erik lundegaard

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Wednesday October 30, 2024

One With My Genome

“Only 2 percent of the human genome codes for proteins, which is to say only 2 percent does anything demonstrably and unequivocally practical.”

-- Bill Bryson, “The Body: A Guide for Occupants,” which does for biology what he did for other sciences in “A History of Nearly Everything.” Most of it, of course, is going over my head or is tough to grasp: “Unpacked, you are positively enormous. Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast. The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around Earth.” And it gets worse. Or we get bigger. Stuff inside us could go to the moon and back. Here's another line, by the way, that I am one with, that helps explain me to me: “What is perhaps most remarkable is that nothing is in charge. Each component of the cell responds to signals from other components, all of them bumping and jostling like so many bumper cars...” Explains all of humanity, really.

Posted at 08:14 AM on Wednesday October 30, 2024 in category Books