards.

9
. The hammerhead ribozyme is found in a number of viruses and single-celled organisms. Its name is derived from the fact that when the RNA sequence folds into a 3D structure, it has a head that is exactly the same shape as a hammer.

10
. Cytidine is the name for cytosine attached to the ribose sugar, that is, the rung attached to the strut.

11
. This work was conducted while Sutherland was at the University of Manchester, another Nobel Prize factory, boasting more than twenty laureates.

12
. There's a coda to Sutherland's synthesis. He and his team found that shining ultraviolet light onto the mix had the double effect of improving the yield of uracil and of carving up some of the by-products. UV light on Earth comes from the Sun, stronger now than it was when our solar system was young. Naturally, this is a plausible addition to the Archaean reaction, as these conditions were present on young Earth, but makes the idea more focused, at least in a location. If this actually transpired, then it happened on Earth's surface.

1
. Even death is not easy to define, for the same reason that life isn't. We can point to events that are essential for death, those that are in opposition to life—loss of respiration, the stopped heart, snuffing out neural activity, the end of consciousness. But none of them is useful to the majority of life-forms that don't have brains or hearts or consciousness. Doctors use a checklist to pronounce death, but death is a process itself, not a punctuation mark at the end of a life.

2
. Crick and Orgel's paper is written partially in the formal language of scientific papers, but also drifts off to wonder if the fate of the alien bioengineers was that their star had “frizzled them.” This is not a term that appears frequently in academic journals. It's unusual to see such august scientists pontificate in public, in what looks to be the formalization of a fascinating bar conversation: “The psychology of extraterrestrial societies,” they note with presumably arched eyebrows, “is no better understood than terrestrial psychology.”

3
. Very occasionally, a piece of Mars lands on Earth, most recently in 2011, a 33-pound meteorite named Tissint after the small town in Morocco it landed in.

4
. As Carl Sagan described it following a photograph taken by
Voyager 1
in 1990, 3,728,227,139 miles from Earth. Many now think life elsewhere in the universe is statistically inevitable. Indeed, the blossoming field of astrobiology exists to formalize the study of if, how, and where life might exist extraterrestrially.

5
. A paper in
Science
in 1996 suggested that the shapes of particular microscopic mineral deposits on the Allan Hills meteorite (commonly abbreviated ALH 84001) were biological in origin. The rock in question is thought to be around four billion years old, blasted off the surface of Mars in an impact. Some researchers maintain that the bobbles seen on the meteorite's surface are the product of microscopic life-forms, but the scientific consensus is that they are geological in origin. Chemical analysis of the rock shows that the amino acids it bears are identical in nature to the Antarctic ice it was found in, suggesting this was the very terrestrial source of biological molecules. Research continues.

6
. Spontaneous self-organization is not quite as magical as it might seem. If you had Cheerios as your breakfast cereal this morning, you will have seen fundamental universal forces conspiring to invoke spontaneous organization in your bowl. The oat rings want to float, because their density is lower than that of the milk. Gravity pushes them down, but the pressure underneath from the column of milk pushes them up. If, after the first few mouthfuls, there is enough space at the surface, they will automatically jiggle themselves into a hexagonal pattern, because this is the formation that allows the upward force to be distributed evenly.

7
. This is a heterodox view from a man who likes a healthy bit of agitprop. He starts his lectures on the origin of life by tipping up the soup bowl. He points out that Haldane and Oparin, the independent founders of the soup model, were both Communists. Coming from a Texan (who now lives in Germany), this instantly sounds like a political point. In fact, he is quick to point out it means that, as they were both dialectic materialists, “there had to be a rational explanation for everything from the workings of society to the needs of individuals to the origin of life. And [Haldane and] Oparin's theory became party doctrine.”

8
. Hoyle was a brilliant scientist and author but also something of an iconoclast, prone to vocally rejecting mainstream ideas. He disputed the universe's origin's being the result of the big bang, which is the overwhelming scientific consensus view.

1
. Some scientists consider viruses, or at least some types of virus, to be living. They are problematic, as they have many characteristics of the more definably living cells, but lack the cellular machinery to reproduce themselves. Thus, they are parasitic on living cells in order to reproduce. The question “what is life?” is explored in chapter 4, but for simplicity's sake I have chosen to adhere to the consensus (which is not undisputed) that viruses are not alive.

