Connecting DNA and Development

This is a bracing exploration of recent discoveries in genomics and development that paint a new picture of how organisms workone that modifies the now-standard account of what genes do.Author Philip Ball, a prizewinning science writer, shows why likening organisms to machines or computer programs doesn't do justice to the flexible, context-sensitive molecular networks inside cells that run the show we call life.It is the behavior of these systems, Ball explains, that allows individual cells to survive in fluctuating conditions and cooperate to form multicellular creatures, including us.Getting this story right is not just of academic interest-it's crucial for medicine and for the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, which, despite their successes, still struggle to deliver on the hype around the sequencing of the human genome.The hope that the sequence would by itself spawn cures was naïve.Genes generally don't match up one-to-one with medically important processes, and in multicellular organisms, most of the genome consists of DNA sequences that regulate genes and edit products of their activity in complicated ways.They don't just make proteins.Sequencing the human genome has, however, spurred followup projects that are transforming biological understanding.Ball sketches prospects for medical technologies that will build on insights now coming into view.Many are based on understanding patterns of development, which can cause disease when they are diverted into undesirable paths.The idea of correcting such developmental "wrong turns" is now being tested in an attempt to develop a treatment for a type of leukemia.The account of recent discoveries in How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology highlights how, as some biologists and philosophers have long protested, the standard "modern