George Zarkadakis

Another reason to be pretty sure that we're all descended from some common ancestor, and that as this information molecule evolved over time, it took on different letters and different orders, but it was still that double helix with all of that potential.

Potential.

Part of what this discovery did was show us humans a way into understanding things about ourselves we hadn't yet discovered.

And Collins believed to further unlock the secrets of who we are, we needed to decode our genetic programming.

The big question was, okay, this is a book.

We are information organisms, and this is our information source.

It's digital, but it's not actually carrying out the actions.

How does that happen?

How do you take this information and cause a cell to actually do something?

If we were going to get that intelligent about our own instruction book, maybe we could not just read it, but we could actually occasionally figure out how to do a find and replace when something was misspelled.

It was clear to me, if we want to do this, we've got to have a better database to work with.

We need the human genome.

That became my dream.

This era, when humans were seeking mastery of the sky and the body, was in many ways dependent on another groundbreaking technology of the time.

An additional brain that can work faster than ours, but does what we wish we could do.

The computer.

In the old days, the word computer usually meant a person, usually a woman actually, that sat down and did mathematical calculations by hand, okay?

And by rule, a ruler, right?

And then that word computer, which described a human being, was transposed into the machine because the machine can do it better.

So the mainframe computers would only fit in these massive rooms in the basement, which is fitting because these devalued laborers who did the actual programming work were down there.