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How does a fertilized egg become a human?


Wired, Issue 15.02 - February 2007
 
Imagine that you place 
a 1-inch-wide black cube in an empty field. 

Suddenly the cube 
makes copies of itself 
- two, four, eight, 16. 

The proliferating cubes 
begin to form structures 
- enclosures, arches, walls, tubes. 

Some of the tubes turn into wires, 
PVC pipes, structural steel, wooden studs. 

Sheets of cubes 
become wallboard and wood paneling, 
carpet and plate-glass windows. 

The wires begin connecting themselves 
into a network of immense complexity. 

Eventually, 
a 100-story skyscraper 
stands in the field.

That’s basically the process 
a fertilized cell undergoes 
beginning with the moment of conception. 

How did that cube know 
how to make a skyscraper? 

How does a cell know 
how to make a human 
(or any other mammal)? 

Biologists used to think 
that the cellular proteins 
somehow carried the instructions. 

But now proteins 
look more like 
pieces of brick and stone 
- useless without 
a building plan and a mason. 

The instructions 
for how to build an organism 
must be written in a cell’s DNA, 
but no one has figured out 
exactly how to read them.
 
- Steve Olson, author of Mapping Human History

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