Because genes have about 12,000 chemical letters on average— ranging from a few hundred to a couple of million—they spread over several pages, and thus might seem easy enough to spot. But the task of locating these pages is made more difficult by the fact that protein-producing code represents only a few percent of the human genome. Between the genes—and inside them, too, shattering them into many smaller fragments—are stretches of what has been traditionally and rather dismissively termed “junk DNA.”
It is now clear, however, that there are many other important structures there (control sequences, for example, that regulate when and how proteins are produced). Unfortunately, when looking at DNA letters, no simple set of rules can be applied for distinguishing between pages that code for proteins and those that represent the so-called junk. In any case, even speed-reading through the pile of books at one page a second would require around 300 hours, or nearly two days, of nonstop page flicking. There would be little time left for noting any subtle signs that might be present.
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