On June 26th, 2000, two scientists, called Francis Collins and Craig Venter, told the world that they could now read the whole “map” of the human body: DNA. DNA is something that all humans have, and it tells the body what to do. DNA is the reason that we look like our mother and father, because we get some of their DNA to make our own. Now we can read some of this “map”, and so we can find out more about how our bodies work.
People have been trying to understand the human body for a long time. In 1860, Gregory Mendel discovered that there is a special reason why we look the same as other people in our family. It is because of small things called “genes” that we have in our body. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick made another discovery and found out that those small parts are really messages written in the DNA with a special language.
In 1961, Marshall Nirenberg and Johann Matthaei found the first “word” that they could understand in that language, showing how DNA tells the cell to build its parts. This meant that one day we would be able to read all the messages that a human body gets from its parents' bodies. Scientists have now found all the words in DNA map, but we still do not understand what they all do. By understanding what just one “word” means, we can help save people from several diseases. So the more we understand, the more doctors will be able to do.
Most people hope that this will help to make better medicine and help people who are very ill. Other people worry about that when we learn more words and find out lots of other information, we still use it in the wrong way, just to make people more attractive, or stop sick people getting jobs.
