Creating Life As We Don’t Know It

Back in the 1970s, you might open up a box of cereal one morning and out would fall a cardboard disk. It was a code wheel, which allowed preteen cryptographers to ply their trade. The wheel had two disks of unequal size, joined at the center, so that you could turn each of them on the common axis. Letters ringed the outer wheel, and the inner wheel was marked with an arrow. If you lined the arrow up with a letter, a window in the inner wheel revealed a different letter. You could write out a message in those coded letters that would look like gibberish to outsiders (most importantly, to your parents). The only way to understand the message was to decipher it with the help of another code wheel from another box of cereal—provided, of course, it was the same brand.

The image of that code wheel always comes back to mind whenever I page through a biology textbook and see this:

It is a code wheel of sorts. But it’s not for encrypting messages like, Meet me in the backyard with the Micronauts. It’s a code wheel that exists in our own bodies, in every one of our 30 trillion cells¹, enabling them to translate the recipes stored in our DNA into the stuff we are made of. You can find the same code wheel in pretty much identical form in every species on Earth. It is, when you get down to it, the code of life.

This genetic code is different from an organism’s specific genetic sequence—a much more familiar concept. Take the genome of the gorilla. It is stored in the ape’s DNA, consisting of a series of chemical units called bases, each one like a letter in a book. In the case of the gorilla, that book is 3.04 billion letters long, comprising 21,000 genes.

To translate the gorilla’s genes into the corresponding proteins that build and do almost everything in the gorilla’s body, its cells use a set of rules: the genetic code. A genetic sequence is a book, but without the code, it’s meaningless—like hieroglyphics without the Rosetta