I will try and be as cryptic yet as informative as possible in this post. It has to do with a new project I'm working on for my old, now part-time, job. But I can't really post too many details about it. As I was working on it this morning, I learned all about "junk" DNA. Or the 90 some % of our DNA that no one seemed to understand before. Genetic scientists have suspected for years that there was some function hiding in this tangled mess, but just didn't know what. And after a massive international study, the project EnCode announced last week that this "junk" is actually millions of switches that turn certain genes on and off.
The media is having a heyday with this, and of course, acting like this means we'll understand everything about disease and how to treat it 5 years from now. But the truth is that this simply means that our genes are far more complicated than the already complex system we were aware of. Which means we're probably actually further away from clinical and therapeutic applications than we previously thought.
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