Junk DNA
A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome
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- 17,99 US$
Lời Giới Thiệu Của Nhà Xuất Bản
From the author of the acclaimed The Epigenetics Revolution (‘A book that would have had Darwin swooning’ – Guardian) comes another thrilling exploration of the cutting edge of human science.
For decades after the structure of DNA was identified, scientists focused purely on genes, the regions of the genome that contain codes for the production of proteins. Other regions – 98% of the human genome – were dismissed as ‘junk’. But in recent years researchers have discovered that variations in this ‘junk’ DNA underlie many previously intractable diseases, and they can now generate new approaches to tackling them.
Nessa Carey explores, for the first time for a general audience, the incredible story behind a controversy that has generated unusually vituperative public exchanges between scientists. She shows how junk DNA plays an important role in areas as diverse as genetic diseases, viral infections, sex determination in mammals, human biological complexity, disease treatments, even evolution itself – and reveals how we are only now truly unlocking its secrets, more than half a century after Crick and Watson won their Nobel prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1962.
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Carey (The Epigenetics Revolution), a visiting professor at Imperial College, London, explores the latest in genomics research and describes, in prose that is for the most part accessible to nonscientists, the complexities of how scientists currently believe the genome works. Two surprising outcomes of the Human Genome Project were the discoveries that humans have only approximately 24,000 functional genes, "pretty much the same quantity as simple microscopic worms," and that over 98% of the DNA in human cells is "junk," long stretches that can't be translated into any proteins. Only recently have scientists began to study this junk, but even at this early stage of understanding, Carey demonstrates that we now know some of the junk DNA may well be partly responsible for terribly debilitating and, to date, intractable disorders such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, various cancers, and Alzheimer's disease. She also discusses potential breakthrough drug therapies designed to make use of our growing knowledge of junk DNA to ameliorate or cure some of these devastating conditions. Carey makes two points very clearly: that our understanding is tentative and evolving, and that chromosomal functioning is far more intricate than anyone ever hypothesized.
