DNA is not just a biological blueprint

When I was an undergrad working on a biology degree, I took a course in insect genetics. I thought I'd be learning about the structure and organization of arthropod genomes, which was a terribly esoteric and consequently fascinating subject to explore. The teacher ended up accusing me at one point of not using the potential I had; he felt I could have done much better in his class. It seemed quite rude, however, to inform him that what he was teaching was just a bunch of experimental techniques and as such related only tangentially to what I had hoped to learn. In other words, his class was irrelevant and boring as dirt.

I went on to pursue an M.S. in entomology, but I ran into similar problems: the molecular genetics research at the school I attended was an utter joke. In fact, almost two years after finishing classes, I still have not completed my thesis. What interest I had when I started quickly evaporated when I began attending conferences with fascinating symposia that were far above my head. The problem wasn't my lack of ability to comprehend the material; it was my department's lack of ability or even motivation to address and educate me about the presented topics.

Today, I nearly cried with mingled joy and buried frustration when I stumbled onto a Wired article that highlights a researcher who is doing the research and obtaining exactly the kind of information I sought but could never articulate because, as it turns out, it didn't exist yet. The researcher began his inquest to link genomic function and topography in 2007, the year I graduated.

In retrospect, I pursued degrees in the wrong fields altogether. This is what I get for eschewing calculus. One would think that molecular biology classes would've been the route to take to learn about the tertiary structure, organization, and function of chromosomes, but no. Biophysics apparently holds the roadmap. I should've gone to Harvard.

This is some really cool stuff. Here's an article that demonstrates some potential of this field of inquiry. The DNA in animals with excellent night vision is packaged and organized in such a way as to help focus light, rather than scatter it as our eyes tend more to do. Our genomes, as I and many others have long suspected, are more than just the sum of their sequential parts.