We are 50% Bananas...

Well what does that mean? Realistically we are what we eat. But genealogically, we are 50% similar in genes to the everyday, common place banana. The reason this is such a big deal is what it tells us about everything, the messages of life. In the beginning of life the first DNA contained a message of ATGC and that same message of what life contains and/or can be built from was built from has been passed from that primordial soup to today. Making up a part of the banana you may have eaten in the last month or the zygote of your latest child; no matter it was all the same... in the beginning.

So what does that mean? In the beginning? Well, everything has a start just as death marks the end of everything. It is the only statistic that matters and is 100% accurate for everyone; there is a 1:1 chance you, I, you best friend, your dog, my goldfish will die. But what about where it all began? That doesn't matter really. I don't live in the past. What matters is the future. What does this information, the messages of the DNA tell us about who we are now and where we are going?

The pairs of Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine, and Adenine form strings of base pairs of 3 billion steps for building a human being; the double helix. A small variation gives us a difference of monkeys and humans, lions and tigers, fruit flies and snakes. 99% of all babies are similar to every other human baby! That is one powerful 1% or is it due to the power of the DNA. This fact is why we find the human genome project so fundamentally valuable and important.

Craig Venter, a 58-year-old entrepreneur of genome mapping, lead the way to understanding the way we, humans can manufacture life. As is a character trait for him, he unraveled a lot of his colleagues and assistants in bypassing the scientific method and horrifying some of them with his results. When he began to clash with his peers at the government's Human Genome Project, he simply quit the project, founding a company called Celera and was racing the government to the finish line. They said it would take twenty years; he finished in nine months.

Venter is one of the many leading the way in biotechnology and genome experimentation. With his lab process called, Genome Shotgun Sequencing Technique, he is able to make a genome defining its many parts and properties; with this understanding, Venter wants to remake life, to create new microorganisms that will cure diseases, produce free energy, and make your life better.

As quoted in an article in the December 2004 issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly, he stated: "The ultimate goal is to make organisms with specific functions," he said. "I'll give you an example. We'd like to synthesize an organism that can produce Taxol for breast cancer treatment. Right now, Taxol comes from the yew tree. We'd like to find the gene pathways that lead to synthesis of Taxol and then reproduce them in an artificial cell. Or we could produce cells that make chemicals for carpets and clothing, or cells that produce energy, like methane. We could take the photoreceptor from a bacterium in the Sargasso Sea and make hydrogen for fuel cells. The possibilities are almost limitless."

more about the human genome project:
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml