The Age of the Genome 2

A reminder today to listen to BBC World Service's Age of the Genome here.  This is the second of a four-part series, which commemorates the tenth anniversary of this landmark finding.  The series explores how the 26 June 2000 discovery by Venter and Collins, which was supported by a research team of thousands, will change our world forever.

Update from the program: “I suppose you could say that history, the ordinary study of history, took an enormous leap forward with the invention of writing because once writing had been invented and people, archaeologists, could look at stone tablets with cuneiform writing and then look at scrolls and things, you had a huge resource in history. And in a way, DNA does just that because it is writing – it is a form of writing – this digital code; there are letters there. So it’s as though we’ve now suddenly realized that something like writing with the same relevance to history as human writing goes back, well, not just to the common ancestry with chimpanzees but really back to bacteria.”

Go back to blog piece on Part 1 of the series.

See my other posts on the Fountain of Youth.