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Come back to this page each day to read another entry from Cathie Katz's beautifully illustrated journal, "Nature a Day at a Time."
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In 2020, you will be able to go into a drugstore, have your [DNA] sequence read in an hour or so, and given back to you on a compact disc so you can analyze it. Dr. Walter Gilbert in The Human Blueprint The yeast used to make bread and beer is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a live single-celled organism. It is the same as the fungus that grows on the surfaces of fruits and vegetables, as well as the dry powder sold in flat packages in the refrigerated section to make bakery products. When mixed with water, yeast cells become active and begin "budding" - a small area of the yeast balloons out, then pinches off to create a new, identical version of itself. Yeast cells are dried into bead-like clusters for baking and they can stay alive for up to six months. Yeasts contain DNA instructions that allows them to make copies of themselves over and over as they continue to bud.
Yet this seemingly 'fine print' of DNA instructions is the reason humans can do calculus, compose poetry, and build cathedrals, while chimps pick bugs off each other and eat them. Humans have pretty much the same DNA as a chimp because that's where we came from; and the chimp is close to the ape, because that's where he came from; and so on down the line to fish and reptiles and even single-cell organisms, such as yeast.Dr. Dean Hamer in Living with Our Genes |
Cathie Katz, the author of several books on natural history, also co-founded The Drifting Seed, an international newsletter about rain forest drift seeds. In her engaging Nature a Day at a Time, published by Sierra Club Books and Random House, Katz interweaves fascinating facts about familiar creatures, pen-and-ink drawings and quotations.
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