文档介绍：THE
LANGUAGE
OF GOD
A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
FRANCIS S. COLLINS
Free Press
N e w Y o r k London Toronto Sydney
JUL 7 2006
INTRODUCTION
N A WARM SUMMER DAY just six months into the new
millennium, humankind crossed a bridge into a mo•
Omentous new era. An announcement beamed around
the world, highlighted in virtually all major newspapers, trum•
peted that the first draft of the human genome, our own in•
struction book, had been assembled.
The human genome consists of all the DNA of our species,
the hereditary code of life. This newly revealed text was 3 bil•
lion letters long, and written in a strange and cryptographic
four-letter code. Such is the plexity of the infor•
mation carried within each cell of the human body, that a live
reading of that code at a rate of one letter per second would
take thirty-one years, even if reading continued day and night.
Printing these letters out in regular font size on normal bond
1
The Language of God
paper and binding them all together would result in a tower the
height of the Washington Monument. For the first time on that
summer morning this amazing script, carrying within it all of
the instructions for building a human being, was available to
the world.
As the leader of the international Human Genome Project,
which had labored mightily over more than a decade to reveal
this DNA sequence, I stood beside President Bill Clinton in the
East Room of the White House, along with Craig Venter, the
leader of peting private sector enterprise. Prime Minister
Tony Blair was connected to the event by satellite, and celebra•
tions were occurring simultaneously in many parts of the world.
Clinton's speech began paring this human sequence
map to the map that Meriwether Lewis had unfolded in front of
President Thomas Jefferson in that very room nearly two hun•
dred years earlier. Clinton said, "Without a doubt, this is the
most important, most