Today, I’m thankful for those code breakers who’ve changed the world.
Pure bliss comes from reading a mystery thriller that gradually unfolds with each page. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code tells the plot-twisting tale of a museum curator’s ambitious quest to decipher the code to a hidden secret that would change the world. Suspense movie thrillers, like The National Treasure, strive to do the same. In this movie, a cryptologist uses a code on the back of the Declaration of Independence to discover a site hidden by America’s forefathers.
However, not all codes are fictional. Throughout history, humans have used code to encrypt secret messages intended for only those who know the answer to the puzzle. Julius Caesar used the Caesarian Shift as a cipher intended solely for his military generals. The British mathematician Alan Turing and his colleagues in Bletchley Park decrypted Nazi German intelligence messages during World War II with their trusty mechanical friend, Christopher. We still use codes today to encrypt our home alarm systems, home computers, and bankcards. In fact, it’s in our DNA to set passwords to avoid identify theft, protect personal property, and maintain our deepest secrets.
Literally.
Life is encoded through a mysterious code that took humans only about 200,000 years to decipher. The amazing thing is how simple the code is. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA, for short) is a double-helix molecule of nucleic acids that hides the genetic instruction for how we develop, grow, develop, and ultimately reproduce. Every living thing contains the same code. Amazingly, it’s made up of only 4 nitrogen-containing nucelotides pieced together into base pairs that wrap around each other. Adenosine (A) pairs with thymine (T), while cytosine (C) pairs with guanine (G). Each 3-base pairs forms the code for an amino acid, that when linked together in a chain, leads to protein formation. How simple. How beautiful. How sneaky.
Although DNA was first isolated in 1869 by the Swiss biologist Friedrich Miescher, it wasn’t until a British biologist and American scientist working together uncovered the model of the double helix. On this day (Feb 28), Francis Crick & James Watson announced they had decoded the “secret of life.” A few years later, Crick would unveil the central dogma of molecular biology: DNA makes RNA, and RNA makes protein. Those proteins then help to make everything else.
I’m grateful to know that science is nothing more than a series of codes. It’s our job to figure them out.
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