Technology Quarterly | MONITOR
Speed reading
A new gene-sequencing technique could decode a person’s genome in hours instead of years
FOR all the infinite variety of life on the planet, DNA is fairly uniform stuff. Humans share nearly all of their DNA with one another, and a goodly chunk with worms and mice. Even subtler are the variances between the nucleotides that make up DNA. This quartet of molecules—adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine—are nearly identical, differing chemically by only a few atoms.
This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline “Speed reading”
From the June 23rd 2001 edition
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