It is hard to believe, however, that the idea had not at least crossed the minds of two such bold thinkers once they understood how DNA was structured. For the broader implications of their work on the structure of DNA were quite clear. Only a few weeks after the first, they published the second of their classic DNA papers, which concluded as follows: “We feel that our proposed structure for deoxyribonucleic acid may help solve one of the fundamental biological problems—the molecular basis of the template needed for genetic replication. The hypothesis we are suggesting is that the template is the pattern of bases formed by one chain of the deoxyribonucleic acid.”
If heredity, or “genetic replication” as they called it, was simply a matter of a “pattern of bases”—a string of chemical letters—it was clear that spelling out that pattern by sequencing the complete human genome must stand as a key goal of molecular biology until fully achieved. Doing so would also allow some of the practical implications of digital DNA—understanding human biology, promoting health, and fighting disease—to be explored in a way that was not possible with genomes of other organisms, however interesting they might be.
The fact that human DNA consisted of around 3 billion such bases was, of course, something of a problem when there was no way to sequence even short DNA strands. It was not until nearly a quarter of a century after Watson and Crick’s hypothesis, in 1976, that Gilbert and Sanger developed their respective sequencing methods. Soon afterwards, people started dreaming the undreamable. For example, in 1981, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) was contemplating sequencing one of the human chromosomes. Though still far less than the full 3 billion bases, tackling tens of millions of DNA letters was a brave idea for the time. Nothing came of this, but it is indicative of how quickly things were moving.
How it works on the seller’s side?
