The latest findings in genetics and molecular biology are revealing the so-called “book of life” to be messy to the point of incomprehensibility. Each copy is filled with annotations that change the meaning, there are some instructions that the book omits, the words overlap and we don’t have a clue about the grammar.
Or maybe we simply have the wrong metaphor. The genome is no book, and the longer we talk about it in that way, the harder it will be to avoid misconceptions about how genes work.
But it’s not just the notion of the genome as a “list of parts” that now appears under threat. The entire central dogma of genetics—that a gene is a self-contained stretch of a DNA molecule that encodes instructions for making an enzyme, and that genetic inheritance works via DNA—is now under revision. It is not that this picture is wrong, but it is certainly incomplete in ways that are challenging the textbook image of how genes work.
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