{"id":529158,"date":"2010-04-15T13:25:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T17:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/discovermagazine.com\/2010\/mar\/12-the-picasso-of-dna"},"modified":"2010-04-15T13:25:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T17:25:00","slug":"the-picasso-of-dna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/529158","title":{"rendered":"The Picasso of DNA"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"dna<\/p>\n

This is a preview of this article. Full text of features from DISCOVER magazine are available only to subscribers.<\/i><\/p>\n

Here is how to get an appointment with George M. Church<\/a>, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, director of four organizations devoted to genomics, cofounder of four biotech firms within the past four years, scientific adviser to 17 ultralow-cost genome sequencing companies, and founder of the Personal Genome Project<\/a>:<\/p>\n

First, you send him an e-mail requesting a meeting. He will reply with the URL for a Web site that lists his current schedule<\/a>. This, when printed out, proves to be a 10-page, single-spaced document in very small type that starts with \u201cJanuary 1, 2009: Holiday, New Year\u2019s Day\u201d and ends with \u201cSeptember 17, 2010: International Steven Hoogendijk Award 2010 for G. Church, Rotterdam, Netherlands.\u201d Searching through hundreds of entries\u2014as many as nine falling on a single day\u2014you try to find an uncommitted hour. If successful, you contact either of Church\u2019s two administrative assistants to propose a date, time, and place. Then you hope for the best.<\/p>\n

When the magical day arrives, the first question I ask Church is how he can possibly direct, create, advise, and mastermind so many projects (as well as teach classes and supervise Ph.D. dissertations) without going crazy. \u201cWell, I think it\u2019s an assumption that I\u2019m not crazy,\u201d he says. \u201cThey all seem pretty much the same to me. They\u2019re all integrated, and I guess what we try to do is\u2014we try to do integration.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Church\u2019s career has a single integrating theme, it is finding ways to apply the machinery of automation to the molecular basis of life, the genome<\/a>. His infatuation with computers goes back to grammar school in Clearwater, Florida, when, at age 9, he built an electronic computer for a science fair. Genetics entered the picture in the spring of 1974. Then an undergraduate at Duke, Church typed into a computer all the transfer RNA sequences that were available at the time and folded each one into a three-dimensional structure, as RNA molecules were known to do. \u201cI became obsessed with sequencing,\u201d he says. The obsession never faded. Today his myriad projects all emerge from his impulse to know, unravel, depict, use, and\u2014better yet\u2014tinker with and even create the RNA and DNA codes that constitute the software of living systems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a preview of this article. Full text of features from DISCOVER magazine are available only to subscribers. Here is how to get an appointment with George M. Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, director of four organizations devoted to genomics, cofounder of four biotech firms within the past four years, scientific […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-529158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}