The book of man

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.