Dr. Francis Collins Speaking at the University of Alaska Anchorage

This Thursday, March 30, 2006, Dr. Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project will be giving a free public talk at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He promises that it won’t be a lecture just for the “science nerds”.

Here’s an excerpt from an informative telephone interview with Dr. Collins:

Q. The human genome project is difficult to grasp. How do you explain it to people?

A. I think it’s a pretty good metaphor to think of it as an instruction book. It’s a very large instruction. It has 3 billion letters in its instruction set.

If you printed those out on hard copy paper and piled all the copies on top of each other, this would be as tall as the Washington Monument.

You have that amount of information inside each cell of your body. Every cell carries the whole instruction book, but each cell uses the instructions in a different way depending on whether it’s a heart muscle cell or a brain cell or a blood cell.

For all of human history, we have not known very much about that instruction book. We only really knew it was DNA that carried that information 50 years ago.

Now we have all of those letters of the code. They’re there on the Internet for anybody who wants to start helping us figure out how they work. And that’s a phenomenal concept that we’ve moved across a bridge into an era where we know our own instruction book.

You see our textbooks are the same — yours and mine — at least 99.9 percent of it is the same. But that .1 percent, which is what we are now focusing a lot of our scientific attention on, carries within it the clues of why different people are at risk for different diseases.

Dr. Francis Collins will give a free public talk at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Wendy Williamson Auditorium at the University of Alaska Anchorage.