Why DNA Isn’t What You Think: Dr. Garry Nolan Reveals Its Hidden Code

What is the most beautiful thing about DNA when you think about it? Well, to me, the most interesting and beautiful and fascinating thing is the information compaction that's there. People don't really think about that. DNA is only a few gigabytes. It's like three billion base pairs. Three billion individual letters does not explain this, you know, in terms of the linear sequence. So the way you have to think about it is that the DNA in the egg serves a different purpose than the DNA in a nerve cell or the DNA in the heart cell. It has all the information there, but as the DNA replicates in the different cells that it becomes, it actually assumes a different function or set of functions in each cell. So the way I usually talk about it is, where is the gene for nest building in birds? Is there a gene for building a nest in birds? Because people often think of the gene for intelligence or the gene for this or that. It turns out there is no gene for nest building, any more than there's a gene for reliking chocolate, right? But what there is, is as the DNA is replicating, it is assuming a new environment. It's unzipping into a new environment using computer terminology, and it's expecting a certain environment, and then it divides again and again and again. And so what's happening is, eventually what is built in the bird's brain are different cells in just the right place at the right time, signaling in just the right way that has the instinct for building one kind of nest versus another. And if you ever watched a nature documentary, you can see all the different styles of nest building that different birds will have. It's all built, but you have to reverse engineer the final structure of the bird's brain back to the DNA, and you can't find any one place. It's distributed across the genome, as it turns out, most likely in what's called an epigenetic state. So it's not just the linear sequence of the DNA, it's the three-dimensional information of the DNA that actually has a code in it that we've yet to decipher.