Codes and Codons

…a set of instructions passed from generation to generation. It has a vocabulary—the genes themselves; a grammar—the way in which the inherited information is arranged; and a literature—the thousands of instructions needed to make a human being. The language is based on the DNA molecule, the famous double helix; the icon of the twentieth century. It has a simple alphabet; not 26 letters, but just four, the four different DNA bases—A, C, G, and T for short. (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine) These are arranged in words of three letters such as CGA or TGG. Most of the words code for different amino acids, the building blocks of the body. Although the DNA message is simple, it is very long. Each cell in our body contains about six feet of DNA. A useless but amusing fact is that if all the DNA in all the cells in a single body was stretched out it would reach to the moon and back 8,000 times. (Steve Jones, Reith Lecture, Radio 4, 14 November, 1991.)

“Within the matrices of the body, the chemical basis of life is fixed for reading through a kind of hypertext markup language—A, C, G and T. For meteorology, the history of the world is also a kind of literate organisation of its patterns. Meteorology and genetic science are able to produce typographies of the unseeable that enable us to read backwards into the past a history of the planet and of the body.”

Reading Paul Elliman’s My Typographies, 1998, a striking parallelism emerges that illustrates the concept of hypertext markup language. For someone who is fascinated by science—particularly biology—like me, Elliman’s example of genetic language being compared to a markup language was extremely interesting—it was almost like creating a connection between different regions of my brain. In our bodies, there are infinitely many DNA double helixes that generate commands for our cells. When they create amino acids that are building blocks of our bodies, they communicate with combinations made from these four letters—A, C, G, and T. These combinations are called “codons,” (Three of the letters make up one codon) and they have existed since the dawn of humanity—they were the very first language to make humanity possible, and all the other creatures too, for that matter. This simple language is remarkable in that it is universal. Humans speak a dazzling array of different languages, and it is very hard for us to even learn one foreign language. However, this universal language called codons facilitate an easy communication of complex biological processes, which leaves me awestruck and profoundly amazed every time I look at it. This attribute of codons, to me, is very similar to that of computer codes. Codes let us design websites, communicate with other computers, initiate different functions, and is a universal language for all computers. In the emerging modern world, technology and computers are only going to become more important, and codes let us decipher computers and develop softwares, enabling us to do many things. This (relatively) new phenomenon pertaining to computer codes is very similar to how codons work in our bodies, capably doing seemingly impossible things.

Another cool parallelism about codons and codes: Before the codons actually get translated into amino acids, biological molecules called DNA polymerases proofread the codon sequence to make sure it is correct (they replace or discard any incorrect bases). This is very similar to the process of debugging in coding!