The Scientific Asymptote: Treading water: drudgery, stagnation and the loss of hope.

Sai Medi:

The whole proposition was and still is so wild to me: self-organizing, distinct little molecular legos, which fit together a certain way and form sequences corresponding to another set of building blocks, proteins, which then go on to construct, well, everything. I mean literally everything. I’m talking about DNA. 

The early 2000s was like a golden age in genomics research. I was getting my undergraduate degree when the Human Genome Project had just wrapped up a few years earlier. Some of it was done in my hometown, Houston, at Baylor College of Medicine. An offshoot of that was the HapMap project, which after sequencing many individuals of different ethnicities to find distinct inheritance patterns, created the concept of ‘haplotypes,’ referring to set of gene variants that tend to occur together. With the use of haplotypes, geneticists were able to trace human ancestry and understand specific inheritance patterns.