Genes are written in English, not in Chinese
Tags:character Chinese English genes
The Loom : Farewell, Seymour Benzer
As the geneticist Guido Pontecorvo wrote in 1958, "The analogy of the genetic material with a written message is a useful commonplace. The important change is that we now think of the message as being in handwritten English rather than in Chinese." In Chinese, words are single pictograms. In English, words are not the fundamental unit–they are made from letters. Likewise, genes are made up of nucleotides of DNA. That may seem like an obvious truth today, but only thanks to Benzer.