Page 38 - The Miracle in the Cell

THE MIRACLE IN THE CELL
been seen before. It's been calculated that DNA's giant "encyclopedia"
would possess up to 3 billion different instructions.
At this point, let's reflect on possesses instructions, those two
words that fall from our lips so easily. In saying that there are billions
of instructions in one cell, what we are talking about is not a comput-
th
er or a library, but is a tiny sphere, smaller than a 100 of a millimeter
and composed of just protein, fat and water molecules. That even one
instruction, let alone millions of them, can be maintained within this
tiny piece of tissue is absolutely amazing.
To store information today, people use computer technology, con-
sidered to be at the forefront of all other technologies. The amount of
information that could be stored in a room-sized computer 20 years
ago can now be encoded in a tiny microchip. But even this latest mod-
ern technology, the result of much effort and knowledge accumulated

over many years, hasn't come close to the capacity of even one cell's
nucleus for storing information. The following comparison explains
the tiny size of DNA, and its amazing capacity for information storage:
The information necessary to specify the design of all the species of
organisms which have ever existed on the planet… could be held in a
teaspoon, and there would still be room left for all the information in
every book ever written. 3
How can a helix that we cannot see with our eyes, which is a bil-
lionth of a millimeter in diameter and formed from the coming togeth-
er of atoms, store and remember such a huge amount of information?
To this one question, add another: Each of the 100 trillion cells in your
body can effortlessly recall one million pages of data, but how many
pages of an encyclopedia can you-a conscious, intelligent human
being-memorize during your lifetime?

Intelligence in the Cell

You would have to accept that any single cell in your stomach or
your ear is more knowledgeable than you. And because it evaluates its

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