Think Thoughts This Thursday, Finding Friday and the Suggestion of Saturday,

440 scientists working in 32 labs around the world for 12 years started the release Wednesday of the initial 37 papers establishing that 99% of human DNA does something. It is not junk.

DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is the chemical code that resides in each of your cells and determines who you are. Most DNA is in the nucleus or center of the cells, and your DNA is pretty much the same in every cell in your body. Each of your cells contains about 10 feet of DNA, coiled in a dense tangle resembling in its way a very small ball of twine. Some years ago, the Human Genome Project uncoiled the thread and mapped the entire sequence of human DNA. That project discovered that only about 1% of your DNA contains the genes which control inherited traits like eye color and blood type. At that time, the rest of the DNA was labelled “junk,” because it didn’t seem to be doing anything. Around and between the genes that did the original building of you the way you are, the scientists saw vast stretches of other DNA which looked to be just sitting there. But, was it just sitting?

The initial results of the recent round of international studies indicate that junk DNA does something. All those scientists working for all that time now believe that some 80% of our junk DNA, that junk that resides in every cell in your body, is active and needed. And, they seem to be saying that . . . it’s all a bunch of switches. The emerging thought is that all those little junk DNA switches – think of all the computer switches in the small microchip in your computer – regulate and control how our cells, organs and tissues behave on a daily basis and react to what we are doing and our environment about us.

My thinking is that we may have discovered that what we thought was junk DNA is really the keyboard and computer in each of our cells plugged into the Internet of cellular computers and servers in our whole body. Keep eating a high-fat diet, and those little computer switches start our metabolic equipment working more efficiently to process the fat. Don’t get enough exercise, and our think-tank switch yards send out the signals to the endocrine system to manufacture more stimulants and to the circulatory system to increase blood flow to keep the tracks running and the deliveries of nutrients and pep pills on time. Keep going with bad diet and poor exercise, and you overload the switches, they break down, systems crash, screens go blue and disease results.

In the paper this morning, one scientist commented that “Most of the changes that affect disease don’t lie in the genes themselves; they lie in the switches.” Another further thought might be that most of the changes that affect disease don’t lie in the switches themselves, they lie in what we are asking the switches to do. Even a good switch can only do so much. It may take another 12 years and 440 scientists, but, who knows, maybe they’ll discover that diet, exercise and a happy attitude are the best ways to keep the switches working and the train on the track.

Keep chugging along and wave as you pass the station,

Grandpa Jim