In Darkness, the Word

THE WORD - LOGOS

LIFE IS WRITTEN IN FOUR LETTERS
THE LETTERS ARE A, C, G, T

The Human Genome is the entire list of three billion letters required to create a human being. All the instructions are written in just four letters – A, C, G, T. The instructions are encoded in DNA. These four letters in the DNA alphabet carry the instructions to make all living things. From a human being to a leaf – a tiger, Guinea pig, tortoise, dolphin or flower. The meaning of the code lies in the sequence of the letters. Thus, from continual adaptation of just these four letters by the creative principle of Evolution, are made the hand, the heart, the eye - the iridescence of the peacock and brilliant blue of a kingfisher - the helicoptering sycamore key - druggy sunflower and poppy eyes - the chameleon, armadillo, bushbaby - and the perfumed stillness of the milk-skinned lily.

“There is no word used to create anything alive that is longer than three letters.” Matt Ridley, Science Writer

‘Today we celebrate the revelation of the first draft of the human book of life… it is humbling for me and awe inspiring to realise that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.’ Dr Francis Collins, Head, Human Genome Project, US

‘The languge of the genes has a simple alphabet, not with 26 letters but just four. These are the four different DNA bases…(A,G,C and T for short). The bases are arranged in words of three letters such as CGA or TGG…It is possible to write a meaningful sentence with 25 letters instead of 26, but only just. Life manages with a mere four.’ Steven Jones, Professor of Gentics, University College, London, The Language of Genes, HarperCollins, 1993

‘…we find poetry, as it were, substantiated and realized in nature: yea, nature itself disclosed to us... as at once the poet and the poem!’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

‘In the beginning was the Word.’ John 1, 1, The Bible

‘Imagine that the genome is a book. There are 23 chapters, called chromosomes. Each chapter contains several thousand stories, called genes. Each story is made up of paragraphs, called exons, which are interrupted by advertisements called introns. Each paragraph is made up of words, called codons. Each word is written in letters called BASES. There are one billion words in the book… This is a gigantic document, an immense book, a recipe of extravagant length, and it all fits inside the microscopic nucleus of a tiny cell that fits easily on the head of a pin. The idea of the genome as a book is not, strictly speaking, even a metaphor. It is literally true. A book is a piece of digital information, written in linear, one dimensional and one directional form and defined by a code that transliterates a small alphabet of sign into a large lexicon of meanings through the order of their groupings. So is the genome.’ Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Fourth Estate, 2000

Written out, the Human Genome would fill one million pages, 5000 books stacked 200 feet high; two hundred telephone directories. Read out for 24 hours a day, it would take a century to finish. It has taken scientists 13 years to decipher. The human body has 100 trillion (100 000 000 000 000) cells – each contains a copy of the entire Human Genome.

‘So although there are only twenty or so amino acids, the range of proteins to which they can give rise is effectively infinite. In the same way the twenty-six letters of the western alphabet can code the language of Shakespeare, and 10,000 other languages as well.’ Ian Wilmut, Scientist

‘To continue the linguistic, information-theory metaphor within which genetic theory was now to be formulated, the directed synthesis of RNAon DNA was termed transcription, and the synthesis of protein on the RNA was translation. DNA had become the master-molecule, and the nucleus in which it was located had assumed its patriarchal role in relation to the rest of the cell. It is hard to know which had more impact on the future directions of biology – the determination of the role of DNA in protein synthesis, or the organizing power of the metaphor within which it was framed.’ Steven Rose, Lifelines: Biology, Freedom, Determinism, 1997

‘In the beginning was the Word. The Word proselytised the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever – the Word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live – the Word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise. The Word eventually blossomed and became sufficiently ingenious to build a porridgy contraption called a human brain that could discover and become aware of the Word itself.’ Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, 2000

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.’John 1, 1-5, The Bible

‘In our culture at present, people find it somewhat surprising that an idea can be large enough to have both a scientific and a religious aspect. This is because, during the last century, our ideas of religion, of science, and indeed of life have all become narrowed in a way that makes it difficult to get these topics into the same perspective. (Here our window has become a good deal narrower that it was when Galileo and Newton and Faraday used it. They never doubted these things belonged together).’ Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry, 2003


In Darkness, the Word

Space vagrant -
in darkness, the Word

was.
Shut eye dreaming light

among a billion stars and gases,
dust and ashes.

First Author -
of itself;

principle without theory -
workings on the blackboard of space;

intention before means,
elements, first materials.

Earth and all her dreaming creatures
improbable as Raphael’s Madonnas

looming ethereal from mineral pigment,
the silver formulae of poems, skeletons

beneath as music is scored -
love’s organic consummation.