Twenty-five years ago, the world heard: “We’ve got it!” The first map of human DNA was no
longer a science-fiction dream - it had become a reality. It wasn’t just a scientific
achievement and a milestone in the history of biology - it was a momentous event in the
history of all humanity. For the first time, we were able to read our own “instruction manual.”
As it turned out, the instructions were not easy to understand, or even to read. Written down
on paper, the complete human genome sequence takes up 109 volumes-books of about
1,000 pages each, printed in a single continuous string of repeating characters (a, c, t, g), in
a small, barely legible font. Until 2023, they could be viewed at the “Medicine Now” exhibition
at the Wellcome Collection in London (https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/the-key-to-memory–write-it-down).
