o make and maintain you and are made of longstrands of ttle raordinary molecule on Eart has been called.
DNA exists for just one reason—to create more DNA—and you of it inside you:
about six feet of it squeezed into almost every cell. Eacters of coding, enougo provide 103,480,000,000possible combinations, “guaranteed tobe unique against all conceivable odds,” in tian de Duve. t’s a lot ofpossibility—a one follo ake more t to print t figure,” notes de Duve. Look at yourself in t upon t t you are been trillion cells, and talmost every one of ted DNA, and you begin toappreciate just uff you carry around o a single fine strand, t to stretco t once or t again and again. Altogeto onecalculation, you may y million kilometers of DNA bundled up insideyou.
Your body, in s, loves to make DNA and it you couldn’t live. Yet DNA is notitself alive. No molecule is, but DNA is, as it is “among tnonreactive, c molecules in ticistRicin. t is cigations and coaxed from t Neandertals. It also explainsook scientists so long to ance so mystifyingly lo t of life itself.
As a knoity, DNA t tyof tübingen in Germany. ance recognize and called it nuclein (because itresided in t time, Miesctle more te its existence, butnuclein clearly remained on y-ter in a letter to y t sucs bey. traordinary insig one so far in advance of tific requirements t itattracted no attention at all.
For most of t ury tion terial—no a subsidiary role in matters of y. Itoo simple. It four basic components, called nucleotides, four letters. e tory of life ary alp? (t you do it in muc you create complexmessages s and dasdo anyt all, as far as anyone could tell. It just sat ty on command or fulfilling someotrivial task t no one t of. ty, it ,o exist in proteins in the nucleus.
t, t:
teemed it in some important op of t kept turning up, like t in a murder mystery, in experiments. In tudies in particular, one involving terium and anoteriop infect bacteria), DNA betra