From Gordon Ackerman
Your articles on evolution reminded me of the thought that I’ve had for years about DNA (14 June, p 32). A computer program viewed in a text editor looks like a load of gobbledygook with a few pieces of text scattered at random through it. Such things as the error messages can be read, but the main workings of it are only clear to someone who can read the machine code of the program.
Are not the genes that we see on our chromosomes just like those pieces of text, the easily understood parts of the code? It seems possible that the real workings of the program are in what has been called “junk DNA”. Should not researchers be looking here for the code that determines where and when different activities happen?
We need to get the hackers of the DNA world working to try to reverse-engineer its code – to discover what sorts of different instructions it contains by looking for a different sort of pattern in DNA. For example, they could look at DNA that contains similar genes but does different things in different species. Computers could help with the code breaking.
Edinburgh, UK