2
. Synthia contained three hidden quotations, about which British satirist Charlie Brooker commented, “The geneticists spliced a James Joyce quotation into the DNA sequence. The unsuspecting genome now has the phrase ‘To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life' written through it like letters in a stick of rock. In other words, it's the world's most pretentious bacterium.” The quote was taken from the novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, but Venter and his team neglected to seek permission from James Joyce's estate, which is notorious for aggressively protecting their copyright. Executors of Joyce's estate immediately issued Venter a cease and desist letter. In fact, the copyright had expired, and no further action was taken.

1
. Zeedonks (aka zebonkeys, zebrinnies, zebrulas, and zebadonks) are a cross between a zebra and a donkey. Similarly, a liger is a lion and tiger cross, and a hinny a cross between a male horse and a female donkey—as opposed to a mule, which is the opposite. Sterility in these unusual hybrids is in accordance with a principle called Haldane's rule, (after J. B. S. Haldane, who came up with the term
primordial soup
), which states that when a cross is successful between two species, one sex will be absent in the offspring, and that will be the one with two different sex chromosomes, that is, XY (males) instead of XX (females), in mammals. In birds and butterflies, this is reversed.

2
. This cell is known as Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and is discussed at length in part I.

3
. There is plenty of artisanal skill required to get the additional DNA to function. The syntax and phrasing of the inserted gene have to make sense to the cell's translation machinery. The arrangement of the letters of DNA—
A, T, C,
and
G
—is precise and crucial to the protein that a gene encodes. As discussed earlier, those letters, or more properly bases, are set in threes, each triplet encoding an amino acid, a kind of biological waltz. If your insert comes in on the wrong beat, the dance makes no sense. But when you introduce the jellyfish gene so it starts on the right beat, wherever your experimental gene is active that cell will glow green. This tag is small enough not to affect the function of the protein, just like someone wearing a brightly colored hat while waltzing.

4
. This process is called cloning but is unrelated to the popular sense of that word, to reproduce an identical organism as in science fiction or in animals such as Dolly the sheep. My own atomically minuscule contribution to the field of genetics was in a team that worked on a mouse born naturally blind, with shrunken eyes, a deformed retina, and no optic nerve. By various techniques, our team, led by Jane Sowden at the Institute of Child Health in London, excised and spliced various genes and genetic elements to characterize what the faulty gene was doing and when. Using the basics of cloning, we cut the gene out of the genome of the mouse and used it to determine the precise time and place where it should have been working. We tagged it and looked for the other genes it was controlling and being controlled by. By doing this, we helped to discover that the equivalent gene in humans also causes a rare form of blindness in children.

5
. Gasoline itself is a kind of biofuel: crude oil is made of the carcasses of trillions of organisms that have decomposed and been crushed for hundreds of millions of years.

1
.
Voyager 1
is the most distant man-made object from Earth, and at the time of writing is eighteen billion kilometers from us. It sends regular messages via Twitter as @nasavoyager.

2
. The Venus flytrap circuit is qualitatively different from electronics because the logic of the genes underlying the process is there not to enact the trapping, but to set the trap; that is, to open the jaws and arm the trigger. They express the proteins that act as the components in the logic pathway. In electronics the logic is dictated by the flow of electricity through the circuit.

3
. And, indeed, from cell to cell; one of the confounding things about cancers is that their DNA mutates quickly and causes highly variable responses to therapeutic attacks of this precision.

4
. Cell death is, perversely, essential for growth and a very important part of development in the womb. For example, as fetuses our hands start out as paddles, and the fingers grow within them. The fingers separate when the cells in the webbing enact their own death.

1
. The Beatles did this in 1967 by borrowing and looping calliope recordings on “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” on
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
(and even more so on such experimental tracks as “Revolution 9” on
The
White Album
).

2
. This was replaced for the 2012 competition by an elegant wooden giant Lego brick.

3
. In the summer of my second undergraduate year in 1995, I spent three months measuring the vital statistics of three thousand stalk-eyed flies to assess whether asymmetry was greater in their eyestalks compared with their wings. It was not. The world of biology remains utterly unmoved by this study, but the lure of the lab was strong enough for me to return.