With the publication of the human genome sequence, we are passing into a new phase in the analysis of what is popularly being called the 'Book of Life'. However symbolic the shift, it is nevertheless palpable: the data will be in a more or less contiguous, more or less stable form, constituting a reference text against which coding and regulatory regions, polymorphisms, model organism sequences, genetic phenomena, etc., can be systematically and reliably pinned. The role of the-bioinformatics practitioner may also be expected to change, by degrees: one may become less like an archaeologist, discovering and poring over shards of evidence to piece together rudimentary translations, and more tike a literary critic, attuned to theme and variation, elucidating ever more subtle nuances of meaning and interrelationship in a well-worn textus receptus. Indeed, the integrative task at hand has been characterized as 'biosequence exegesis' (Boguski, 1999). The notion of genome as literature may be seen as an extension of the linguistic metaphor that has dominated molecular biology from its inception, as is evident from the terminology used in the field. In fact, the span of modem molecular biology over the last half-century has some striking parallels to developments in the field of linguistics. In 1953, Michael Ventris and John Chadwick succeeded in deciphering Linear B, showing it to be a dialect of Mycenean Greek written in an early syllabic script that was an important milestone on the path to alphabetic languages (Robinson, 1995). This achievement, of course, occurred just at the time that Watson and Crick were establishing the same sort of lexical foundation for our present understanding of the genome. (Students of history, and of irony, may be interested to learn that Ventris and Chadwick were crucially aided in their endeavor by earlier groundbreaking efforts of a woman, Alice Kober, whose premature death denied her any possibility of achieving similar renown.)
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