Brenner, Sydney

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False starts
The book of man
Sydney Brenner
From time to time,
we need to be
reminded that not so
long ago information
was distributed in the
form of words and
pictures printed on
sheets of paper and
bound into what were
called journals and
books. Although
everything is done
today in a very different way, the fact
that the products of scientific research
are still called papers links us to the
past. My father once told me that he
could remember being taken as a
small child by his grandfather to a real
library, a building in which vast
numbers of books and journals were
stored. As everybody knows, almost
all printed matter was destroyed in
the Great Paper Plague; we know
more about ancient Egypt and
Sumeria, whose people had the
foresight to write on walls.
Now, to commemorate the
centennial of the first complete
sequence of the human genome, the
Institute of Biohistoriography in
Shanghai has reproduced a book
called Human Genes that was
published in the early years of this
millennium. Apparently, the
complete sequence was never
printed as, with one kilobase of
sequence taking up one page, it
would have occupied three million
pages. What Human Genes contains is
just the protein-coding sequences of
some 3% of the genome. Comprising
25 volumes — one per
chromosome — it is still 100,000
pages, although, by the standards of
those times, this was not very large,
as there were several journals
producing some 20,000 pages of
printed material every year. 
Human Genes contains additional
material in the form of what was
called annotation, which includes a
translation of the sequences into
amino acid sequences. The first gene
on chromosome 1, reading from right
to left, begins with the sequence
(met).val.arg.ala.tyr.ser.his.ile.ser
(VRAYSHIS) and the significance of
this was first explained in a short
paper written by a scientist called
L. Orgel1, which is reprinted in
Volume 1. It has to be said that the
reproduction of Human Genes is a
collector’s item and not really suited
to casual reading. 
More widely interesting is the
accompanying old-fashioned
compact disc, which contains the
genome sequence set to music.
Towards the end of the twentieth
century a minor composer, Susumu
Ohno, experimented with the
transposition of gene sequences
into musical form. When the
pieces were performed they were
found to resemble the compositions
of well known composers. Some
genes sounded like Mozart, others
like Chopin. 
I don’t know whether these
transpositions were made on a larger
scale, but what we have on the
compact disc is much more
elaborate. It is an eight-hour cantata,
set for full orchestra together with
several hundred voices, composed by
Ragami Nagata, who, like Ohno, was
Japanese. The text he used is not
the original human genome
sequence but a later one which
included the polymorphisms, thus
allowing an extension of the basic
vocabulary of A,G,C,T to include
R,Y,N,M,K and so on. He also
introduced the letter I for those
A sites modified by editing. This
greatly increased the range of
vocalisation and although I am not
fond of this kind of music, which
used to be called modern, it lessens
the tediousness of the performance. 
Nagata also invented a new
instrument, called a tryptophone, but
all efforts to trace a description of it
have failed. The compact disc
provides us with an original
performance, and although the sound
has been reconstructed and
improved by modern techniques, it
still preserves much of the original
quality. You can hear the
tryptophone in the 8th movement
performing the TGG triplet repeats.
Research at the Institute has shown
that there were other musical
settings of the human genome
sequence. Songs, several operas and
even a Broadway musical comedy are
known but these remain curiosities
and have been rarely performed over
the past hundred years. 
A pioneering attempt to transfer
the sequence into odours is also
available from the Institute. It comes
in the form of a program that has to
be run on an old fashioned
two-dimensional computer capable
of synthesizing the smells. As with
Nagata’s cantata, variety has been
introduced by using the polymorphic
sequence. This is not to everybody’s
taste (or smell) and I, for one, found
that I adapted too quickly and the
performances quickly became flat
and bland.
For those with a more
contemporary taste, the Institute is
making available the newest set of
Micro-Av Crystals. These weigh
about 100 micrograms and can store
6 × 1017 bits, or 1010 genomes, in
quantum superposition states in the
three-dimensional lattice. The
crystal contains genome sequences of
all of the people in the world, which
will be kept up-to-date as new
people are born. This is truly the
human genome sequence complete
and a far cry from the early work of
Human Genes.
1He noticed the similarity of this motif to the
first word of an early Aramaic book called
Genesis which, from the four fragments that
have survived, appears to have been a
treatise on cosmology and evolution.
R905
Magazine


The book of man 

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The book of man

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