Genome 2.0
Mountains of new data are challenging old views
Patrick Barry

When scientists unveiled a draft of the human genome in early 2001, many
cautioned that sequencing the genome was only the beginning. The long list
of the four chemical components that make up all the strands of human DNA
would not be a finished book of life, but a road map of an undiscovered
country that would take decades to explore.

Only 6 years later, the landscape of the genome is already proving to be
dramatically different than most scientists had expected.

The established view of the genome began to take shape in 1958, just 5 years
after Francis Crick and James D. Watson worked out the structure of DNA. In
that year, Crick expounded what he called the "central dogma" of molecular
biology: DNA's genetic information flows strictly one way, from a gene
through a series of steps that ends in the creation of a protein. That
principle developed into a modern orthodoxy, according to which a genome is
a collection of discrete genes located at specific spots along a strand of
DNA. This old view got the basics right: that genes encode proteins and that
proteins do the myriad work necessary to keep an organism alive.

Robert Karl Stonjek wrote: